The bioluminescent beams of “fairy folk” are shining again from a nature reserve in North Yorkshire for the first time in a century after the successful reintroduction of endangered glowworms.

Female glowworms were spotted over multiple weeks at Nosterfield nature reserve this summer following a no-frills, almost zero-budget reintroduction of the much-loved invertebrates, which have vanished from the British countryside in recent decades and are notoriously difficult to re-establish.

The reintroduction by volunteer “glow-getters” and the independent ecologist Pete Cooper involved the authorised collecting of a small number of glowworms from a local donor site, breeding them in captivity and rearing hundreds of snail-eating glowworm larvae in a garden shed in Bristol.