August was welcomed in at Arnside and Silverdale, looking at the developing plight of the Duke of Burgundy in a district which had recently been a national stronghold. Surveys organised by Butterfly Conservation revealed that it was still relatively strong on Whitbarrow, north of the Kent estuary, and at Gait Barrows NNR south of the river, but in a parlous state elsewhere. The main problem was fairly obvious: despite good habitat connectivity within this relatively unspoilt landscape no new colonies had been formed, whilst habitat conditions at the long-established colonies inevitably deteriorated. This is one of many butterflies which mainly occupies successional (changing) habitats and so needs to move on periodically. Rabbit population increases play havoc with it on grasslands. Its demise should be measured by the paucity of new colonisations rather than by colony disappearance, for it cannot stay forever in any one place. The conundrum in the Morecambe Bay district is why it had not moved back into the woods, following the extensive reintroduction of coppicing there. Oddly, the essential primulas had simply not appeared in the reinvigorated woods, or had not been found by wandering females.
August provided little relief. It was a fairly average August down south, but very wet from the Midlands northwards. Incredibly, this wretched month produced a small second brood of Duke of Burgundy at Noar Hill in Hampshire. Second generations of this vernal butterfly have been extremely rare in this country, though normal in southern Europe. Second-brood specimens were seen on Noar Hill from August 3rd through to the 17th. I had assiduously searched for second-brood individuals there in hot summers during the 1980s, without success. Another partial second brood occurred in 2011, again at Noar Hill and also at Rodborough Common in the Cotswolds, where specimens were seen between July 26th and August 6th. It seems very much as though the second brood of the Duke of Burgundy occurs only after the spring brood has appeared very early, as happened in 2007 and 2011, and the resultant larvae have fed up and pupated unusually early. The 2011 second brood at Rodborough was almost inevitable, given that some larvae were full-grown there by the start of June. On June 9th I felt that some would have pupated, a month or more earlier than normal.
But August 2007 was most notable for the paucity of that most ubiquitous of garden butterflies, the Small Tortoiseshell. Being a nerd and a fanatical butterfly diarist, I note every individual butterfly of any interest. By August 19th I had seen a maximum of 45 Small Tortoiseshells during 2007 (counted as day individuals), 19 in the spring and 26 in the summer. The theory at the time was that the species was suffering from the impact of a new parasitic fly, Sturmia bella, which had recently colonised from the Continent and was heavily parasitising Small Tortoiseshell larvae. I must confess that I rather struggled to find S. bella, a distinctive tachinid fly, and I searched many a nettle patch for it, using a sweep-net. By the end of August 2007 I had added an extra three Small Tortoiseshells. Mercifully, they picked up a little in early September, as did the Red Admiral and the two cabbage whites, which had also been unusually scarce all summer. Then in mid-September I saw an impressive 53 Small Tortoiseshells – nearly doubling my year's tally – during a three-day visit to the North Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. I saw 23 around the Bishop's Palace (an eighteenth-century excrescence) near Downhill, feeding up on yellow composites and Escallonias, and 20 at White Park Bay. This was followed by a pleasing display the following April, of Small Tortoiseshells feeding on dandelions around Strangford Lough and nearby in County Down. Normally, one takes such sights for granted. It was not until 2013 that Small Tortoiseshell numbers picked up again in mainland UK. Verdict: next time the Small Tortoiseshell nosedives, visit Northern Ireland; or visit Northern Ireland anyway, it is the most welcoming and hospitable of countries.
The Small Tortoiseshell was also prominent on the Isles of Scilly in the early autumn of 2007. It was, though, thoroughly outgunned by the Peacock. I saw about 150 freshly emerged Peacocks on Tresco on September 28th and similar numbers on Bryher and St Mary's. This abundance must have been the main emergence of a second generation, resultant from the main brood appearing ridiculously early due to the good spring. Presumably, butterflies exist in different dynamics on Scilly. One is not supposed to visit Scilly for common nymphalid butterflies, but the Peacock did rather steal the show during that trip, and there was not much competition from the birds. Bird-wise, the best on offer was a Buff-bellied Pipit – no match for a phalanx of Peacocks on Ivy blossom. I also saw a Comma in Old Town Churchyard on St Mary's, where Harold Wilson is buried. This butterfly first reached the islands in 1997 and was just starting to establish itself properly in 2007. I also saw a Clouded Yellow fly over Sir Cloudesley Shovell's grave at Porthellick Cove nearby. Sir Cloudesley was not actually there at the time, having been re-interred in Westminster Abbey by Queen Anne and a grateful nation. All trips to Scilly should include a pilgrimage to the (original) grave of Sir Cloudesley, naval hero, Admiral of the Fleet, MP and Commissioner of London Sewers, who perished along with 2000 other souls when the British fleet under him was wrecked off the Isles of Scilly in October 1707.
The final diary entry for 2007 reads: Never before has a year promised so much and ascended to such great heights, only to flounder and then crash into a pitiless chasm. Like Sir Cloudesley's fleet, it had floundered hopelessly on the rocks.
On Whixall Moss
Grey pilgrim of the peat hags, wandering the wind
That blows the waste of quivering cotton grass,
Stirring you to rise from nowhere, drift in time,
As midsummer too, arises, sinks and then is passed.
And we must squelch behind you, in hopeless pursuit
Of some perfect image, framed within eternity,
Captured breathless at some place, flowerless and destitute,
That shows you for what you cannot be, a humbled deity.
We were not born for this, you and I, for we were free
Upon the breeze that chimes the endless summer hours,
Above a wasted land of boggy pool and waving reed,
Beyond the pleasantries of budding heather flowers,
Into the passion of the scudding clouds themselves,
Bridging the interstices between two living souls.
It would be pleasant to record that 2008 redeemed the situation, but it did not. March was vile, April even worse. May was good in Scotland and Northern Ireland, though poor down south. June was utterly unmemorable. July started promisingly but fell away badly. August was the dullest and coldest on record, and also one of the wettest. Northern Ireland suffered its wettest August ever, and significant flooding. September started catastrophically wet, effectively ending the butterfly season early – only to come good too late, and a fairly pleasant autumn ensued. But even in the direst of butterfly summers there are highlights. Butterflies are irrepressible spirits, it takes a lot to put them down. That is one reason why they are loved so deeply.
Butterflies also look after those in need of being looked after by them. On St George's Day I was in Northern Ireland ...
Diary, April 23rd 2008: ... and found myself in paradise – the gardens of Rowallane in County Down – where the butterflies looked after me well. Straight in on a male Holly Blue around a clump of hollies. This is a rare and protected species in Northern Ireland, and Rowallane is one of the best known sites for it. Another good sighting was of a Comma, a recent colonist of NI.
There were even Small Tortoiseshells in County Down, feasting up on dandelion flowers.
Three weeks later I was on the Isle of Man, which like most islands has a decidedly odd butterfly fauna. Wall Browns and Dark Green Fritillaries abound along the coastal fringe, but several species regarded as standard on the British mainland are absent; not a single species of skipper occurs, and Green Hairstreak is also absent. But Holly Blues were here too, gathered around clumps of clifftop gorse on which they must have been breeding, given the absence of hollies. The real highlights were singletons of Speckled Wood and Comma, at Laxey, both recent colonists to Man.
The BBC chose the miserable summer of 2008 to film five pieces on butterflies for the popular One Show, with me as the contributor. This represented something of a breakthrough, as butterflies had been held too difficult, too fidgety to film. They wanted the rarest, biggest, most rapidly declining, zaniest, and commonest, and of course beauty, wonder and passion, and strong story lines. That meant Large Blue, Swallowtail, High Brown Fritillary, Purple Emperor and the ubiquitous cabbage whites – quite a tall order. Incredibly, the Large Blue behaved impeccably, so much so that the piece was wrapped in three hours, on the eastern bank of Collard Hill, Somerset. We even filmed a female laying her eggs amongst the Wild Thyme buds. Weather conditions were perfect though, with the butterflies basking as the cloud cover slowly broke, before becoming nicely active – perfect butterfly photography weather. One–nil!
But the Swallowtail is a haughty king and was not in the giving vein. The signs were ominous on a precursor expedition in mid-June, arranged to capture some close-up footage with ace wildlife cameraman Alastair MacEwen. This was not a good Swallowtail year, with only a modest show along the edge of Butterfly Conservation's reserve at Catfield Fen in the Broads. They were taking afternoon tea: two on early-flowering brambles and one on Ragged-Robin, the latter flapping whilst feeding, to prevent the weak stem from collapsing under the butterfly's weight. The following day something made the weather misbehave: the gorgeous day that was forecast was lost to unforecast cloud, and a completely unforecast west wind. Swallowtails hate wind, and are creatures of warm sunshine. But the sheltering scrub at Hickling Broad produced only nine brief sightings, of intermittently patrolling males, before gloom descended and all butterflies ceased flying. Another stab was made with another wildlife cameraman, the day before the piece was to be filmed. Once more the weather gods were in malevolent mood, as the forecast was wrong again. A scatter of largely distant sightings were made, ‘largely distant’ being the operative term as this giant of a butterfly can be seen by the naked eye at 250 metres distance, appearing coffee-coloured.
Finally the dies irae arrived, Friday June 27th, when the piece had to be filmed, with a film crew of six and presenter Miranda Krestovnikoff in attendance.
Diary, June 27th 2008: Like the Battle of Waterloo it was a close-run thing. We were fortunate in that the weather relented, for a while, allowing three hours of sun during which the butterflies were fully active.
But the beasts had retreated to their reed-bed bastions. A secret weapon was required, a Trojan horse: we borrowed the Norfolk Wildlife Trust's electric boat, and stormed the high citadels of proud Machaon and, metaphorically at least, put him to the sword, pillaged and plundered, and razed the place to the ground. We even got the all-essential two-shot, of a male flying around an overjoyed Miranda. There must have been twenty or thirty of the cowardly animals hiding in the reed beds, including a couple of courting pairs. The diary concludes:
Throughout the three days spent trying to film this blighter I felt I was up against a mastermind determined to thwart my every move. He had to be forced into submission, but submit he did.
Conversely, the High Brown Fritillary and the Purple Emperor behaved impeccably, being easily filmed at Heddon valley on the Exmoor coast and in Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire, respectively. Heddon, my old High Brown heartland, was on stupendous form, welcoming us on a day of long sunny spells. Fermyn was short-changed by the weather, but the Emperor overrode that minor impediment and performed admirably. And as for cabbage whites, visit any National Trust mansion with a walled kitchen garden. We chose Barrington Court, a garden idyll near Ilminster in Somerset, where cabbages are grown along predominately organic lines, alongside drifts of Nasturtiums. The two cabbage whites consequently abounded; indeed 2008 was an extremely good year for the Large White in particular – perhaps because its larval parasites had been harder hit during the wet summer of 2007 than the host. It was the caterpillars that really stole the show, with young and full-grown individuals fully expressing themselves by perforating every Brassica leaf in the garden. Caterpillars are misunderstood. Like us, they are trying to become butterflies. They need friends.
August 2008 was written off early. The diary philosophised with paradoxes: It deserves to burn in hell but cannot: it is too wet to burn, and it already is hell. By mid-month I had seen a mere nineteen Small Tortoiseshells all year in England, plus a few in Northern Ireland. Somehow the tortoiseshell clawed its way back from beyond the gates of death during a modestly sunny spell in September. All told I saw a meagre 54 Small Tortoiseshells in England that year, which indicates what a lousy butterfly season it was, and the dire state into which this most ubiquitous of our garden butterflies had fallen. We were overdue a good butterfly summer.
Summer
The little darling, Spring,
Has run away;
The sunshine grew too hot for her to stay.
She kissed her sister, Summer,
And she said:
‘When I am gone, you must be queen
Instead.’
Cicely Mary Barker,
Flower Fairies of the Summer
If we belong anywhere, it is within summer. It is perhaps the truest reality we can experience here, representing the Garden of Eden, perhaps. Yet, as with the other seasons, summer has no clear beginning, and just a gradual dwindling for an end. In summer, the green of the countryside, particularly of the trees, quite suddenly deepens: spring's yellow-greens are replaced first by darkening greens, and then by blue-greens – this is particularly noticeable in oak-dominated landscapes.
Above all, summer slows time down; gone is the reckless gushing of spring, to be replaced by more measured hours – as we reach the pinnacle of the year. We can actually relax. For at its zenith summer transcends time itself, offering some genuine lucidity. It is the stillness within the turning world. It is summer's zenith that matters most, not its beginning, nor its ending. There, the memory of the year is created, and dyed fast.
We have some June specialist butterflies, notably the Heath Fritillary and Large Blue, but within the butterflying world the year reaches up towards the midsummer period. In the woods this begins with the first White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries, which by tradition appear around Midsummer Day, but it then ascends higher – into the Purple Emperor season, when the butterflying year soars above the tree tops. On the downs, the Marbled Whites and Ringlets appear prodigiously in midsummer, on the heaths the Silver-studded Blues, and up north the Large Heath and the Mountain Ringlet, the king of the mountains. In days of yore the High Brown Fritillaries started to emerge at midsummer. They still do, in their remaining heartlands.
But after early or mid-July, and once the Purple Emperor is on the wane, very few butterflies are left to make their appearance for the year – effectively only the Brown Hairstreak, Chalkhill Blue, Silver-spotted Skipper and Scotch Argus. At last, butterfly enthusiasts stop assiduously seeking out the first this and that of the year, for the list is ending. Also, they may be seriously burnt out – certainly so if spring and early summer have been good. August is the ageing of summer, and of butterflying.
More of our species are on the wing in late July than at any other time of year: the midsummer species linger on, albeit in dwindling numbers, whilst their late-summer counterparts begin to appear, along with the second broods of several species. August is indeed a month of second broods – of Brown Argus, Common Blue, Small Heath, Small Tortoiseshell, Wall Brown, the whites, and others. It is also the month for garden butterflies. Until the third week of July our gardens are rather bereft of butterflies; then the cabbage whites – the Large White and Small White – appear, sometimes in great numbers, followed by the annual hatch of fresh Brimstones, Peacocks, a new, larger brood of Small Tortoiseshells, and Red Admirals and Painted Ladies of immigrant or home-grown provenance. Buddleias flower at precisely the right time for this pageant.
Yet, every summer, there is a day when the light suddenly changes – when the sil
ver light of high summer is dramatically replaced by the golden light of September. This change is most noticeable in shafts of sunlight, which suddenly become golden, Septemberine. These shafts, which at times appear almost as angels, when glimpsed over our shoulders, have lost the dancing miasma of tiny flies they host in high summer; instead they contain harvest dust, the dust of the ageing year. Also, and crucially, the birds have ceased to sing. That day – which is quite noticeable – used to occur in late July, round about the 28th; but in poor summers it can occur as early as July's second week, and during my lifetime it has stealthily crept forward.
But summer is essentially about fulfilment, of spring's promise, and of the year itself. And it leaves something wonderful behind – memories. Like no other season, summer instils memories, deep and profound. Its journey is into memory, within us as individuals and collectively. And people collect memories, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless, and are moulded by them. And butterflying is all about the collecting of memories in moments of time within idylls of place.
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below,
On the hot stone he perched contented so,
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth.
I was divided between him and the gleam,
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel.
In Pursuit of Butterflies Page 37