30,000 rare flies have been released in Scotland

Conservationists at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS ) have just released a whopping 30,000 rare flies into the Cairngorms National Park.

The pine hoverfly is one of Britain's rarest insects and is critically endangered in Scotland.

In fact, the pine hoverfly is so rare in the UK that an adult female spotted in 2022 was the first seen in the wild in nearly a decade!

It is hoped that they will now breed in the wild to help the population grow.

Georgina Lindsay, RZSS field conservation manager, said: "The scale of our achievement really only struck me when we found out that 18,000 people live in the Cairngorms and we've now released almost twice as many flies!"

The flies are important pollinators for woodland flowers like rowan and as larvae they help to break down wood, leaves and plants.

They live in woodland habitats that need to have lots of different trees, plants and flowers.

The hoverfly's larvae - the young that has hatched from an egg - require wet rotting holes in deadwood to live in.

Human activity, such as logging, clears away deadwood from forests, so these natural rot holes are rare, and conservationists have had to create artificial rot holes to encourage breeding.

The Royal Zoological Society for Scotland had already released 7,000 larvae across four sites in March 2026.