Wye Valley BUTTERFLY ZOO

Walk with butterflies from around the world. Wye Valley Butterfly Zoo is indoors, it’s tropical and it’s teeming with exotic butterflies.

Living butterflies fly around as you discover their fascinating lives in close-up. They’re amazing.

See for yourself every stage of their life-cycle: Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and some of the world’s most beautiful butterflies.

Discounted tickets with the aMazing Hedge Puzzle and half price MiniGolf are available.

The species we breed in our zoo have fascinating survival strategies, and there’s loads to learn. Bring a camera for superb wildlife photography.

The Zoo shop has wonderful gifts, butterfly plants, and books on wildlife. It’s a real treat.

The butterfly farm is within walking distance of Forest Holidays in the Forest of Dean between Monmouth and Ross on Wye at Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley.

Butterfly Conservation

Here at Wye Valley Butterfly Zoo we are not just passionate about butterfly conservation, we really work at it. We support sustainable Butterfly Farming worldwide through trade: This devalues collected specimens and preserves rainforest and other habitats.

We manage our own Nature Reserve, the Battleground for Wye Valley Warfare LASER OPS. We engaged Barnaby Millard, Conservation Landscape Architect to improve the range of habitats to benefit insects, birds, reptiles and small mammals from the start.

We’ve preserved all the existing habitat zones, and enhanced habitat microdiversity in each one. The tactical obstacles are designed to shelter and sustain wildlife and channel movements of players to protect some areas and in others create ecocline gradation through trampling. This preserves and creates habitat niches suited to the specific preferences of various fauna and flora. They’ll be invaded by the local species bank, naturally increasing biodiversity. We’re managing “improved grassland” to change its habitat classification to “wildflower meadow” in three years.

Barnaby has now taken a post with the RHS at Wisley. He was our second Conservation Landscape Architect. We’ve also provided work experience for University College Worcester’s Sustainable Development Advocacy (Professional Practice) MA course, and a paid internship surveying local lepidoptera.

The Upper Wye Gorge from Goodrich to Monmouth was famous with victorian Butterfly Collectors. The eccentric entomologist A. B. Farn retired here a century ago. Naturalists’ clubs would hire excursion trains to collect here. Today, there are over thirty indigenous species on the hills around Symonds Yat, but half a dozen are extinct.

Add our Nature Notes and Spotters’ Guide to your favourites to keep up with the news about butterflies to see on the hills overlooking the Wye Valley Butterfly Zoo month by month. We need volunteer Recorders to establish new butterfly-count transects. Your help will raise the profile of the Wye Gorge for conservation funding in the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Come and see us, or if you want to help elsewhere in Britain, contact the charity Butterfly Conservation to work with a group near you.