But after a rotten start August worked hard to redeem itself. The year's first Painted Ladies appeared, late. The July species were lingering on, due to the late start to the season. Silver-studded Blues were flying on the north-east Hampshire heaths well into the second half of August, whereas normally they are gone by late July. The year's Peacock hatch did not commence until August 9th, at least around Selborne, and the Brown Hairstreak did not appear there before mid-August. Small Whites abounded, until they got blasted away by an excessively wet August bank holiday.
We then entered a lengthy spell of benign weather, with day after day of gentle mild Septemberine sunshine, punctuated by an occasional day of unchallenging drizzle. In such genial weather conditions individual butterflies can live unusually long lives. Having emerged late, because of the poor spring, Gatekeepers and Small and Essex skippers lasted well into September, and Graylings into October. One Gatekeeper was seen as late as September 18th in the garden of The Lodge, the latest I have seen the species. At Old Winchester Hill NNR in Hampshire's Meon valley the Silver-spotted Skipper lasted into early October, remarkably late for that species, although it does fly distinctly later in the Meon valley than elsewhere. The pleasant early autumn weather carried on well into October, allowing me to see a faded Brown Hairstreak on Noar Hill as late as October 16th. This remains my latest sighting of that species. Small Heaths and Meadow Browns persisted until the end of the month. They might have lasted longer, only the autumn rains then arrived with a vengeance, and the country degenerated into flood and quagmire.
Autumn
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Amongst the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
From John Keats, ‘To Autumn’
Summer gradually burns itself out, rather like the human body. But it does so gently, almost imperceptibly. August is a descending month, and the subsequent vitiation into autumn is most gradual – until the oak leaves fall and we find ourselves stranded in early winter. Autumn, like winter, descends from the north, reaching the far south coast last. You can find touches of autumn in middle England in mid-August, and earlier further north – if you look.
There are autumn broods of Comma, Red Admiral, Small Copper, Small Tortoiseshell and occasionally some fresh Painted Ladies and a partial third brood of the Wall Brown. Rarely, a few other species produce autumn broods, such as the Holly Blue and White Admiral. The Speckled Wood is usually at its most numerous in early or mid-September, when its autumn brood emerges, and after warm summers late emergences of the Green-veined White occur, at least down south, and very locally. Small and Large Whites can also produce a few fresh adults in October during mild weather. Later, on warm late autumn days a few hibernating Brimstones, Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells wake up to enjoy the last of the sunshine, before returning to hibernation.
There are early autumns, precipitated by gales in September or frosts at the start of October, middling autumns, and late autumns when the frost and rains hold off. There are also Indian summers – periods of warm fine weather during September or October – though, strictly, an Indian Summer comes after the first pulse of frosts (like ‘decimate’, the term ‘Indian summer’ has transmogrified). Whatever, our butterflies seize upon Indian summer weather and make it their own, but it is their last stand. They are doomed, and they know it; for above all else autumn tears summer's leafy temple down.
Gradually butterflies diminish and retreat as autumn advances: the number of species on the wing declines, and the individual survivors age and head south or gather in sheltered warm places, such as gardens, valley bottoms or the foot of south-facing hillsides, where they become more and more dependent on late flowers. They are pushed towards warmth, and seek out the warmest microclimates where summer lingers longest, and so become increasingly localised. The last of the year is often seen fluttering around the south-facing edge of a building, a Red Admiral usually, or a Small Tortoiseshell.
But gradually the strength of the sun wanes and the sun angles become too low in the sky, so that the temperature fails to reach the 12-degree threshold that butterflies require for activity. It is this diminution that ends the butterfly season, rather than night frost or even the autumn rains. Consequently, it is unusual to see a butterfly on the wing after November 5th – the sun has sunk too low. By the end of October the sun angles are comparable to those of mid-February.
Perhaps autumn is loved so much by people, not so much because of the colours – yellows, browns, oranges and some reds – but because it gives us a last chance to value sunshine before the pall of winter descends. Also, those final sunlit days allow us to say goodbye to summer, properly.
November is the grim reaper, the Avenging Angel of Death, which strips the leaves off the trees, casts the sun into shadow, sends forth the driving autumn rains which blow before the emptying of time, and subdues the colours of the land to the drabbest shades of brown. It is a reign of terror. We can only rage against the dying of the light, and retreat into the memories of summer gone – and start dreaming of spring.
November, the crucifixion of the year,
Spread-eagles my soul upon a naked land.
Bereft of leaves, the flail-maddened hedge,
Cut with thorns, bereft of hope.
The furrowed land where no bird flies,
But for waif-like blackened crows
Whose cries are wraiths of summer gone,
Borne on the wind that drives the rain.
The pheasant struts, there but to be shot,
And die on winter's waste of thorns.
Dismember, there is no colour here:
The blood has drained through nail holes,
In palm and heel, within the mind itself,
And in the earth, through heel and palm.
Then in the brambles, stripped by wind,
An empty warbler's nest, of twisted grass,
The makers long away in sun-tilled lands,
Their song a memory, remote, alone.
My soul flew with them time ago,
Leaving but something lost behind.
(Selborne, Hampshire, autumn 1975)
15 High-blown years: the Great Storm and afterwards
Our winters are largely unmemorable, and when we do recollect them it is seldom for positive reasons. The winter of 1986/87 was memorable, for a lengthy freeze-up. The cold weather moved down from the north at the start of the year. It was well forecast, so I removed the sheep from Noar Hill early. January 12th was one of the coldest days on record nationally, with maximum temperatures in central southern England around –5°C. Snow then fell on several consecutive days, a powdery snow that cannot be moulded into snowballs and which blows around in the wind – call it fairy snow. It blew off the fields on a bitter wind and accumulated in the lanes, cutting off villages. Around The Lodge, 20 centimetres of snow in the fields blew to form drifts more than 2 metres deep in the lanes. We were cut off for three days, during a ten-day freeze-up in which the temperature failed to rise above zero. Once again, we retreated to a single room in the house, with three cats and a baby – and survived. A slow thaw began on January 21st, generating three days of fog. All told, the nation suffered a spell of fifteen sunless days.
February brought a change, to mild and grey weather – day after day of thoroughly mindless weather. Mid-month, the sun broke through, but with it came the return of the cold. At least it was dry and the first butterflying expeditions of the year could be launched, in search of Brown Hairstreak eggs in north-west Hampshire, to the south-west of Andover. This was terra nova, a vast undulating expanse of arable landscape – Edward Thomas called it ploughland – over Clay-with-Flints overlying the chalk. There were ‘old’ records of the Brown Hairstreak in this district, but no one had looked in recent years. Sure enough, the butterfly was still pre
sent, breeding along green lanes flanked by Blackthorn and on the few roadside hedges that were not flail-cut to smithereens annually. Major epicentres were discovered on MOD land around Shipton Bellinger, on the Wiltshire border, and at Cholderton, where an enlightened landowner, Henry Edmonds, manages his estate with butterflies, moths, birds and flowers firmly in mind. Henry is in touch with Nature, and with the land in his sound stewardship.
Early March brought more snow, this time the wet variety that settles on the grass and decorates trees nicely, but melts on roads. So we did not get cut off. Spring was long in coming, and the entire nation was becoming decidedly Fed Up. Then, on March 27th we suffered a violent storm, the fiercest spring storm I had known. Nationally, twelve people were killed and a large number of trees were blown down. It was perhaps a foretaste of what was to come.
Spring then broke through – on Passion Sunday, April 5th. Chiffchaffs flew in from the south and butterflies took to the air. My first butterfly of the year was, unusually, a Comma. The Comma was the butterfly of that early spring, outnumbering the Brimstone and Small Tortoiseshell. But no sooner had spring started than the weather got into the wretched habit of clouding up for the day and clearing for the night. Anyone with an eye for butterflies will understand the frustration that this weather pattern instils, especially in spring and after a long numbing winter. Nonetheless, the first Orange-tip appeared in East Hampshire on April 14th, bang on time. Once again, the species had timed the start of its emergence with the flowering of the Lady's Smock, one of its two main foodplants.
St George's Day, April 23rd, finally sorted things out. The weather was perfect, many Orange-tips hatched and an immigration of Red Admirals occurred – they had to be migrants, for the winter must surely have been too cold for this butterfly to have hibernated successfully. Holly Blues, Green Hairstreaks and Speckled Woods all quickly followed. Five reasonable, or even good, weeks ensued, allowing our spring butterflies to enjoy a successful season. It did, however, prove to be the best spell of weather of a difficult season. It brought out the first Duke of Burgundy of the year on Noar Hill on April 27th, a freshly emerged male launching itself at passing hoverflies from a perch in one of the chalk pits. By the end of April the vegetation was some ten days ahead of the norm, with the Beech, birch and oak trees well in leaf. By mid-May the Hawthorn was in flower, bedecked with snow again. Somehow, a bitter winter had led into an early spring.
The Forestry Commission arranged for a survey of the Pearl-bordered Fritillary in Alice Holt Forest. We were worried it was dying out there, as the Forestry Commission had (rightly) stopped felling blocks of oak woodland. This meant that there was a shortage of suitable new clearings and young plantations for the butterfly to colonise. The news was better than expected, but still worrying. I found two thriving colonies, at either end of the forest, both in experimental areas used by Forestry Commission Forest Research. In these plots, each of about 1 hectare in size, trees were planted, grown on for a few years and then grubbed out and replaced. The objective was to study how well saplings of different species established themselves. Crucially, Bracken, bramble and coarse grasses were controlled, by cutting and spraying, enabling violets to abound. Sure enough, in one of these research plots, in Lodge Inclosure at the north end of the forest, many Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were on the wing. I spent an afternoon catching, marking and recapturing them. All told 65 were netted and marked, and one was recaptured as many as six times. Jeremy Thomas kindly analysed the data and reported that there were between 128 and 182 individuals flying on the day. This represented an annual emergence of about 450 Pearl-bordered Fritillaries. Sadly, soon afterwards these experimental plots were abandoned, and the butterfly died out in Alice Holt. There was nowhere new for them to colonise. The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, which also utilised these plots, lasted a while longer, then followed suit. Alice has been a shadow of herself since.
June started poorly, with a deep depression which gave vent to a fully fledged autumn gale. The month sagged, then recovered briefly, only to fall apart when the Lords Test match started. The spring butterflies, together with the immigrant Painted Ladies, were knocked out, and the high summer species were prevented from emerging. The sun returned towards the end of the month to bring out the Silver-studded Blues on the East Hampshire heaths, and the Ringlets and Marbled Whites on the downs.
The new month began promisingly, with the first Silver-washed Fritillaries and White Admirals appearing in the woods and another electrifying display of Dark Green Fritillaries at Porton Down, north-east of Salisbury, on July 5th. The latter was emerging in numbers that day, and a group from Butterfly Conservation's Hampshire Branch encountered several pairings amongst the grasses – limp, soft-winged females at the mercy of amorous males who were quartering the breeding grounds, low, picking off virgin females as soon as they had emerged. As the day progressed and the heat intensified they moved on to Viper's Bugloss – large orange butterflies with silver pearls on their undersides, feeding avidly together on plumes of mauve and blue flowers, under a cloudless sky. Send for an artist, or a poet.
The following day – July 6th – was National White Admiral Day, and The Lodge excelled itself. The previous July we had noticed a female White Admiral showing an interest in the old Honeysuckle which covered much of the southern front of the house, but assumed she would not lay eggs there. But at 5 pm a year later we spotted a freshly emerged, soft-winged White Admiral sitting on the Honeysuckle. The butterfly had bred there after all! I took it down to the local wood, a kilometre away, and set it free. Later the vacant pupal case was found, high up on the Honeysuckle tangle. Such was The Lodge, and such was my contentment and depth of belonging there.
The fine weather held. Ringlets erupted on Noar Hill, with the Marbled Whites appearing soon after them. Over at Bentley Wood, I R P Heslop's old heartland on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border, butterflies were massing. The wood, a small forest really, had been sold by the Forestry Commission to the Bentley Wood Trust, a charity set up by the Colman (mustard) family with the objectives of promoting nature conservation, public access, sustainable forestry and the Christian faith – four things that blend wondrously together. The Trust set about steadily removing non-native conifers and preserving the wood's flora and fauna. They have done a superb job, for Bentley Wood to this day remains England's best site for woodland butterflies. Only one butterfly seems to have been lost from there in the last thirty years – the High Brown Fritillary, which was on its last legs, or rather wings, when the Trust acquired the wood. On July 8th 1987 I saw a magnificent female feeding on a tall Marsh Thistle, and a couple of males amongst a plethora of similar-looking Dark Green Fritillaries in what is known as the Eastern Clearing, an area of former meadowland where planted conifers had died during the 1976 drought.
The fine weather then ushered in the Purple Emperor season, with a magnificent male feeding on fresh horse manure in one of the East Hampshire Hangers near Hawkley, before capitulating horribly – just as I was setting off for two weeks surveying for the High Brown Fritillary in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The expedition could not have been more unfortunate, with day after day of cloud, drizzle and at times precipitous rain. The weather mattered little in the main, for many of the Bracken-filled commons I had been asked to visit had ceased to be suitable for the butterfly, though they might have supported populations in the not too distant past, before they became neglected. I found that the High Brown had gone from the Abberley Hills in west Worcestershire, and saw one of the last High Browns ever recorded in lovely Haugh Wood, south of Hereford. The one success was at Bircher Common and Croft Ambrey, on the National Trust's Croft estate north of Leominster. Here, between downpours, a thriving cluster of colonies was discovered, flying over Bracken on a sheep-grazed common. The National Trust was delighted that this rare and rapidly declining butterfly was present there and a major conservation initiative began. Scratched, bruised, storm-battered and suffering from foot rot and incipient trenc
h foot, the 1987 High Brown Fritillary Roadshow was abandoned.
Of course, soon afterwards the weather improved, for a while. Hampshire welcomed me home, with a magnificent flight of Purple Emperors at Coxmoor Wood near Odiham and the news that the Essex Skipper had at last colonised Noar Hill. The latter is all but impossible to separate out from its cousin the Small Skipper in flight. I was not looking forward to separating them out during the weekly butterfly transect count there: Heaven help me, I wrote in the diary. Time was spent in the New Forest, searching for High Brown Fritillaries amongst a plethora of Dark Greens in Hawkhill Inclosure, and admiring an excellent show of Silver-washed Fritillaries in Pondhead Inclosure, the most famous of the old Forest collecting grounds, near Lyndhurst.
The summer of 1987 had fallen apart, and not even the first Clouded Yellows could redeem a blighted season. These were seen in a conifer plantation near Bramshill in north Hampshire, which was threatened by a new town development. The nature conservation interest of this former heathland site managed to stave off the threat, not least because the insect fauna turned out to be distinctly rich. Over on the Isle of Wight a public inquiry was to be held to determine the future of the coastal road that cuts over the chalk downland ridge east of Freshwater. The road, known as the Military Road, is destined to disappear as the sea gradually eats into the chalk cliffs. The county council proposed to reset the road further back into the chalk ridge, cutting through one of the richest areas of downland in the country, and one of our best butterfly sites. Evidence had to be gathered to present to the inquiry. This involved surveying and counting the butterflies – several thousand Chalkhill Blues for a start. Suffice it to say that the inquiry was won, and that discussions over the future of the road along the west coast of the Isle of Wight are ongoing to this day.
In Pursuit of Butterflies Page 18