In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  The year then ended as it had begun, for the Small Tortoiseshell was very much the butterfly of the autumn, gathering in numbers in gardens to feed up on nectar prior to hibernation. Outside my front door they fed on an old variety of Calendula grown in large tubs. It was my first butterfly of that year, and my last.

  There then began the infamous Winter of Discontent. The diary describes the winter of 1978/79 in some detail:

  The autumn of 1978 was dry and mild until mid-November when it became very cold. Snow fell just prior to Christmas and some parts of southern England had a White Christmas. That was just the prelude. Heavy snow fell on the last day of the year and the New Year began with four to five inches on the ground in East Hampshire, though further west and north it was measured in feet.

  I spent that New Year's Day brushing snow off the rafters and bedroom ceiling of the primitive cottage in the woods in which I was living – it had drifted in as snow dust on a brisk wind, and settled there an inch deep. The diary continues:

  The third coldest January this century materialised (after 1942 and 1963). Snow lay in Hampshire all January ... Hardly a night went by without a noticeable frost and the maximum temperature recorded all month was 6°C. No Snowdrops were noted. February started dry and comparatively mild but the second week saw the return of the very cold weather, with a St Valentine's Day Massacre in the form of six inches of snow that was again loath to melt. More fell during a cold but otherwise wet final week. A few catkins appeared right at the end of the month. March saw a change in the weather, but not for the better: the sun hardly shone at all during the wettest March on record, and more snow fell on the 21st, the First Day of Spring.

  Suffice to say that a cold, wet and sunless April ensued. The whole nation struggled, not just its naturalists.

  I was living in a cottage deep in the woods, at the end of 2 kilometres of rutted lane that plunged suddenly down the East Hampshire Hangers escarpment between East Worldham and Oakhanger, on the edge of my beloved Hartley Wood. The cottage lacked electricity, loft insulation and double glazing, and indeed any modern comforts. Water was obtained from a spring, in containers. I had dug out a cesspit system and installed a simple toilet. Heating, as such, was provided by a Calor gas stove and open fires. Dead elm trees were in plentiful supply, though they were incredibly hard to saw and chop, and then burnt too fast and gave off little heat. The country was in turmoil, culminating in the collapse of the Labour government and the surge to power of Margaret Thatcher. Alton, my nearest shopping centre, was the first town in the UK to run out of sugar in a nationwide wave of panic buying and hoarding. All this mattered little to one whose windows iced up nightly, both inside and out. Existence degenerated into subsistence. Serotonin levels were dangerously low. The sun disappeared into the pall of winter, seemingly for weeks on end. It was all akin to the apocalyptic world that Byron describes in his poem ‘Darkness’ –

  I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

  Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

  Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day ...

  But spring, when it eventually arrived, was all the sweeter. The bird life around the cottage had to be experienced to be believed, though it rendered sleep difficult. Nights pulsated with the songs of a dozen Nightingales, far and near, and reeled softly with the constant whirr of Grasshopper Warblers. At the first sign of dawn the Cuckoos started up, meeting noisily for courtship in a nearby prominent tree, their gathering tree. Minutes later the full dawn chorus began, such that the living air itself actually vibrated – certainly, the noise rattled my windows. Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers nested in a hole in the old sallow tree at the end of my washing line. In mid-May, I watched a female Cuckoo lay an egg in a Dunnock's nest concealed amongst the Ivy jungle on the edge of the adjoining garden. The egg better resembled a Robin's than a Dunnock's, but it hatched and the youngster was successfully fostered. I followed the development of the young Cuckoo, which eventually flew in late June. The following year I found what may well prove to be my last ever Cuckoo's egg, in a Tree Pipit's nest in Hartley Wood.

  The butterfly season was late, and with one or two exceptions distinctly poor. Orange-tips hardly got going before May, again laying no eggs in April, and my first Speckled Wood was not seen until May 12th. Pearl-bordered Fritillaries did not begin to appear before the end of May. Then June was so indifferent that they almost lingered into July. The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary delayed its appearance until mid-June and lasted well into July. It was a year of record latest sightings, with the Orange-tip being the pick of the bunch: I saw the year's last on July 8th, the day after my wedding day. There was no contest for the title of Butterfly of the Year. The Purple Emperor won it fair and square, emerging in considerable numbers in late July, squabbling incessantly and at times violently, and laying eggs in the sallow tree at the end of my washing line. In one glorious moment I saw a posse of seven in a vista.

  And as for the cottage in the woods, that little piece of Walden? The following winter the landowner had no proper work for his farmhands to do, so he instructed them to clear the Nightingale's (and Brown Hairstreak's) Blackthorn scrub. The year after that, much of the adjoining ancient oak woodland was felled too, and a rye grass field was duly created, where sheep developed foot rot. The farm workers were then made redundant, ending their lives in council flats in Alton and Basingstoke. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the rural poor had begun. Their cottages were sold off as second homes – a fate that also befell my little cottage, but only after all the necessary utilities had been installed. I have never been back, for the place I loved has gone.

  Winter

  Be near me when my light is low,

  When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

  And tingle; and the heart is sick,

  And all the wheels of Being slow.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from ‘In Memoriam’

  For lovers of sunshine, and of butterflies, our winter constitutes a spiritual prison sentence of sixteen weeks of non-existence. Think of your nightmare school-timetable day (for me, double maths, double French and double physics), and grind that out, in mindless repetition, day after wretched day, for four interminably long months: that is precisely what our butterfly lovers suffer, annually. They scarcely belong in this country, and perhaps should be migratory beings, wintering on the shores of the Mediterranean.

  Winter begins in November, sometime, normally late on, depending on how unkind the Fates are feeling. Of course, we deny it for as long as possible; not least because it takes a while for winter to erase the memories of warmth and sunshine, for such pleasantries are keen to linger. December gets away with it, just, because of the helter-skelter rush that has become Christmas – that takes our minds off the dying of the light, and of the year. But when Christmas has passed we are left alone, bereft. New Year is a mirage. We should be in hibernation.

  It is curious that most of our so-called country sports are winter-based activities. Perhaps they are so keenly defended because they help their practitioners endure winter, for without precious days out with hounds or gun surviving winter might prove too difficult? The humble butterfly lover survives on paltry fare, of searching for the eggs of Brown Hairstreaks on Blackthorn shoots, or Purple Hairstreak eggs around clusters of oak buds, or White-letter Hairstreak eggs placed, symbolically, where the old and new wood meet on elm twigs. The bravest search for White Admiral larvae, in tiny spun-up Honeysuckle leaves, or prospect new places. But this is subsistence fare: a bolder strategy is required. First, I shortened winter by studying Marsh Fritillary larvae, which emerge from hibernation in mid to late January; and then slew it altogether by following Purple Emperor larvae through their five-month-long period of hibernation. Once winter is placed under the spell of the Purple Emperor it is rendered
impotent.

  Yet winter remains at least one month too long, and that month is January. It is the slowest month of the year, with time outworn, almost still. Throughout this shadow-land of transience the sun angles remain dangerously low, and we may suffer day after day of opacity. We are in the Underworld. There is no lucidity in January skies, the days of so-called ‘crisp winter sunshine’ are at best a sad parody of the real thing, summer. No changes of any note occur in the countryside that long and pallid month, bar the mustard-haze yellowing of catkins in clouded drab copses and hedges, whilst Snowdrops apart the gardens remain soulless. We are entombed, under winter's pall.

  One of the most important, and little used, words in the English language is ‘apricity’. It means the warmth of winter sunshine. The secret is to sit in it, behind a pane of glass, and allow the warmth of the light to reach the eyelids. That will help you through, but in true desperation visit a butterfly house.

  Yet winter has its magic: its blood-drained sunsets, a tranquillity and calmness of air that is so seldom experienced in summer, days of embalmment when the light fades stealthily from noon, its wakefulness. It is a period of meditation, and of dreaming.

  We all, as pilgrims, look out for the signs of spring – yet they are not signs, or even tokens of hope, but actualities. It is February that brings most hope. February is much maligned, yet it is the shortest and often the driest month of the year; and apart from in severe winters it is a month of transition, into spring. In a mild winter it is indeed the first month of spring, for spring begins when the Rooks start to build, which is normally around Valentine's Day. February is also the month of many firsts – Coltsfoot, Primrose, Celandine, sallow blossom, bumblebee and butterfly – and the slow inexorable lengthening of days. A good February will issue a new sign of spring almost every other day, making it a month of immense hope. Then, at the end of the month the Blackbirds begin to sing, and they sing of spring.

  Early on in his rural prose-poem ‘The South Country’ (1909) Edward Thomas muses: ‘It is not Spring yet. Spring is being dreamed …’ He then loses his thread, badly in fact (he later regretted writing the book, knowing that he could and should have ventured deeper); but what he had almost stumbled upon is the concept that spring needs to be dreamed up, ideated. Surely that is precisely what the sleeping trees are doing? In which case there may be a role for us too, in the meditative conjuring up of spring; so maybe we need winter after all, though it certainly needs shortening.

  Over the land freckled with snow and half-thawed,

  The speculating rooks at their nests cawed,

  And saw from elm tops, delicate as flower of grass,

  What we below could not see – Winter pass.

  Edward Thomas, ‘Thaw’

  11 In and out of war: the early 1980s

  After three lousy summers we were due some serious sunshine, and we got it in 1980 – for a while. After a mild and dry winter, a distinctly warm and dry spring developed. Virtually no rain fell during April or May, with day after day of hot sunshine. It was the driest May in England for fifty years. Butterflies emerged early, and in pleasingly good numbers, with core populations recovering well after being suppressed by three dire seasons. At Noar Hill, the Duke of Burgundy began to emerge on May 4th, which at the time constituted its earliest known appearance there. Pearl-bordered Fritillaries and Wood Whites started to appear soon after. Sprinklers were in use on lawns, hose-pipe bans were being introduced and two-thirds of Ludshott Common, a vast expanse of heather and gorse heath near Hindhead, went up in flames on May 12th. It felt like 1976 was returning.

  The drought coincided with an attempt to restore grazing to Noar Hill, after an absence of some thirty years. We (being the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Naturalists’ Trust) borrowed 34 sheep from the Nature Conservancy Council at Old Winchester Hill NNR, in the Meon valley. On the advice of various experts, notably Dr Francis Rose, who lived nearby at Liss, Lady Anne Brewis, a gloriously eccentric but brilliant botanist and dearest of friends, and the Nature Conservancy Council's wardens from the Martin Down and Old Winchester Hill NNRs, Paul Toynton and John Bacon, it was decided to graze a quarter of the reserve that spring. The objectives were to eliminate scrub and reduce the dominance of coarse grass. Much later I learnt that grazing can only ever succeed with the latter aim. Bacon masterminded things. I had met him for the first time the previous year, on a sheep-handling course, where he was engagingly teaching a small group of volunteers how to dag sheep: ‘Sheep need dagging out, and you need to learn how to dag 'em,’ he preached. He and I instantly forged a partnership which explored various new directions in nature conservation over three decades. But this first venture was a disaster. In the absence of perimeter fencing the sheep were contained within electric flexi-netting, which was not easy to erect or maintain on Noar Hill's undulating topography of chalk pits and spoil heaps. There was also no water supply, so we ferried water up to the animals in large containers, in heat that seemed to stupefy sheep. The inevitable happened: the sheep broke out, or were otherwise released, and wreaked havoc in Farmer Vining's barley field. Mercifully, Vining and I both emanated from the same corner of Somerset, and so had some form of understanding, in that at least I could understand him when in the heat of the moment he lapsed into deep West Somerset brogue. It took several years to get grazing back on the reserve, as we had to raise the necessary funds for perimeter fencing and a water supply, for in those days there was little in the way of grant aid.

  That May I cracked how to find the larvae of the Dark Green Fritillary, at Stockbridge Down and Broughton Down in west Hampshire. Their larvae either take the upper third of the leaf or remove the basal lobes, producing distinctive and fairly diagnostic ‘eating marks’. Later I learnt that I had not discovered anything new, for many of the old butterfly collectors had developed that particular skill – as far back as mid-Victorian times. Whilst the Dark Green Fritillary is one of our boldest butterflies, relishing a battle with the wind on a downland crest, its larvae are the most frightful cowards, curling up into a tight, paranoid ball when disturbed.

  In early June the Painted Ladies showed up in numbers, for the first time since 1969. We had hardly seen this loveliest of migrant butterflies during the late 1970s, even during the great summer of 1976, when I recorded less than twenty. But no sooner had they arrived, along with a pleasing number of Red Admirals and the West Indian cricketers, complete with a battery of fast bowlers of Richter scale magnitude, than the weather collapsed, badly. We suffered the wettest English June since 1912. It was also cold and sunless. The problem was that the high-summer butterflies, including Purple Emperor, Silver-washed Fritillary and White Admiral, had all pupated early because of the fine April and May, which provided excellent conditions for rapid larval growth. They then got stuck for ages in the vulnerable pupal state, and seemingly suffered high levels of mortality. Certainly White Admiral and Purple Emperor populations collapsed badly.

  But what the Emperor lacked quantitatively he made up for qualitatively. On the last day of July, a visit to Shortheath Pond, a small acidic lake on one of the East Hampshire heaths, produced a most edifying encounter with this most memorable of butterflies.

  Diary, July 31st 1980: A lovely male was spotted settling on the bare sand on the pond's east side. We watched him feeding firstly on Rabbit droppings and then on damp sand. He had obviously just emerged since his wings were perfect and still soft, and he was of above average size as well. We watched him as he fed for about fifteen minutes, crawling over the sand and occasionally taking off and swooping down again a few yards away, flicking his wings at various flies and regularly showing his wonderful purple. He fed mainly with closed wings due to the wind but when possible he opened them. Of course I had only four shots left in the camera, and when I'd just changed the film he took off for good and began flying rather erratically over the pond westwards into the wind. He had not quite mastered the art of flying. He soon learnt, for a few yards out he encountered a male Empe
ror Dragonfly Anax imperator and the great Battle of the Emperors ensued. The dragonfly pitched into young butterfly with much wing rattling. For a full minute a wonderful battle was watched as the butterfly escaped west over the pond, rising to 60 feet, pursued by his tormentor. Suddenly, he turned on the dragonfly and explained concisely and conclusively who is Emperor of All Insects in this country. The Anax immediately returned to patrolling his reed bed, duly chastened.

  Almost a year later Shortheath was the setting of another memorable occasion, though this time the entomology played second or even third fiddle. We are all supposed to be able to remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when seminal moments in world history occurred. I was listening to Test Match Special on a small transistor radio and studying Grayling butterflies during the dramatic conclusion to the famous Headingley Test match of 1981 when, inspired by Ian Botham, Bob Willis and the late Graham Dilley, England came back from the dead to trounce Australia. What is worth recording here is that several anglers, who had been fishing placidly around the pond, suddenly went berserk when Willis took the final wicket. One slipped into the lake and half a dozen independently danced jigs, to the (hopefully perpetual) bemusement of a couple of lady dog walkers. For the record, I was butterflying at Denbies Hillside (NT) near Dorking during Botham's stupendous innings at Old Trafford in the same series, when cricket proved rather a distraction from a fine display by the Chalkhill Blue. It is, of course, against National Trust bylaws to listen to radios on Trust land – but it is unlikely that anyone has infringed that particular bylaw more than me, for I have butterflied intensively on NT land and Test Match Special is the perfect accompaniment to a day's butterflying.

  Back in the summer of 1980, a belated honeymoon took place, along the Purbeck coast in late July. The weather was right, cloudless and almost calm; time itself stood still. We walked from east to west, and in consequence got sunburnt along the left side of our bodies. Lovers do things like that, but naturalists should know better. The Winspit, near Worth Matravers, is one of the most famous butterflying spots in the UK. Collectors used to work the downland slopes here, particularly looking for aberrations of the Chalkhill Blue, finishing the day with a well-earned beer in the Square & Compass at Worth Matravers. The area is also renowned for the pride of Purbeck, the Lulworth Skipper, though butterfly collectors tended not to trouble it much as it rarely varies from the norm in colouring or markings. It gathers in numbers on favoured flowers – Marjoram, knapweeds, scabiouses and, where available, Viper's Bugloss. Perhaps it rather lacks what used to be called moral fibre. The diary states: The males are seemingly a trifle over-sexed. At 11.35 a pair met over some flowers and within 30 seconds were in cop… the receptive female was grabbed by the male without any preamble. Some butterflies have elaborate courtship displays, many do not, and the Lulworth Skipper falls comfortably into the latter bracket. That same day produced a spectacular aberration of the Small Skipper, with prominent canary-yellow veins on the wing undersides.