In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  Yet May came good, at least initially. A modest influx of Painted Ladies and Red Admirals occurred, following a deposit of Sahara dust on parked vehicles overnight on May 5th. Sahara dust is a good omen. Duke of Burgundies and Green Hairstreaks abounded – but then the fine weather dramatically ended. Somehow, the bulk of the Cirencester Pearl-bordered Fritillaries and Marsh Fritillaries almost nationally managed to delay emerging from their pupae until the fine weather returned at the start of June. It seems that these creatures can hold back from emerging for a week, or perhaps two, though they cannot delay indefinitely.

  Butterflies were becoming popular, receiving media attention. The Fates drew me in to television that year, an area in which I harboured no ambition, though I had some previous experience. Lion TV approached me out of the blue, wanting a ‘butterfly man’ for a major series on the summer of 2006, to be screened in the Sunday evening BBC primetime 9 pm slot during the autumn. Never mind a butterfly man, the series represented a great opportunity to take British butterflies into six million or so homes. It was interesting that butterflies were deemed integral to the great British summertime experience. The crew were a delight to work with, even if much of the footage they filmed did not make the final cut. Thus, some superb footage of Duke of Burgundies at Rodborough Common, filmed on a sublime May morning straight out of Cider With Rosie, got the chop – not because there was anything wrong with it. Filming started at the dawn of May at the Cerne Abbas Giant. Marsh Fritillary caterpillars were crawling off to pupate. For some inexplicable reason several of them were heading towards the Giant's willy, maybe to pupate en masse there? We returned to Giant Hill at the end of May to film the only placid male Green Hairstreak I have ever encountered, and a superb flight of Marsh Fritillaries. The eventual transmission included a clip of a freshly emerged Marsh Fritillary female being – courted is the wrong word – by half a dozen over-amorous males. Whatever you think about butterflies, please do not consider them artisans of the gentle art of courtship – smash and grab is more their style. There is no way that that clip could have been broadcast before the 9 pm watershed. I returned to Giant Hill on August 1st with a group from the Kingcombe Centre, and wrote: Some poor soul will have the rotten job of counting or estimating Marsh Fritillary larval webs here – the scale of abundance is such that this task should be handed out as a punishment.

  June became a belter. The Clouded Yellow appeared, which is nearly always a sign that the weather is set fair. The butterfly season, which had been running late, gradually switched over, so that the high-summer species began to emerge early. At the start of the month, Swallowtails were only just starting to appear in the Norfolk Broads. I saw the first proper emergence of the year at How Hill Nature Reserve, near Ludham, on June 6th, en route to Blakeney Point on the north Norfolk coast.

  By the end of the month, the high-summer butterfly species were well out and the Purple Emperor was imminent. The Large Blue was successfully filmed at Collard Hill in Somerset, on what was just about the only cloudy day of the month. It was out-staged, however, by the Heath Fritillary, which declared itself to be the easiest butterfly on the British list to film. At Bin Combe, one of the deep combes radiating off Dunkery Beacon, they flopped wantonly in front of the camera, feeding from Heath Bedstraw and Common Tormentil flowers, true media tarts. The storyline needed to be kept simple: this butterfly had been on the point of extinction nationally when stonking great colonies were discovered on east Exmoor, only for agricultural changes to take place and numbers to plummet; enter the National Trust and Butterfly Conservation to rescue the situation. Something like that.

  The Lake District called at the end of the month. Meathop Moss was so dry that sandals could have been worn, albeit at the expense of prickled toes. This was ironic, as a board walk had recently been installed. Impressive amounts of Scots Pine and birch had been cleared. Large Heath was emerging well, but only males were seen, bumbling about over the peat bog. We were staying at the Red Lion in Grasmere, in Wordsworth's heartland. I sprinkled rose petals on William and Dorothy's graves, whilst reciting some lines from Coleridge. Ennerdale, a lost and much-abused valley in north-west Lakeland, is in the process of being ‘re-wilded’ by a partnership led by the Forestry Commission, which had planted much of it up with highly invasive Sitka Spruce, the water board and the National Trust, which owns the valley mouth. The diary was succinct: Moving on from the mistakes of twentieth-century forestry – Death By Sitka. The process of debuggerisation. But the only thing genuinely wild about the valley was the naturally functioning river, the only one in the Lakes allowed to express itself freely as a mountain river. On the south side of the river, in an area where tall Sitka had been cleared, was a majestic colony of Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary and a lone Dark Green Fritillary. Butterflies are essential to any re-wilding scheme. These particular guys were pioneer colonisers.

  All day the mountain tops had been calling; my heart had scarcely been in Ennerdale at all. So the following day, June 29th, the old Mountain Ringlet partnership of Hooson and Oates re-formed. We took the easy route, from Honister youth hostel up to Fleetwith and then on to Brandreth, and in passing looked down into Ennerdale and the braided streams of its river, bright with boulders and pebbles, for water levels were low. Mountain cloud was loath to clear, so the ringlets needed to be walked up.

  Diary, June 29th 2006: As fragments of brightness increased, more and more ringlets became apparent, and a few tentative flights ensued – especially when the breeze sprang up. Then I found a freshly emerged male drying his wings, and quickly located the vacated pupal case – attached by a couple of silk strands rather randomly on the side of a small Mat-grass tussock. We were surprised by its open situation: I had expected to find it inside a tussock.

  That generated a frenetic search for Mountain Ringlet pupae, with some success. The significance here is not the eccentricity of the venture, but the likelihood that no one had found Mountain Ringlet pupae in the wild before, or indeed the larvae. Of course, scientific endeavour quickly lost out to aesthetics, as more and more ringlets took to the air, or basked on the sides of tussocks, displaying Starling-like iridescence. I had first visited the Honister fells thirty years and a day ago, and had returned home.

  Home also lay to the south, on the lonely limestone hills surrounding the Kent estuary. There, the powerful Dark Green Fritillary had erupted on Helsington Barrows, part of the National Trust's Sizergh estate. Two hundred were counted in an hour. After decades of damaging summer sheep grazing the Barrows had come under the custodianship of a small herd of Galloway cattle, ranging there all year long. The changes were impressive, with the flora recovering spectacularly and the butterflies tracking these beneficial changes. High Brown Fritillary was starting to emerge in fair numbers, having been a rarity there during the sheep-grazing era. Grassland butterfly habitats tend to recover more quickly after spells of so-called over-grazing than following periods of neglect.

  It was July 1st, and White-letter Hairstreaks were emerging in impressive numbers at the western end of Westonbirt Arboretum back in Gloucestershire. A sizeable population was based on a large stand of the Himalayan elm Ulmus villosa planted in an early attempt to find a type of elm resistant to Dutch elm disease. The males were busily sparring with each other, engaging in spiral combats high over rather randomly selected elms and Ash trees.

  Emperor time began explosively. I nearly trod on the first Emperor of the year – never answer the mobile phone as you walk into an Emperor wood, you will fail to spot the distinctive shark's-fin shape of his closed wings on the ride. Diary: This male didn't mind, he flew round me several times and almost landed on me, before wandering off low into the wood, big and dark. That was in the Straits Inclosure of Alice Holt Forest. Later, ten or twelve males were battling away in the favoured territory up at Goose Green Inclosure, by the village of Bucks Horn Oak. Things were looking good, very good. The Emperor had to be filmed, his appearance would be the pinnacle of the TV programme. The
date was set, Thursday July 6th.

  Diary, July 6th 2006: Massive thunderstorms and flooding in central southern England. In Alice Holt, dull and damp till 12.30, then brightening nicely. Quite sunny from 1.15. Light south-westerly breeze. 22°C max.

  The entry continues:

  An eventful and memorable day, starting with a nightmare journey (Swindon was seriously flooded). Arrived in damp gloom at the Forestry Commission visitor centre in Alice Holt. A long period of indecision there, hoping that it would clear (as forecast) and dithering over whether to cancel the cherry-picker and abandon the day. I turned things round by visiting the Gents: some bright spark had left the lights on overnight and the doors and windows open, the result being that the Gents had miraculously turned into a walk-in moth trap. We filmed a ridiculously silly piece, with me showing off the night's catch above the urinals to a dead-pan sound technician playing the innocent visitor.

  And that, Dear Reader, is how the rare Waved Black moth was discovered in Alice Holt Forest.

  The difficult start to the day mattered little. A hugely successful Emperor filming session ensued, using a cherry-picker with a 22-metre reach parked slap bang in the middle of the prime male territory near Bucks Horn Oak.

  Diary, July 6th 2006: His Imperial Majesty allowed us to film him with the greatest of ease. We were able to manoeuvre the cradle, containing three men, to within a metre of perched males ... but we had a problem with hoverflies regularly trying to land on basking males, mainly Xylota segnis, which was common high up.

  The diary entry reaches a climax:

  It was edifying in the extreme to watch iris in flight from above and, especially, to look down on chasing males. Until you've seen HIM in flight from above you have no idea how purple he is, and how much the purple iridescence flashes and changes, from Adonis blue, through royal and dark blues, through deep purple to almost violet, and back. Indeed, until you have been Up There with HIM you have not experienced The Purple Emperor at all.

  Let it be freely known that I will do anything – repeat, anything – to spend time in a cherry-picker up in the Emperor's trees. By happy chance, just two weeks later the BBC Natural History Unit needed a guide to help obtain footage of males for its Nature of Britain series. Consequently, two more days were spent up there, in the real world, guiding a wildlife cameraman and making detailed notes of what was going on. In the heat of one of those July days, things did not run entirely to plan:

  Diary, July 20th 2006: The cherry-picker succumbed to the heat and jammed 20 metres up in the air, with us in it. This precipitated a ridiculous rescue saga. First, the Forestry Commission sent out one of their engineers, who took the piss out of us mercilessly but was otherwise ineffective. Then the rescue engineer from Cherry-Picker HQ at Heathrow grabbed his shades and a can of Red Bull, revved up his white van and shot out onto the M25 to encounter, predictably, gridlock. We were ‘rescued’ after some four hours, re-ascended only for the thing to jam again half an hour later, necessitating White Van Rescue Man to extricate himself from a traffic jam on the Farnham bypass.

  The Natural History Unit had wanted to obtain footage of Emperors feasting on honey dew, the supposedly sweet secretion of aphids on tree leaves. Here it must be stated that, all told, I have spent nine afternoons admiring Emperors from cherry-pickers and have yet to see one imbibing honey dew. It may be myth, derived from the Emperor's habit of periodically cleaning his proboscis, the butterfly equivalent of beak wiping in birds.

  In July 2006, Seven Ways was no more, but instead I was able to stay in an old caravan in my friend Lynn Fomison's wildlife orchard down at Ropley, in Edward Thomas country. The caravan had been white, but had painted itself green with algae. Wood Pigeons copulated at dawn on the roof. It was all rather reminiscent of The Lodge.

  In stultifying heat on July 12th, Mr Yasutaka Murata, a leading Japanese businessman, gentleman butterfly photographer and devotee of Apatura butterflies, descended on the Straits Inclosure. He was driven there by his UK managing director, who was introduced to me as Mr Decorum, but was probably called Dick Oram. At the far end of the main ride Mr Murata placed a tablespoon of Malaysian curried shrimp paste on a tree stump. Within fifteen minutes this bait had attracted a male Emperor, which he duly admired and photographed. That heady day Mr Murata unwittingly introduced a craze, for today no Emperoring expedition is complete without a supply of shrimp paste, or belachan as it is commonly known. Various different types of shrimp paste have been trialled, and most Emperorphiles have determined their own favourite. The bait only works, however, in warm, dry weather early in the Emperor season – and it is actually bettered by fresh Fox scat and fermenting oak sap. The Emperor, like many tropical butterflies, seldom if ever visits flowers.

  The culmination of the magnificent 2006 Purple Emperor season took place in heatwave conditions on July 18th and 19th, just before my two days in the cherry-picker with the Natural History Unit wildlife cameraman. The 19th was the hottest July day on record, with 36.5 degrees registered at Wisley. The males were faded and in decline, yet in the heat of the afternoon ageing females were coming up to the Bucks Horn Oak territories in need of male services, presumably in the form of second matings. Normally, they only mate the once, we think. The diary for the 18th states: I had sightings of several courting pairs between 4.15 and 6.16 and nearly witnessed an actual pairing. At 5.06 a female led a string of six males off into the bushes. The following afternoon several more ‘second honeymoon’ courtship flights were witnessed. In fact there seemed to be so much female pheromone floating around that males were accidentally courting each other, and telling the sexes apart became near-impossible. At 5.35 a female was seen being followed by a train of four males. A few minutes later she returned, having shed one male, and met up with another female being pursued by two males. The significance of this is simple: with Purple Emperors, second matings only seem to occur late on in flight seasons dominated by hot weather, and are decidedly unusual. Moreover, seven is the maximum number of Purple Emperors I have ever seen in vista; I have managed it several times, but never bettered it.

  July had expressed itself fully, and Alice Holt had been memorable. Only the White Admiral had been difficult, for it is not an easy butterfly to film and seems to resent TV cameras. In the early evening, though, they congregate around bramble patches that catch late shafts of forest sunshine, feeding and intermittently basking, often in loose groups of half a dozen or more. One cross-rides in Alice Holt's Straits Inclosure is the perfect place to witness this exquisite high-summer activity, and there we dutifully filmed Camilla of the Brambles. Not for nothing is that cross-rides known as Camilla Corner. But the White Admiral was to feature again in 2006.

  August was memorable for the wondrous spread of the Adonis Blue in the Cotswolds. Twenty-three colonies were found in the southern Cotswolds, as far north as Cranham and Northleach. Most were on short-turf slopes around Stroud, including a sizeable colony on one of the Rodborough Common slopes where I counted an impressive 228 in a 40-minute timed zigzag count. To put this into context, historically the butterfly had at best been a rarity in the Cotswolds and had only ever been recorded from 27 sites, from Bristol northwards. The Adonis died out within a decade of myxomatosis arriving, and was last seen in the Cotswolds in 1962, just a century after it was first recorded. Coombe Hill, by Wotton-under-Edge, proved to be both its first and last locality. Its reappearance in the Cotswolds during the early noughties is the most impressive colonisation by a butterfly I have experienced in half a century of butterflying. Above all, it offers visceral Hope.

  The first modern-era Cotswold colony was found at Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley, in 2001, and was immediately dismissed as a clandestine release – with some justification, as Glanville Fritillary has intermittently appeared there, certainly not of its own accord. But then it became known that the Adonis Blue had maintained a population in the extreme south-east of the Jurassic Limestone Cotswold range, near Castle Combe, north-east of Bath, since at l
east 1976. Perhaps the butterfly had spread from there during good summers, and had taken advantage of improved habitat conditions produced by conservation grazing? Maybe it had even spread from burgeoning populations near Calne on the north Wiltshire downs? Certainly, there are records of odd individuals appearing in the southern Cotswolds during hot summers from 1976 into the new century. For what it is worth, my opinion is that the butterfly recolonised the Cotswolds all but wholly naturally, and that any introduction that may have taken place was an irrelevance – the butterfly would have got there anyway. The appearance of the Adonis Blue in the Cotswolds coincided with the appearance of a rare bee fly, the Downland Bee Fly (Villa cingulata), a short-turf species which had not previously been known from the Cotswolds and had not been seen since the 1930s, anywhere. But if that shadowy band of men, the butterfly breeders, are truly responsible for the reappearance of one of Britain's most splendid butterflies in the Cotswolds, then my message to them is one of admiration and gratitude.

  The summer of 2006 evolved into a wonderful autumn, providing the warmest September and October on record. Drought cracks appeared in the clay, and many a day of Keatsian ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ weather occurred. Butterflies responded, admirably in fact. One in particular seized the moment, and one you would not expect – the White Admiral. There now follows a moment of humble pride, for on August 1st my diary stated: Good to find a couple of White Admiral larvae on semi-shaded Honeysuckle just off the edge of the glade. I was surprised how well developed they were – a second brood could well be on the cards. Second broods of the White Admiral are decidedly rare in the UK, though probably under-recorded. They may occur more frequently with climate change, as they are quite normal further south in Europe. Although the main brood did not appear unusually early in 2006, generally around June 21st, eggs were then laid quickly, hatched rapidly, and larvae developed apace during the hot July – despite the fact that the Honeysuckle leaves wilted in the drought. How this butterfly copes with its precious Honeysuckle droughting off is as yet unknown, but it does. Perhaps the larvae sense what is happening and feed up apace, before the leaves prematurely wither? Sure enough, second-brood White Admirals began to appear in woods in central southern England in mid-September. A visit to my beloved Straits Inclosure in Alice Holt on the 21st revealed no fewer than six, including a female laying eggs on Honeysuckle straggling along ditch banks. I saw another second-generation specimen there on October 15th, and two at Somerford Common in north Wiltshire on September 23rd, the first ever recorded in that county. All told, second-generation specimens were recorded in ten counties, from Norfolk across to the West Midlands, and south-east to Kent.