August was up and down, but mostly down. On one of the better days I visited Watership Down, famous for its Rabbits. This proved to be one of the most disappointing stretches of Hampshire downland I have visited, with much flowerless Red Fescue grassland and few butterflies other than a modicum of Common Blues and Small Heaths. The Rabbits had over-grazed it, prior to leaving, perhaps in disgust.
The first autumn gale came over on September 6th, though in truth we had had several during the summer. Somehow, the Small Tortoiseshell came good, very good – so much so that it wrested the title of Butterfly of the Year 1987 away from the Pearl-bordered Fritillary. Perhaps the poor weather had hindered the larval parasites more than the host. At least 25 were present in our garden at The Lodge each sunny day, feeding up prior to hibernation. Some fresh Painted Ladies joined them too. Then there was another autumn gale, this time on September 12th. Unabashed, the Small Tortoiseshells continued to emerge: on September 17th over 50 were counted in The Lodge garden. Then the Red Admirals appeared in numbers, feasting drunkenly on rotting apples and pears. Another gale came over, and a precipitous deluge on October 9th. The weather was winding itself up, the rivers were swollen and the ground saturated.
Diary, October 15th 1987: Heavy rain from early pm. Very deep depression. Had to attend evening meeting in Hants County Council underground chamber in Winchester. Walked out into and then drove home in a tempest. Switched engine off going up Arlesford bypass and was blown uphill for two miles. Went for walk under swaying dancing trees until I was bowled over and decided it wasn't time to meet my Maker – limbs were crashing down ...
Diary, October 16th 1987: Hurricane during night, with heavy rain, gradually easing off at dawn with wind dying down, exhausted, in pm. The Great Storm of 1987, an intensifying Returning Polar Maritime Depression moving up from Biscay, only the weather men hadn't forecast it. Seventeen people lost their lives.
It began at midnight and peaked around 5 am here. London recorded a gust of 94 mph, but many spots along the south coast had gusts in excess of 100 mph. It was even more devastating than the March 27th storm, with myriad trees falling – the leaves were still on and the ground saturated. Our local environs looked like one of those haunting photos of shell-damaged woodland from the Great War: hardly a tree had survived unscathed. The towering Beech to the immediate east of The Lodge was rent asunder, like the temple veil in Jerusalem. It took us most of the morning to clear the drive.
The Lodge escaped rather miraculously, merely losing a coping tile, the electricity (for nine days), telephone (five days) and water supply (four days). Luckily The Lodge didn't present much of a solid object and the apocalyptic wind just howled through it, billowing the curtains and blowing out decades worth of dust from under the floor boards – this hung as a miasma for days. In the garden the sweet peas disappeared into orbit. All the colour was washed out of surviving oak leaves, as if blanched.
Managed to get up to Noar Hill (to check the sheep), expecting to find the electric flexi-netting up in the trees. Two rolls had vanished, blown utterly away. The hanger looks as if it has been clear-felled. The sheep hadn't noticed.
The following day the picture of devastation throughout central southern and south-east England became clear. Myriad mature, but drawn-up and spindly, Beech trees had been uprooted, like dominoes. A visit to the Selborne hangers revealed (diary): A scene of near-total devastation, probably only one in every 20 trees left standing along Noar Hill Hanger, and many of those are damaged. The hanger was impenetrable, looking as if it had been bombed. Arboreal carnage. This picture was repeated all over the south-east quarter of the UK. Over a million trees were lost. I never found the flexi-netting.
Incredibly, on that day of sunshine and easing showers, I saw a Small White in our garden at The Lodge at noon, and then a Small Tortoiseshell and a Brimstone. Later, on Noar Hill, a Red Admiral was active. Somehow, some butterflies had survived the maelstrom; but that's butterflies all over for you, they are life's great survivors. A few days later I managed to get to the hangers above Petersfield. From Shoulder of Mutton Hill, the hillside dedicated to Edward Thomas, I counted blue smoke rising from 27 wood fires dotted across the Sussex Weald. The great clear-up had begun. But on the summit a superb Beech grove, a natural cathedral fit for a great poet, was lying horizontal, uprooted. Nearby, the road down Stoner Hill was so badly blocked that dynamite was needed to clear it. As around Selborne, it was not so much the veteran Beech pollards that had come down – though many had – but the densely grown and drawn-up maiden trees.
A massive germination of young trees took place, and within twenty years the scars had healed. Time creates these issues, and time solves them. Woods think long term, we don't.
And the Great Storm did some good. It uprooted countless acres of ugly arboreal slums which should never have been established in the first place. Mile after mile of dense, non-native and poorly maintained conifer plantations were blown down, creating a wonderful opportunity to resolve some of the worst excesses of the twentieth-century forestry revolution. The storm proved to be a pathfinder towards the Forestry Commission's laudable Plantations on Ancient Woodland Sites (PAWS) programme, which removes conifers from ancient woodland. Above all, many of our woods were far too dense prior to the storm, having been neglected for decades. The storm opened them up to the benefit of much wildlife, notably the butterflies.
In the short term, the storm provided great opportunities to look for the eggs of the Purple and White-letter Hairstreaks, which breed high up in oaks and elms respectively. In Hampshire, Andy Barker, Adrian Hoskins and I spent much time searching for these eggs, finding that Purple Hairstreak eggs were profuse in what had been the high canopy of dense oak stands, and on several different species of oak too. I was finding a Purple Hairstreak egg about every three minutes. In the New Forest, north-east of Brockenhurst, the beleaguered Pearl-bordered Fritillary benefited greatly from mass wind-blow and the resultant clearance, and in the medium term the Purple Emperor benefited from mass germination of its foodplant, sallow trees.
October remained wet to the last, achieving its ambition to be one of the wettest on record. Mercifully, November calmed things down, by being cold and dry. Finally, the Christmas period was remarkably mild: Red Admirals appeared out of hibernation, and a small influx of Painted Ladies was noticed by birders along the south coast. The Daily Mail even published a letter reporting a Painted Lady at Ventnor on Christmas Day.
A clear and mild night, with a three-quarter moon and a host of stars, ushered in 1988. However, it was not long before rain started. In contrast to its predecessor the winter was mild, ridiculously so, but horribly wet. Aconites and Snowdrops were well out by mid-January. At the end of the month we left our beloved Lodge and moved in to a small and rather loathsome house we were purchasing in nearby Alton. The ending of our tenure at The Lodge, with its pantiles and Pipistrelle Bats, Death-watch Beetles and condensated windows, severely damaged my relationship with Nature – by distancing me from the countryside and, less obviously, from the weather and the night sky. I have not felt genuinely at home in any house since. There one could dwell, not just close to Nature, but as part of it – for the place was so primitive that there was little choice.
Looking after the sheep and organising scrub bashes on Noar Hill, with occasional sorties into the far west of Hampshire to survey the Brown Hairstreak population, maintained some vestige of sanity. In mid-February, with the rookeries in full repair and Primroses blooming, the first butterfly of the year appeared – a yellow Brimstone weaving its way beneath bare trees at the foot of Shoulder of Mutton Hill, by Petersfield. By mid-March the vegetation in both town and countryside looked a month ahead of the norm, with sallows in flower and Hawthorn hedges leafing commonly. The year was running ahead of itself, in what was to be the start of a long run of absurdly mild winters.
April started well, and it was holiday time. A week was spent walking the coastal path between Hartland Point in Devon and Bu
de in north Cornwall, with a small daughter in a back-pack – up and down, from combe to combe, stopping to play on wooden bridges over helter-skelter streams lined with mosses and Golden Saxifrage. The slopes were heavily scented by the heady coconut aroma of gorse blossom. Incoming Swallows skimmed by in loose groups.
This coastline is steeped in butterflying history, for this had been Large Blue country. The butterfly had been discovered along this coast around 1891, in the mysterious Millook valley. Later, during the 1940s, it was found to occur in most of the sea combes between Bude and Hartland Quay. Then myxomatosis eliminated the Rabbits, and the heavily grazed and sparsely vegetated slopes proved to be the perfect seedbed for gorse and Blackthorn, not to mention rough grasses. The gentler slopes lost their butterflies through agricultural improvement. It is not possible to walk these valleys today without immense sadness for what has been lost, especially amongst the Blackthorn and gorse entanglements of the Millook valley, where some lingering pathos tells of paradise lost. Clearly, though, the old collectors must have sweated buckets collecting their specimens on the near-precipitous slopes, though presumably they were not carrying toddlers.
In mid-April the Orange-tips started to appear, and some Painted Ladies. There were reports of huge numbers of Ladies in Spain, Portugal and southern France. April had been reasonable, and had brought out the first of the Noar Hill Duke of Burgundies as early as the 26th. After four poor days May righted itself, and a fair scatter of Painted Ladies appeared. I saw 20 in a week in various places in Hampshire. In theory the arrival of the Painted Lady augured well, though its previous two invasions – in 1980 and 1985 – had been thwarted by poor summer weather.
The Forestry Commission had set up an experimental programme to enhance butterfly populations in Cheriton Wood, near Arlesford in mid Hampshire. Originally a coppice-with-standards wood on Clay-with-Flints overlying the chalk, Cheriton Wood had been felled and replanted with conifers, neglected, and leased out to an intensive pheasant shoot. Annoyingly, it had escaped the ‘Hurricane’ unscathed. Early in 1987, rides had been widened and a series of bays created, the object being to see how these simple measures would benefit butterfly populations in a coniferised wood. I was tasked with studying butterfly population changes there, and learnt much from the five-year programme. One of the immediate beneficiaries was the Brimstone, the females of which homed in on Purging Buckthorn bushes that were regrowing strongly in the coppice bays. So that is what makes Brimstones tick! Coppice the buckthorns, for like the Brown Hairstreak and its Blackthorn, this butterfly favours dynamically growing bushes. The practice on nature reserves at the time was to leave buckthorn bushes well alone. Inspired, I coppiced some of the buckthorns on Noar Hill, with dramatic results. In Cheriton Wood, Brimstones thrived on first-, second- and third-year coppice regrowth, then forsook the maturing bushes.
Some of the most wonderful, memorable days of one's life occur in mid-May, when spring is at its best. Such was Saturday May 14th 1988. Liverpool was playing Wimbledon in the FA Cup Final, under a shimmering sky. Down in Bentley Wood, towards Salisbury, the Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were emerging in numbers, pilgrim Painted Ladies were visiting Bluebell flowers along with ageing Peacocks, and all were being busily and bossily intercepted and seen off by male Duke of Burgundies and equally irate Dingy and Grizzled skippers. These were all thriving in the Eastern Clearing, which was being carefully managed by the Bentley Wood Trust. I was supposed to be surveying the hoverflies there but had got badly hijacked by the butterflies, especially the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, of which three distinct colonies were found, and the dark woodland race of the Duke of Burgundy which was breeding on Primrose plants along the mown path edges. A return visit to Bentley Wood took place on June 7th, by which time spring had merged into early summer and the Pearl-bordereds, Burgundies and spring skippers were all but over. Instead, Marsh Fritillaries were emerging in a clearing in the centre of the wood, a large and lovely race too, taking nectar from Bugle and Tormentil flowers. Best of all, a huge emergence of the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary was taking place, and the brassy males were skimming and fluttering low over the bracken and rushes. For years now, Bentley Wood has been our best and most loved site for woodland butterflies. It can lay on the most magical of days, not least because its butterflies make an essential contribution to the immense sense of place that is assiduously preserved there.
Taking another stab at surveying the Herefordshire commons for High Brown Fritillary colonies was going to be the highlight of the 1988 butterfly season. The previous July's attempt had been a weather-spoilt teaser. It was clear that the butterfly was in trouble in what had almost certainly been a stronghold county, but there was still the very real chance of turning up some sizeable colonies. The big find of the 1987 survey had been Bircher Common, on National Trust land north of Leominster. It needed visiting in early summer, to assess habitat conditions. One of the problems with surveying for High Brown Fritillary during the butterfly's flight season is that by then the bracken canopy has closed over: one can see the adult insect, but it is very hard to read breeding conditions. So in mid-May the old 1986 Malverns High Brown partnership of Grove and Oates was dusted off and dispatched to north Herefordshire, to look at violet densities amongst dead Bracken litter, search for the distinctive but elusive caterpillars, and identify and map breeding areas.
The weather was good, probably too good, for High Brown larvae are relatively easy to find during thin-cloud conditions, when they bask openly, but during hot sunshine they hide. Fortunately, patchy cloud came over during the afternoon to produce a magical half hour during which eleven of the bronze spiny caterpillars were found, basking on dead Bracken fragments. By caterpillar-hunting standards that's Mega, especially as High Brown larvae cryptically match the pieces of dead Bracken stems and fronds on which they sit. We found that the butterfly had two distinct breeding grounds on Bircher Common. Better still, we found that the High Brown was breeding in a few discrete patches on the ramparts of the Neolithic hill fort of Croft Ambrey, a place haunted by the spirits of autumn, and also on the sheep-grazed west-facing slope of Yatton Hill below. In other words, there was a cluster of colonies, each with distinct breeding areas, within a couple of square kilometres of landscape. Additionally, several other areas of potential habitat were spotted across the valley from the Croft Ambrey ramparts. We were looking at what conservation biologists call an intact metapopulation, a loose cluster of habitat patches within an area of landscape. I could not wait until July.
June was indeterminate, then in early July we were subjected to the deepest July depression since 1902. The White Admirals were blasted away. A few days of indifferent weather followed, before another depression came over, followed by a return to sunshine and showers. But I could wait no longer, the assault on the Herefordshire commons was launched. It could not possibly suffer worse weather than I had experienced there the previous July. It did. The expedition started reasonably, with days of long cloudy periods interspersed with short sunny spells. Such conditions are workable: the trick is to explore during cloud, keeping an eye out for developing sunny breaks, and make sure you are in the best-looking spots when the sun deigns to come out. I started on Swinyard Hill, a known ‘good site’ at the southern end of the Malverns, in order to get a measure of what numbers were like. They were far from impressive. Then, three days on slopes around Symonds Yat in the Wye valley and on Bracken-filled commons in the Hay-on-Wye and Dorstone areas drew blank. Few of the places visited there looked suitable, but I should have turned the butterfly up at a couple of places. All the time the cloudy periods were lengthening and the sunny intervals dwindling. I found some highly promising-looking habitat, near Pontrilas, but lost the sun altogether. Then the rain began, and became relentless. When glimmers of watery sun appeared the midges and mosquitoes descended, and behaved like entomological Furies.
It is probable that the High Brown had either been recently lost or was in the latter stages of dying out from
most of the places visited – steep south-facing Bracken hillsides along the Welsh border. All told, I found two new High Brown localities, both of which were poised to lose the butterfly. Eventually the sun reappeared: it was time for a stock take, which revealed that the butterfly was only present in pitiful numbers at its strongholds at Eastnor and Swinyard Hill in the southern Malverns, and at Bircher Common north of Leominster. If the butterfly was that scarce in its core sites there was little point in carrying on searching for it in poor habitat elsewhere. July 1988 was duly excommunicated and the expedition abandoned. The High Brown Fritillary owed me big time – or perhaps the Purple Emperor was wanting to reel me back in?
The butterfly season was running late after a rotten July, with the year's brood of Brimstones and Peacocks only starting to emerge in early August, along with a new, home-grown generation of Painted Ladies. August was a veritable Wendy house, in one day, out the next; or, for people on holiday, beach one day, historic mansion the next. The coppiced buckthorns in Cheriton Wood produced a superb hatch of Brimstones, which then fed avidly on Burdock flowers. An excursion to Hilliers Arboretum near Winchester revealed that the butterfly was breeding merrily there on two non-native buckthorns – Rhamnus rupestris from Eastern Europe and R. globosa from China. As is their habit during poor summers, the two cabbage whites, the Large White and Small White, appeared in unusually high numbers, making up for a general paucity of butterflies in gardens.
September began with a fully fledged autumn gale, but then settled down for a couple of weeks, perhaps seeking to redeem a wasted summer – before suddenly giving up and ushering in the autumn rains early. During the fine spell I saw my eighth and ninth (and final) Holly Blues of the year, a lousy annual tally for a supposedly ‘common’ insect, and all the more remarkable given that the butterfly became numerous the following spring. In September the damage caused by the poor summer sequence, now in its fourth year, became clear: despite excellent habitat conditions and exemplary habitat management the introduced colony of the Adonis Blue at Old Winchester Hill NNR, in Hampshire's lovely Meon valley, became extinct. The problem was that for several consecutive generations (the butterfly has two broods a year) the wretched weather did its worst at the worst possible time, just when the broods were emerging.
In Pursuit of Butterflies Page 19