“We are very disappointed, because we are very concerned with biodiversity and ecology,” says a spokesman for the water board. “When we received a notification that there was mowing in that area, we immediately stopped the work. We naturally spoke with the contractor and we are going to investigate how things could have gone wrong.”
According to the spokesman, many pieces are known in Limburg where rare animals live and this is always taken into account when mowing. “And that almost always goes well. But it remains human work, right. You can still capture it all so well, but it is always people who walk and mow along those thousand ditches.”
Verge trampled
For its survival, the dark burnish blue depends on the plant species large burnout and the presence of the common sting ant. The butterflies deposit their eggs on the flowering flower heads of the great burnet and the caterpillars hibernate in the ant nests, where they feed on the ants’ larvae. In the spring the caterpillar grows further and pupates near the exit of the ant nest to become a butterfly.
It is not the first time that the habitat has been destroyed in a stretch of road along the provincial road in Posterholt. In 2018, much of the berm was trampled by dozens of butterfly enthusiasts and photographers who walked through it to capture the extremely rare butterflies.
Things sometimes go wrong in other parts of the Netherlands. A nature project in an Amsterdam park had to suffer earlier this year and in 2017 8000 square meters of ‘butterfly idyll’, a kind of green zone, were razed to the ground in Houten.
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