In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  Each day was a journey into the timelessness of Nature, as the weather slowly intensified, each day lovelier than its predecessor. I constantly checked to see that the Jay's feather was still in my hat, for to lose it might be to lose the summer. The stillness of the evening saw a celebration of what had been, and each night was lit by a small camp fire and glow worms along the rides. As Thoreau puts it in his Natural History of Massachusetts: ‘Think of … the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening … the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings.’

  And the Emperors were everywhere, by their aloof standard. Each canopy glade revealed one or two, usually two, for this butterfly is indolent when alone but boldly, even aggressively active when a rival male is about. This was the July to search the whole woods, to find out how widespread they actually were. Each canopy gap along the oak-lined Marlpost Road, between Marlpost and Madgeland wood, held at least one male, and the journey into wonder continued down Oldhouse Lane, which wound its sunken way down past the dense trees of Netherwood and round towards Brooks Green.

  Was I lonely? Thoreau once again springs to our aid here, stating in his famous treatise on ‘Solitude’ in Walden: ‘I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are most lonely when we go abroad among men.’ Indeed, only in society is the naturalist, the lover of Nature, lonely, and then only within the growing elements of society divorced from or in denial of Nature. And for voices, there were the birds, the hum of a million insects, and Test Match Special, for this was the summer when Lillee and Thomson terrorised English batsman and a streaker, gloriously named Michael Angelo, straddled the sanctity of the Lords wicket. The Ashes were duly surrendered.

  It could not last, and it did not. Gradually the Emperor males burnt themselves out. First their regal glory faded, then their physical strength and levels of activity. Late in the day on July 26th I watched an aged male fly low and slow over a field, into the sunset, seeking eternity. That was the first time I saw an Emperor take a deliberate last flight off into the sinking sun. But first, on the 22nd, I experienced a vision of a dark form that could only be the most elusive and cherished of all British butterfly varieties, the all-purple version of the Emperor, ab. lugenda – or was it even the impossibly rare ab. iole? I disturbed it low down in a glade below the mighty Osiris's birches where, daily, half a dozen or more males battled amongst themselves whilst their ladies skulked amongst the coppiced sallows. The females slowly took over, secreting their eggs in sallow trees during the middle part of the day, but always high up out of reach or on wispy coppiced branches that could not be brought undamaged to the ground, and which therefore remained uninspected. One morning, the 25th, one particular female glided in to feed on the sticky buds of a young Ash tree at the Crookhorn Lane junction in Madgeland Wood, the buds of 1976. She fed there for twelve minutes, wings closed except to flash away a pestering bee. That tree is still there, a handsome Ash capable of growing into a veneer butt. I remember that female each time I pass the spot. Butterflying does that to you.

  On July 26th a massive area of high pressure came over. The Long Hot Summer of 1976 was born that day in 1975, for thereafter anticyclonic conditions dominated our weather for precisely a year, a month and a day. The Empresses laid their last eggs, then wilted in the intense heat that also accounted for the last of the White Admirals and White-letter Hairstreaks. I saw the year's final Purple Emperor on August 2nd, a ragged female wandering aimlessly down a favoured ride. I waited around for two more days, but the midsummer party was over, and my energy levels were depleted. Peacocks, Common Blues, Small Coppers and, especially, Wall Browns were everywhere instead. Another party had begun.

  On August 7th, my 22nd birthday, I entered a new dimension of existence, in the form of Noar Hill, to the south-west of Selborne. In that era it was a rundown sort of place, consisting of large areas of rank False Oat-grass and brooding patches of Hawthorn scrub, and surrounded by a thick band of impenetrable Blackthorn dotted with Ash and Beech trees. Not many people visited, and I had the place to myself that day. Marbled Whites and Small Skippers were abundant, though ageing fast in the heatwave. Common Blues were everywhere, as is their practice there in good summers. Wall Browns were numerous. The diary states: I saw one settle in the shade down a Rabbit hole and display. Later I realised this was an egg-laying female, for Wall Browns often deposit their eggs on root hairs protruding through the roofs of Rabbit burrows. It must also be added that within a decade the butterfly disappeared from Noar Hill and from the entire East Hampshire district, inexplicably, and that it was my duty to record that loss.

  Selborne was duly explored, and the wooded hanger system that wound its way down towards Petersfield – Edward Thomas country – and the hazy South Downs. But it was all too leafy, too shaded in late summer; it would come into its own in spring, when the lanes would dance with Orange-tips. The central tangle of twisted Blackthorn growth on Selborne Common was clearly the haunt of Brown Hairstreaks, as was the perimeter of Noar Hill, if one had the energy to work a butterfly even more elusive than the Purple Emperor. In open places, along grassy roadside banks and even on old lawns sloping down to the lanes, Wall Browns were frequently encountered, for this late summer belonged almost exclusively to them. Towards the end of August they petered out, only to be replaced by a prolific third brood that lasted into early November. The Small Copper reacted similarly.

  I spent a glorious autumn picking apples in Blackmoor Estate's orchards, below the hanging woods of Selborne, in an attempt to earn some pennies without sacrificing my relationship with Nature, and in good company. Red Admirals were abundant, feeding profusely and at times drunkenly on fallen apples, alongside a scatter of Comma, Speckled Wood and Small Copper. Wall Browns frequented the sunny banks, but I had lost the will to record butterflies: the ending of that summer was simply too sad. The butterfly diary petered out early.

  8 The long hot summer of 1976

  Having weaned himself off opium, Coleridge mused in his 1814–1815 notebook: ‘If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & (if he) found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye? And what then?’ Those of us who have passed through paradise are left, perhaps indefinitely, with the question Coleridge poses. We find ourselves wanting to get back, somehow, anyhow, rather than move forward. Such, for me, was the summer of 1976. Part of me still wanders, sunburnt, through that parched land of relentless sun, droughted trees and brown, cracked lawns, haunted by its omnipresent butterflies.

  The winter of 1975/76 was largely mild and dry, as if the power of the late summer and autumn of 1975 had never really left. By late February sallows were blossoming and some were even in leaf, Lady's Smock was flowering along the East Hampshire lanes and the Bullfinch was singing his summertime song. The last eleven months had been the driest on record, and in the South-east the last six had produced only 60% of the average rainfall.

  Good summers tend to be heralded by an anticyclone at the start of March – seemingly, the stronger and more prolonged that anticyclone, the greater the summer. Sure enough, March 1976 began with a light frost that was quickly burnt off by shafts of sun strengthening through misted fields, promising glory and tempting the lark to ascend. By noon the magic temperature of 12 degrees Celsius had been reached, and the first butterflies of the year appeared. Early in Tove Jansson's childhood classic Finn Family Moomintroll it is revealed that, ‘if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about.’ Her story continues, ‘But this butterfly was golden … Gold is even better than yellow.’ Certainly, the male Brimstone that danced through St Matthew's churchyard in Blackmoor, and off and away down a path through silvered birch trees, appeared as a golden butterfly, and in golden light. The early March
anticyclone intensified, peaking on the 4th, a day when chimerical Skylarks ascended en masse through early-morning mists over the nurseries and orchards of Blackmoor estate, between Selborne and the heaths of Woolmer Forest. I had worked there through the winter, reconnecting with rural people who had a profound relationship with the land, the weather and the seasons. The issue here is that the more time one spends outdoors, the more one lives under the thumb of the vagaries of our climate, the weather and seasonal extremes.

  The four standard hibernating butterflies – Brimstone, Comma, Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell – were all out and about in unusually high numbers. I had determined to throw all caution to the warm summer wind and spend the season butterflying, having saved a paltry sum of money by working on the land and writing the odd article. But sometimes one develops an intuitive feel of faith in a summer, or even in an entire year. Great summers are not merely planned, however assiduously, but are faithfully dreamt and prayed for during the winter. Moreover, great butterfly years are not one-offs, but the second or even third in a sequence of good summers, which allows butterfly populations to build up incrementally and spread to establish new colonies. I had no objectives other than to relish each sunlit moment, explore the promised land of East Hampshire, experience an entire Purple Emperor season again, see some of the few remaining British butterflies I had not yet seen, record each sighting and each event in diaries, and learn as much about our butterflies and their habitats as was humanly possible. For relaxation, I would play some cricket and woo pretty young ladies, until they realised I was living in another spiritual dimension and deemed me unsuitable. My parameters were limitations in funds and transport, the latter often restricted to a bicycle.

  In those days it was rare to see the Orange-tip, that quintessential harbinger of spring, before mid-April, even during the great spring of 1976. The lower hanger system between Selborne and Empshott, where the Upper Greensand gives way to heavy Gault Clay, is an especially rich area for Orange-tips and Green-veined Whites, as one of their favourite larval foodplants, Lady's Smock, grows profusely in the damp woods there, whilst another, Garlic Mustard, occurs commonly along the lanes. Sure enough, the first Orange-tip of the year was seen in a lonely winding part-wooded combe below Selborne on April 16th. Shortly afterwards the first Cuckoo of the year, a sleek dark male, flew silently off into a copse there, perching barred chest on-high in a leafing Ash tree, having been disturbed whilst feeding on the ground. Minutes later, he called, clear and deep, and in that very moment winter, and all the tedium it epitomises, was forgotten. Within three days Orange-tip males abounded around drifts of Lady's Smock in the young conifer plantations of Hartley Wood, between Oakhanger and Selborne, a sizeable Gault Clay oak wood then in the process of being replanted with non-native conifers. What surprised me, during that spring of discovery in East Hampshire, was how small Orange-tips are in that district. I have never worked out why. Perhaps the majority of them breed on Lady's Smock there, a relatively small plant that perhaps produces small underfed adults.

  Over in Southwater Forest, the Nightingales were in. Two nights were spent with them – more precisely two sleepless nights, as two birds sang close by from 9.30 pm, non-stop. I lay in my tent pondering how dear Keats had managed to turn the lightning storm of the Nightingale's explosive song into a soporific. Had he, a Cockney with no natural history knowledge, actually been listening to the right species of bird?

  May stuttered at the start, then quickly mended its ways as another anticyclone moved in from the south-west. Cuckoos seemed to be everywhere in the East Hampshire countryside, especially in Hartley Wood, where a knot of five was seen on May 6th, four loud males and a ‘bubbling’ female. The following day what was still called the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary was beginning to emerge at Noar Hill, a somewhat late start for this butterfly in such a fine spring, but in those days this and other butterfly species emerged later than is now considered normal. Azure-winged Holly Blues were by then almost ubiquitous around clumps of flowering Holly bushes in the Selborne lanes and gardens, and migrant Red Admirals were starting to appear. On the 11th, Pearl-bordered Fritillaries began to emerge in Alice Holt Forest, in a young plantation close to Bucks Horn Oak. A great butterfly summer had been born.

  In mid-May, two lengthy searches of Southwater Forest revealed that both Duke of Burgundy and Pearl-bordered Fritillary had died out there during my three-year enforced springtime absence. This hurt, and was hard to believe, especially with the former, for it is a tiny butterfly which can subsist at very low population levels and is easily overlooked. Nonetheless, despite suffering five near-sleepless nights on account of the incessant tongues of the wanton Nightingales a double blank was drawn, and a heart-wrenching conclusion reached: I had seen the last of the Southwater Duke of Burgundies and Pearl-bordered Fritillaries back in 1972. Their lifeblood, the supply of young plantations from broad-leaved fellings, had ceased. There was nowhere for them to move to, for in woodland systems these butterflies follow the woodcutter, and the woodcutter had stopped work here. A fatal break in continuity of habitat supply had occurred.

  The loss was rubbed in by the discovery of huge colonies of Pearl-bordered Fritillary in several places in Alice Holt Forest, and more modest colonies in the Oakhanger woods. Pearl-bordered Fritillary had emerged in wonderful numbers that spring. There were three sizeable colonies alone in the Lodge Inclosure of Alice Holt, and others in Goose Green, Abbots Wood and Willows Green inclosures. This most graceful of springtime butterflies almost abounded along the rides there, feasting communally on patches of Bugle flowers, fulvous amber on gentian blue. Wall Browns, today a rarity in most districts and all but extinct throughout Hampshire, were very common that May. In Alice Holt's Lodge Inclosure I counted over fifty in two hours on the 23rd. I had not seen this grassland insect so numerous in a wood, and have not since. This was 1976.

  Monday May 24th was cloudless and hot, with a vestige of breeze emanating vaguely from the south-east. I cycled, some twenty miles, to the Chiddingfold Woods, in search of a species new to me, the Wood White. A male bumbled out of the entrance to Fisherlane Wood as I arrived after an hour and a half of cycling over undulating terrain. Crossing the arduous heights of Haslemere proved to be worth the effort. I fell instantly for this fragile white butterfly that flutters perpetually just above the rough ride-side grasses, forever threatening to alight on some choice plant yet changing its mind at the last millisecond and continuing in perpetual motion, ever onwards, at a constant speed, in dithering flight. I watched the females laying eggs, found other eggs and even some tiny young larvae on the leaves of Greater Bird's-foot Trefoil growing along the ride-side ditch margins. Pearl-bordered and Small Pearl-bordered fritillaries abounded in a young fir plantation at the southern end of the wood, where male Grizzled and Dingy skippers fought each other almost manfully. That evening, I took my young cat, Thomas Mouse, for his customary amble through the apple orchards to a Beech cathedral on a promontory along the greensand hanger system. There, I scratched the name of the Wood White in the dust – sinapis – whilst my cat, a highly confident long-haired black with white trimmings, played merrily with a clan of young badgers, dashing in and out of exposed tree roots, overhangs and hollows on a steep earthy bank with his mutually coloured counterparts. There is a better reality than the one we continually subsist within, Nature's.

  The weather wobbled at the turn of May, producing a short spell of indecision between pulses of high pressure, as if Nature was taking a deep breath before the immortal June of 1976 commenced. The abundance of butterflies was making the news, with eulogies appearing in several newspapers. An expedition to the Moulsford Downs by John Clarke and myself somehow generated a spate of indignant letters in The Times concerning butterfly collecting. In early June 1976 the Adonis Blue was a seriously rare butterfly outside Dorset, the Isle of Wight and Wiltshire. In Hampshire only a single colony was known, at Martin Down NNR in the extreme west of the county. In Surrey it was known only from De
nbies Hillside (also and wrongly known as Ranmore Common) near Dorking. In Berkshire and the Chilterns there were colonies only on the Moulsford Downs just west of Streatley. Clarke and I had travelled there as much in search of Stone Curlew, an even greater rarity, as Adonis Blues, which I had seen there back in August 1970. Despite much agricultural damage to the downs during my six-year absence we found the Adonis still present. A couple of old collectors were also present, and a spate of critical letters started. Clearly, perceptions and values were changing. Indeed, 1976 was the last year of widespread butterfly collecting in this country, a watershed year in our attitudes towards butterflies. Thereafter collectors converted to photography, switched to collecting abroad, went undercover and became paranoid, or simply gave up – most of the collectors I encountered in 1976 were never heard of again. In the ensuing sequence of poor summers Clarke hung up his net and converted to birding.

  At the end of June, a Mr John Lodge wrote to The Times claiming to have rediscovered the Large Blue ‘in the Cotswolds’, supposedly near Cheltenham. At that time, the butterfly was known only from a single, top-secret site in south Dartmoor. Three years later that colony, and with it the British race, was formally declared extinct. Sadly, Lodge's claims were never substantiated, as he insisted on keeping the locality secret, but years later it was reported that a credible source knew of a colony in existence in the southern Cotswolds that persisted until after 1976, so perhaps Lodge had after all found something. We will never know. But this was 1976, and it was that sort of year.