My mother, Iris Newbery, who has died aged 99, was involved in several environmental and conservation projects in Essex and Cambridgeshire. Taking up photography in her 40s, she combined her new skills with a keen interest in wildlife, gradually specialising in butterflies, moths and dragonflies, fungi, lichen and galls. As a member of Loughton Camera Club she won many awards, and achieved the distinction of becoming an LRPS (licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society), then later an ARPS (associate).
A founder in the early 1980s of the Essex and Cambridge branch of Butterfly Conservation, she undertook surveys and conservation work and organised field trips for members. Among the group’s successes was the restoration of chalk grassland on the Devil’s Dyke, an Anglo-Saxon earthwork near Newmarket, where hundreds of chalkhill blue butterflies can now be seen each August.
