But the Pearl-bordered Fritillary completely stole the late May show around Silverdale that year. I saw hundreds at Gait Barrows, probably the best flight I had seen of this living jewel at the time. It was also numerous on Arnside Knott and on the slopes of the adjoining hill, picturesque Heathwaite. But the lasting memories are twofold: first, a trio feeding on a patch of pink Bird's-eye Primrose flowers growing along the edge of a lonely sedge-flanked mere called Haws Water and, secondly, of the butterfly going to roost in numbers high in scrub on Arnside Knott at 6 pm one evening. A naturalist's mind can photograph such near-divine experiences far better than any camera. A poet can place them in words.
There was time, too, to search for the spectacular larvae of the High Brown Fritillary. Now these were new to me; indeed, there may have been no one alive at the time who had actually found High Brown Fritillary larvae in the wild, for the insect had become both rare and neglected. The larvae are of a golden-brown colour, and are heavily and gloriously spined. They were found basking close to Hairy Violet plants growing in warm spots as the sun was coming out after cloudy spells, or during periods of thin cloud through which a pale sun shone. The feeding marks on the violet leaves were quite distinctive, with basal lobes and/or leaf tips being removed, though Dark Green Fritillary larvae leave similar tell-tale signs.
Back in Hampshire, the Duke of Burgundy was on the wane. Much time was spent endeavouring to track dispersing females, but they proved to be uncooperative minxes and my endeavours, though honest, were largely thwarted. It was not a single-person job. But up near Farnborough the Marsh Fritillary had exploded, at least metaphorically, at Foxlease Meadows near Cove. I visited a little on the late side, judging by the ragged and worn state of the many hundreds that were flying, and by the frequency with which dead specimens were found in funnel-trap spider's webs. It was the third consecutive good year for this butterfly, during which time populations had increased phenomenally, enabling the butterfly to spread far and wide. Indeed, it turned up in many places on the west Hampshire chalk in that era. Similar range expansions were recorded during this period in Dorset, Wiltshire and the Cotswolds.
Over on the Isle of Wight in mid-June, Clouded Yellows were not flying in off the sea, as they had during the previous June. But, like the Marsh Fritillary across the Solent, the Glanville Fritillary had produced a bumper brood, for similar reasons. They were so profuse that I started spotting emerging specimens crawling out of tussocks of grass, then hanging upside down on a sturdy stem to expand and harden their wings. Sure enough, the vacated pupal cases were promptly located within deep matted tussocks of Yorkshire-fog grass. A number of unhatched pupae were also found, and another useful jigsaw-puzzle piece of butterfly ecology was put in place.
The White-letter Hairstreak also revealed some useful secrets, back in Blacknest Copse on the edge of Alice Holt Forest. My pipe-cleaner experiment, so called because I had bedecked several elms with multicoloured pipe cleaners, marking egg and larval sites, had come to fruition. The study suggested, strongly, that the butterfly bred most successfully on flowering Wych Elm, followed (some way behind) by flowering English Elm and flowering Smooth-leaved Elm, though a few larvae developed successfully on non-flowering Wych Elm. Larvae failed to develop from eggs laid on non-flowering English and Smooth-leaved elms. The problem here is that Dutch elm disease tends to infect trees as they become mature enough to flower.
June intensified, and brought out a huge emergence of Small Tortoiseshells. These home-grown butterflies were perhaps augmented by immigrants from the continent. Their gregarious larvae were almost commonplace on nettle patches in sunny places, and batches of Peacock larvae were also fairly frequent. The summer was building up well. Drought conditions were developing: hose pipes had been banned in several districts, lawns and weeds had stopped growing, and farmers were relishing the prospect of a bumper and early harvest. The only blemish was on the cricket field, where the imperious West Indies steamrolled a cocky England side in the first two Test matches, to be two–nil up by the start of July.
It was time for something silly, and the Duke of Burgundy provided the silliness. The larvae are nocturnal, hiding at the base of Cowslip leaves during the day and only venturing out to feed after dark, often on the under surface of Cowslip leaves. A vast amount of effort was devoted to looking for them at night, though I never stayed later than 3.30 am. They fed only on warm dry nights, when the temperature was at least 10 degrees and the vegetation dry, ceasing to feed when dew wetted the foliage. Lowlights included being tripped over by a Badger that hustled out of a bush unexpectedly, and stumbling into a courting couple who had progressed rather beyond courting.
The planned apex of the summer was to be a return visit to the Morecambe Bay limestone hills, to finish off surveying rare butterflies there for NCC. A friend with a malicious sense of humour had recommended a small hotel in Arnside as a good B&B establishment. We duly booked in to what turned out to be the most preposterous B&B I have ever visited (out of well over a hundred). Offensive features included nylon sheets, a grandfather clock on the landing that struck quarters loudly, a bath without a hot tap, cheap self-assembly furniture with non-opening drawers and doors, and an average of four notices on each room wall forbidding guests from activities that no one in their right mind would contemplate doing anyway. Worse, breakfast was served from 9 am, table by table, by room number – and we were the last room – and one was obliged to stay for a minimum of two nights. We fled after one night, and discovered a superb B&B at Witherslack, where Red Squirrels visited the bird table each morning. Years later the Willowfield Hotel at Arnside changed hands and became, and remains, an excellent establishment. Places go in eras.
We visited many small fringe sites, but some of the larger hills, notably Whitbarrow, required more work, and some hills north of the Kent estuary were visited for the first time. The region was in the grip of severe drought: much of the vegetation was frazzled beyond recognition and many of the Silver Birch trees and Hazel bushes had dropped leaves. However, the drought was ending, and we saw less of the High Brown Fritillary than during the previous July, but found a few more Duke of Burgundy colonies by searching for larval damage on Primula plants, notably a thriving colony on a lonely hill above Grange-over-Sands called, ignominiously, Wart Barrow. After three weeks, we were flooded out, and retreated down the M6 in a deluge.
August was hot, and belonged to the Small Tortoiseshell, which seemed to be everywhere that summer. There were always twenty or so in our garden at The Lodge and huge aggregations on many downs. Absent, however, were the main migrant butterflies. Not a single Painted Lady was recorded in Hampshire all year, and by the end of August I had seen, nationally, a mere two Red Admirals, and a lone Clouded Yellow. Migrant moths were equally scarce. But August 1984 was most memorable for its cereal harvest, the first four-tonnes-to-the-acre harvest. British agriculture had become obsessed by cereal production, even though much of the harvest ended up in costly grain intervention stores. To a young nature conservationist, George Orwell's prophetic warning about that year was more applicable to agricultural values than to wider society. That summer, numerous lengths of hedge throughout the cereal lands were burnt out by wanton straw and stubble burning. A few years later burning was at last banned, mercifully so, for on dry August and September days the sun over Hampshire would be obscured by a pall of acrid amber smoke that stained the sunlight brown and poisoned the sunset. It became impossible for rural housewives to hang washing out to dry, whilst asthmatics simply had to stay indoors.
In mid-July I had introduced 25 full-grown Duke of Burgundy larvae to a carefully re-created plot of rough downland in our garden, which was then carefully proofed with fine nylon netting, dug well into the ground. At the end of August it was time to dissect out this contraption, known as HM Prison Wyck, in an attempt to discover where the butterfly pupates. Ably assisted by my cat, Mouse, and to the trance-like accompaniment of Test Match Special, the task took two painstaking day
s, involving archaeological investigation with a table fork. Only seven pupae were found, suggesting either that some larvae had managed to break out of the contraption, which seemed doubtful, or that mortality is high around the pupation process. Crucially, five of the seven were found 5–8 centimetres above soil level in tussocks of fine-leaved grasses containing many dead blades. One was found lying on the ground within one of these matted tussocks. The seventh was discovered inside an empty beechnut case lying on the ground amongst a patch of Beech litter. The good news is that none was found on the netting, in contrast to how the insect performs in breeding cages.
Nonetheless, the experiment inspired me to search for Duke of Burgundy pupae on Noar Hill. The following day I actually found a wild pupa, 8 centimetres above ground in a tussock of rank Red Fescue grass containing many dead blades. This was only 25 centimetres from a Cowslip plant which had supported a full-grown larva. However, that proved to be the limit of my achievements, even though two days were spent examining tussocks of Red Fescue and other grasses where a large number of larvae had been followed earlier in that summer. Eventually I cracked the mysteries of where the Duke of Burgundy pupates, at least on Noar Hill, by searching for freshly emerged adults and then digging down to discover the vacated pupal case. This revealed that HM Prison Wyck had been a useful exercise, for the species appears to specialise in pupating 4–8 centimetres above ground in matted tussocks. The lessons for conservation grazing here are obvious.
Autumn slowly waned into winter, by means of a veritable tempest in late November that demolished the roof of one of The Lodge's outhouses. Right till the end of the year I surveyed for Duke of Burgundy colonies on downland fragments in and around Hampshire, searching for larval damage on Cowslip leaves. The last colonies were found on Boxing Day, near Buriton and Finchdean on the western South Downs.
14 A time of discovery
Church bells reverberated off the houses and chimney smoke drifted low across Selborne High Street as I cycled up to see in the New Year on Noar Hill. Then, at midnight, a host of burgundy-coloured rockets ascended from a nearby farmstead. Meanwhile, down near Winchester the year's first conservation drama was being played out: a landowner needed to enlarge his farm by an extra ten acres in order to qualify for an EU grant towards a new grain store, only to find that the grant stream was terminated as he finished grubbing out a rather good Duke of Burgundy colony. Please do not think that these were halcyon days: Hampshire was a battlefield, with woods, hedges, marshes and downs disappearing under buildings or agricultural intensification.
Snow descended in early January 1985, primarily on Kent and East Anglia but reaching as far west as Wiltshire. The fallen snow promptly turned to ice and was added to by further falls during a sixteen-day spell in which the temperature scarcely reached zero. At The Lodge, we retreated into one room, heated by a small wood burner. Habitually, we took the battery out of our Morris Minor overnight and kept it in the house. January 16th was London's coldest day for thirty years. The following day the thermometer peaked at –5°C, and the South-west was subjected to a blizzard which buried Cornwall. In the midst of this chaos the year's first butterflying expedition was launched, to search for White-letter Hairstreak eggs at my study site at Blacknest, near Alice Holt Forest. The previous year had been an excellent one for this tiny treetop butterfly, and the egg lay was prolific, even if one's toes and fingers took a long time to thaw out. A rapid thaw kicked in but the land promptly became saturated and rivers flooded. At the end of January there was even a vestige of a dawn chorus. Diary: A Song Thrush with a sore throat, a couple of sparrows and something unrecognisably out of tune.
A second heavy fall of snow descended on February 9th, covering each twig with 5 centimetres of crystallised snow. On Noar Hill, the Yews and Junipers were weighted way down, some broke; and the sheep had to be dug out of a drift and fed hay. Then, whipped up by an easting wind, the snow blew into the lanes, cutting villages off. Snow ploughs came through, and turned road surfaces into ice rinks, as salt and grit were limited commodities in that era. For eleven days the temperature struggled to reach zero, though the sun shone effortlessly. Then, towards the end of the month, the weather improved, enabling the first butterflies of the year to take to the air on February 24th. Hampshire Conservation Volunteers were working with me on Noar Hill that day, cutting scrub in the Top Pit, the Holy of Holies up against the Beech woodland. My first butterfly of the year was a male Brimstone, which (diary) danced right up to me out of the sun in exactly the same spot as where the first butterfly of 1984 had been seen. Could history repeat itself, in the form of a replicate summer? Later that day, a Small Tortoiseshell came out to play, and a few days on, a Red Admiral appeared, having miraculously hibernated. The year was up and away, and winter was forgotten – only to return with a vengeance in mid-March, as two further snowfalls occurred, including one on the first day of spring, March 21st. Spring was now running late, and running scared.
March ended wet, then April roared in on a south-west wind. Incredibly, that wind ushered in an immigration of Painted Ladies. A great number were seen on the South Devon coast. By mid-April more Painted Ladies had been seen in Hampshire than during the whole of 1984. I saw my year's first in Dorset on April 8th, a small grey male along a ride at Lydlinch Common, near Sturminster Newton. By the 10th they had reached the north of England. On the 14th I saw one in Selborne High Street and three on Shoulder of Mutton, the hillside dedicated to Edward Thomas above Steep.
I drove over to the Cotswolds, on a Duke of Burgundy fact-finding tour, by way of Oxford and Bernwood Forest. In Bernwood the Pearl-bordered Fritillary was responding well to recent ride widening and coppicing work at ride junctions – Caroline Steel and I found larvae along a ditch margin in York Wood. But this apparent panacea proved to be short-lived, for coarse grasses soon took over in these opened areas and choked out the butterfly. That was the last Caroline and I ever saw of this illustrious spring butterfly in Bernwood, despite laudable conservation effort. By no means everything that is done in the name of conservation works, or if it works it works only for a while, as in this case. Deer numbers rapidly increased in Bernwood, and their browsing rendered the forest even more unsuitable.
The Cotswolds were interesting, for here the Duke of Burgundy had experienced a boom era after the Rabbits succumbed to myxomatosis and tall grasses and scrub grew up. The poor Large Blue and Adonis Blue died out, though for a couple of decades or so His Grace thrived in their stead. But by the mid-1980s the vegetation on neglected Cotswold grasslands was becoming too coarse even for this long-sward specialist, though some large colonies still survived. At all these rough grassland sites, Dark Green Fritillary and Small Blue occurred in numbers. Also, the Marsh Fritillary had enjoyed a major expansion phase, and was present on many grassland slopes in the southern Cotswolds. Soon afterwards, it retreated during a run of poor summers.
At last spring broke through, and the first Orange-tips and Green-veined Whites took to the wing, on April 22nd. They were late. Painted Ladies were still batting about, but nights had become cold and spring was stalling. At Noar Hill, the first Duke of Burgundies and Dingy Skippers emerged, and promptly squabbled. I was determined to look for emerging Duke of Burgundies in order to find the empty pupal cases. The trick worked, for a recently vacated pupal case was found 5 centimetres above ground level amongst a thick matt of dead grass. Later I found another amongst deep moss, again 5 centimetres above ground. These findings were crucial, as the insect spends at least nine months in the pupal stage, and we need to know just where the pupae occur. At this point, two weeks of dry (but cold) weather ended in rain, and the weathermen kindly pointed out that the country had just suffered eleven sunless Saturdays in a row. Gloom descended, day after day of it, and at the height of the Duke of Burgundy flight season. But one huge colony was discovered, on a rough grassland slope near the curiously named village of Vernham Dean in the extreme north-west of Hampshire. Here, I counted 85 in less than an ho
ur. It doesn't need to be a rare butterfly, and didn't used to be.
May ended well, though the spring species had been decimated by diverse forms of adverse weather. One surprise was in store, on Noar Hill:
Diary, May 29th 1985: A colossal Large Tortoiseshell buzzed me at 3.25, in the north-west corner. I suspect it was a wild insect, rather than a bred-and-released specimen, on account of its size (bred specimens are almost invariably undersized) and behaviour – it beat me up then glided away majestically. An amazing beast – I'm sure it is resident (just) in this area.
But that was the last Large Tortoiseshell recorded in the East Hampshire Hangers. Two days later a Pearl-bordered Fritillary sauntered through the reserve, and a week afterwards a Marsh Fritillary, probably a wanderer from the introduced colony at Conford, to the north-east. Such were the riches of the Selborne area in that golden, now bygone and almost forgotten era.
In Pursuit of Butterflies Page 16