Spring at New Ferry Butterfly Park

Paul Loughnane, one of our reserve managers, would like to remind you that New Ferry Butterfly Park will soon be open for visiting.

The Butterfly Park has been developed on a former goods yard, coal yard and water softening plant and lies adjacent to Bebington Station Car Park. We are open on sunny Sundays in the summer from 3rd May. Entrance is free, as well as the parking, and there are voluntary wardens to assist in your visit. There are colouring-in sheets, quizzes, a nature trail and, with help from the voluntary wardens, you can see the creatures living in the ponds.

A host of nodding cowslips beckons the beginning of spring and the opening of New Ferry Butterfly Park. Strongly calcareous soils are rare in the largely acidic sandstone bedrock that underlies Wirral.

This part of the park was sown with cowslip seed in 1995 on a calcareous area, which was formed by the outflows of a former water softening plant, used in the days of railway steam engines. The soils are white and when they are wet it is like working in toothpaste. Mowing, and more importantly raking up the cut materials, has created a suitable habitat for the cowslips. They are flourishing, and are now self-seeding to create this impressive spring display. The cowslips provide nectar sources early in the growing season for bumble bees, hive bees and those butterflies which have over wintered as adults. The grasslands on the Butterfly Park are looking the most flower-rich they have been in the 15 years that the area has been managed for wildlife.