The Red Admiral was also deeply memorable that autumn, occurring in profusion in gardens and on Ivy tangles everywhere. 2006 had battled its way to glory. The Purple Emperor, of course, comfortably won Butterfly of the Year.
26 A fall from grace
Years can fall from grace, like fallen angels, and 2007 did just that. A mild winter and an early spring is always a high-risk strategy: the earlier spring comes, the easier it falls apart. The marvellous benefit of hindsight indicates that the severe gale that rampaged across southern Britain in mid-January 2007 was a portent of things to come. Gusts of up to 125 kilometres an hour (78 mph) were recorded at Heathrow, eleven lives were lost, high-sided lorries were blown over, and the roof of the Tavern Stand at Lords was damaged. January was, though, the second mildest recorded in England, after that of 1916, apparently. February was also mild, but decidedly wet. All this meant that Red Admirals survived the winter in perhaps unprecedented numbers. I saw my first of the year on February 1st and had seen ten by the end of March, in town and country, probably each one of them UK-born butterflies which had successfully overwintered. However, if my first butterfly of the year is a Peacock or a Red Admiral a poor summer ensues – and 2007 was a double Red Admiral Year …
The year careered away, producing a definitive April, the warmest and sunniest on record in England and Wales. By the end of the month I had seen 23 species of butterfly, comfortably surpassing my previous end-of-April record of seventeen, reached in both 1990 and 1997. Pearl-bordered Fritillaries started to emerge in numbers in Cirencester Park Woods on April 18th, a remarkably early appearance for the frozen wastes of Gloucestershire. On the Isle of Wight, the Glanville Fritillary excelled itself, appearing at Ventnor on April 18th, taking eleven days off its previous record there. The migrants were in, too: Clouded Yellows along the south coast, Large Tortoiseshells on Portland and the Isle of Wight, and even the odd Camberwell Beauty, a few Long-tailed Blues and a Queen of Spain Fritillary on the South Downs. Strangely, though, April 2007 did not remain definitive for long, for it was eclipsed four years later. My lasting memory of that April is of the Orange-tips over the valley meadows at Kingcombe in west Dorset. I had gone to Kingcombe, with my mentor David Russell, to run a philosophical workshop, or waffle, called ‘Nature Beyond Science’, discussing people's relationships with Nature. The Orange-tips taught us much that weekend, being closer to Nature than mere humans could ever hope to be. The diary describes them, moving without pressure over marshy meadows bedecked with Lady's Smock. Spirits of the April air. One flew over my car as I was driving away at the end of the weekend. Such events do not seem stochastic.
We are supposed to remember where we were during key moments in world history. Let it be known, then, that I was in Bin Combe, on east Exmoor, with Nigel Bourn from Butterfly Conservation, when the sublime spring of 2007 collapsed. It happened on May 10th, as we were discussing conservation management for the Heath Fritillary. By evening the rain had become torrential. Three days later the Ten Tors Challenge on Dartmoor had to be abandoned in mid-competition and 2500 teenagers air-lifted to safety.
On May 17th, when conglomerate cloud peeled back along the coastal fringe, I was at Sand Point just to the north of Weston-super-Mare. The Glanville Fritillary was back. The first incarnation of the Glanville Fritillary at Sand Point lasted from 1983, when the butterfly was unofficially released there, to 2000. I saw the last of that population, on June 7th 2000, as poor flight-season weather and oscillating habitat suitability finally brought a weak colony to its knees. Then, early in 2006 I was approached by the late Roger Sutton, a founder member of the British Butterfly Conservation Society, to ask whether the National Trust would like to have the butterfly back. He was acting on behalf of others, who had a surfeit of captive-bred Glanvilles. Thank you so much for asking, but no thanks because there's no way we could maintain the butterfly on such a small and isolated site which continually dips in and out of suitability, and where we could not guarantee the necessary habitat management for it, was the gist of my reply. The real problem for the Glanville on Sand Point was that its foodplant, Ribwort Plantain, was dependent there on regular drought, which burnt off competing grasses, but was swamped by rampant grass growth in wet summers. The butterfly requires exposed Ribwort Plantain plants growing in bare ground pockets and does not use plants covered in long grass. Moreover, the south-facing slope favoured by the butterfly was suffering from vigorous bramble invasion. Despite these remonstrations, the butterfly reappeared there in 2006, blossomed a while, and then faded out in the face of bramble and coarse grass growth. The butterfly was finally doomed once the Rabbit population died out, due to myxomatosis, during 2011 and 2012, for lush grass growth promptly suppressed the plantain. I saw the last of Sand Point's second Glanville Fritillary incarnation in June 2013. The colony, though, attracted butterfly enthusiasts from far and wide, saving them the expensive but joyous pilgrimage to the Glanville's heartland on the Isle of Wight.
May 2007 became wetter and wetter, and was duly excommunicated. June started promisingly, but then changed its mind and degenerated into a month of summer floods. The diary summary of May's weather states:
Six people have died, 600 injured and 3500 rescued in floods that start at Gloucester, go up the Severn valley, turn north-east and run through the East Midlands before fully expressing themselves in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. This is June, not November.
Incredibly, the weather was dry in Northern Ireland for a visit to County Down in early June. Each day, after a grey start the clouds would dissipate. The lovely Marsh Fritillary was having one of its periodic bumper years at Murlough Dunes NNR, close to where the Mountains of Mourne run down to the sea. Some 450 larval webs had been counted there in March. The butterflies then appeared in such high numbers that they had spilled out from their dune-slack haunts and invaded the fore dunes. Marsh Fritillaries, like so many other butterflies, are fervent opportunists.
Since my last early-summer visit to Murlough, in 1994, one species of butterfly had disappeared and a new one had appeared, disappeared, and been replaced by another. These changes were not ecological but due to the wonders of taxonomy: the Wood White had been split into two near-identical species, the ordinary Wood White and Réal's Wood White, after examination of male gonads had determined that one set of willies was longer than the other. Then, DNA analysis determined that Réal's Wood White is absent from the British Isles. Instead, we have the ordinary Wood White, which occurs very locally in southern England and in Ireland flies only in the Burren, and the Cryptic Wood White, which is reasonably widespread in Northern Ireland but absent from England. Back in 1994 I had sensed something different about the Northern Ireland Wood Whites, so it came as no major surprise to find that the so-called Wood Whites of Northern Ireland were actually Cryptic Wood Whites. On this particular trip, Cryptic males were bumbling about over the heathy inland dunes and slacks whilst the females were skulking around in the fore dunes, where the breeding grounds are. There I watched females laying eggs, low down on Bird's-foot Trefoil plants growing over bare sand on the south-facing edges of Marram Grass tussocks high up on the fore dunes – i.e. in hot spots.
A week later I was hitting the high road to Scotland, or rather the airlines, with naturalist friend and colleague Mike Ingram. Luck had it that I was one of the organisers of a conference at Stirling University, which was to commence on a Tuesday. Better still, Mike's brother owned a bothy in the woods near Kingussie. It was expedient to go up in advance, in pursuit of the Chequered Skipper and other Highland wildlife. We arrived to find a Grey Partridge brooding her chicks in the porch, and a Red Squirrel scurrying across the lawn. The weather was cloudless and hot, in southern England. In the Highlands, cloud streamed across from the east, and the rivers were running high. I had not visited Loch Arkaig for thirty years:
Diary, June 10th 2007: Changes included two fish farms, power boats on the loch, increases in caravans and cars, vast amounts of deer fencing, the abandonment of a
croft (doubtless to be sold as a holiday home), the collapse of sheep grazing in the western half, a two-mile-long timber extraction road, and Butterfly Conservation acquiring as a nature reserve the young conifer plantation in which I saw Chequered Skippers back in 1974.
Another change was the colonisation of the Speckled Wood, a new arrival to the district.
Incredibly, I saw a couple of Chequered Skippers in the very spot where I saw my first, back in 1974, a sheltered Bracken-filled stream gully on the western edge of Allt Cheanna Mhuir, at the far end of Butterfly Conservation's Allt Mhuic reserve. Here the butterflies appeared and disappeared at will within the Bracken glades, occasionally visiting Bugle flowers, but that's typical of Chequered Skippers – a matter of small colonies here and there, with the butterflies appearing and vanishing with the sun, masters of dematerialisation.
The best Chequered Skipper colonies were found towards the western end of the loch's northern shore, west of Caonich. I had only once wandered that far west before, in 1975, and had failed to find the butterfly there. Perhaps it had spread westwards in the intervening years? But the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary steals the show along the West Highland loch sides in early June. Its cousin euphrosyne, the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, was sadly finished for the year, but selene abounded, at least towards the western end. Eighteen were feeding on a metre-square patch of early-flowering bramble. Two males lacked the prominent black veining on the wing uppersides, ab. obsoleta probably. The first Meadow Browns and Dark Green Fritillaries of the year were appearing. As the sun came out fully, revealing the true ethereal glory of the West Highlands, Mike and I were faced with a difficult choice: carry on westwards, on what had become a pilgrimage into Nature, and disappear into the alluring paradise that is Knoydart, never to be heard of again; or retreat and go to the conference in Stirling. We made the wrong decision. When next I tread the shores of Loch Arkaig I will go the whole way, deep into Knoydart; I might be there some time.
As in politics, a week in butterflying is a long time, and the following week I was in North Wales. Between downpours I spotted the first Silver-studded Blues of 2007 in the wet heath colony at Hafod Garregog NNR, inland from Porthmadog. Here, the conservation issue was over whether the cattle, brought in to counter Purple Moor-grass growth, were trampling out the butterfly's preferred breeding habitat, a series of old peat mounds rising above the wet heath. Cattle had the habit of standing on these mounds, to avoid wet ground and escape from flies. I was on their side and felt that they were doing more good than harm on the mounds, producing the sort of young heather growths favoured by the caterpillars. The problem is that this is a single isolated colony, perhaps of a unique subspecies (the necessary DNA work has not been done), and recolonisation would not occur if the site deteriorated. It is the most interesting Silver-studded Blue population I know, perhaps similar to the extinct race that formerly occurred on the mosses around Witherslack in south Cumbria, known as ssp. masseyi.
Having failed to see Large Heath out in Scotland, during a visit to Flanders Moss, near Stirling, it was necessary to call in at Whixall Moss on the Welsh border. Here, the grey wanderer of peat bogs was only just beginning to emerge, rather late considering that butterflies were still emerging earlier than normal – not that butterflies ever do anything that is remotely normal. I expected to see a hundred, but struggled to see a dozen males, the first of the year's emergence. I left pondering whether the butterfly was emerging later here after the water levels had been raised in order to restore the bog's all-important hydrology.
The following day, for time was running ahead of itself, the Purple Emperor season commenced, in the form of a male seeing off a Great Spotted Woodpecker in Alice Holt Forest. The Emperor also started that day (June 20th) at Bookham Common in Surrey, Ken Willmott seeing the first of the year there, albeit after a week-long vigil. However, the weather then deteriorated, considerably, with low-pressure systems becoming stuck over the UK. The Glastonbury Festival turned into the biggest mud bath since the Battle of Passchendaele, the county cricket ground at Worcester vanished beneath several feet of water, and Sheffield suffered its wettest day on record. June joined May in excommunication and the entire summer of 2007 was declared apostate. July then started despicably.
Between the periodic aspersions, deluges, drenches, immersions, pluviosities, saturations and swampings, butterflies put on a brave face. They had to: each minute of fitful sunshine meant life or death, not so much to them as individuals but to the future of their colonies – and they knew it, and seized the day, or rather the moment. Butterflies are particularly good at the latter, as they live in the moment, the moment of being.
I had seen my first White Admirals in Marlpost Wood, West Sussex, in 1968, and now I faithfully returned there, albeit in a howling gale. In early July 1968 these butterflies were just starting to emerge. Now, on the very same date four decades later, they were finishing for the season, having emerged ridiculously early because the fine spring had advanced larval development. The visit produced two ‘Black Admirals’, old specimens of ab. obliterae (or semi-nigrina) and a pristine Comma female ab. suffusa. The latter was incredibly wary and inapproachable, but my companion, West Sussex nationalist Neil Hulme, returned the following day and, in his words, nailed the witch (i.e. photographed her).
It was time to visit Fermyn Woods, up in Rockingham Forest, in east Northamptonshire. Here, Oliver Bancroft, a hairy giant of a man carving out a career as a cinematographic artist, had been commissioned by Fermyn Woods Contemporary Art to make a film about the Purple Emperor. He needed help, not least because he had decided to haul a 7-kilogram salmon 11 metres up into the oak canopy, as a sacrificial offering to the Emperor of all the Butterflies. The salmon was duly hoisted (I conducted the hoisting), to dangle from a prominent oak branch above the ride at the entrance to Cherry Lap, where its pointless oscillations in July's gentle zephyrs bemused innumerable butterfly photographers who had not read their Heslop, and thoroughly confused various dog walkers, who did what dog walkers do with the unfamiliar – ignored it. The Emperor also ignored the fish, which was steadily devoured by Hornets.
At 11.35 on the morning of July 10th a male Purple Emperor flushed out a lovely fresh female from the sallows, lucky boy. A one-minute follow-my-leader courtship flight ensued before she settled 10 metres up in the crown of a Corsican Pine tree on the ride edge, and was instantly joined by the male, literally. They remained there, in copula for 3 hours 40 minutes, moving only to flick away the attentions of an irritating wasp. This was only the second time I had seen Purple Emperors mating, after a pairing on July 11th 1976 which lasted for 3 hours 30 minutes.
Diary, July 10th 2007: We did not have a good enough zoom lens to film them, so we requisitioned a 6-metre scaffold tower off another of the Fermyn artists, and raised Oliver, all 16 stone of him, + camera + tripod. This mating pair generated a spectacular display of bizarre human behaviour which wondrously befuddled a succession of butterfly photographers.
Fermyn's tradition of bizarre eccentricity during the Purple Emperor season was born this day. The following day I witnessed another courtship flight which also ended in a pairing, high up in a Turkey Oak. This pair stayed together all night, though only because it started to rain shortly after they had joined.
Exhausted by intensive butterflying, involving 47 species in six weeks, there was only one thing to do – return to work, in order to recover. This happened just in time for the apocalyptic rains of July 20th. Then, twelve hours of non-stop heavy rain led to widespread flooding, in what became known as the Tewkesbury Floods. Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire were worst affected. That day, 135 millimetres of rain fell at Pershore, Worcestershire. The journey home from the office in Swindon usually takes 45 minutes; that day it took five hours. Every dip in the road network around Swindon was flooded, and each flood contained at least one stranded vehicle. Gridlock developed into stasis. Ironically, my journey was softened by the dulc
et tones of Test Match Special on the car radio, for the first Test at Lords enjoyed virtually a full day's play. I was fortunate, some of my colleagues failed to get home at all.
Incredibly, some butterflies actually survived this deluge, probably because there was no buffeting wind. As a generalisation, rain accompanied by wind destroys butterflies more, and they seem to be able to survive 24 hours of rain, providing it is not tumultuous. This rain was, of course, tumultuous, or to use the modern vernacular, stair rods. Much, though, must depend on where individual butterflies roost during extreme wet-weather events. The impact of heavy rain and accompanying floods may be more severe on butterfly immature stages, though we do know that some species, notably our wetland specialists the Large Heath and Swallowtail, regularly survive winter inundation, as larvae and pupae respectively.
In Pursuit of Butterflies Page 36