In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  From ‘The Brook’, by Edward Thomas

  (Bramdean Common, Hampshire, July 10th 1915)

  27 A tale of two butterflies

  The summer of 2009 saw the clash of two mighty titans, the Painted Lady and the Purple Emperor. Between them they eclipsed all other butterflies, despite the fact that several other species put on hugely impressive performances, notably the Silver-washed Fritillary and the Comma. But the latter two picked the wrong year to bid for glory, coming a distant third and fourth respectively in my Butterfly of the Year stakes.

  The new butterfly season came in on the back of a couple of dire butterfly years, a cold but relatively dry winter and a pleasant March. Spring then welled up nicely: an early and promising season was developing.

  Diary, April 22nd 2009: Bookham Common, Surrey. Thirty magical minutes here en route to an indoor meeting, with the most magical combination of morning sunlight on unfurling leaves – then I got bounced by a wanton dog and the spell was broken.

  Springs, and summers, are like that – the spell can suddenly and unexpectedly be broken, most notably by changes in the weather. The entry for April 22nd concludes: My life is primarily about the love of natural beauty, with butterflies providing a focus that may not always be necessary. Two hours later I saw my first Holly Blues of the year, azure jewels over vernal shrubs in the gardens of Polesden Lacey house. They made me forget instantly what the meeting in the National Trust offices there had been about.

  But spring fell apart in early May: the jet stream jumped south on the May Day bank holiday, the 4th, and trashed a most promising spring. Many of the early butterflies were then effectively written off by two hostile weeks. Being a spring butterfly is high-risk business – they are so often blasted away, yet they stagger back for more the following year. The Duke of Burgundy, which had started at Rodborough Common so wondrously on St George's Day, suffered particularly badly. Patrick Barkham visited Rodborough Common that day, to see the first Burgundies of the year, and his first ever. His eulogy on that memorable day, in his ground-breaking book The Butterfly Isles, rather pales in the knowledge that the 2009 Duke of Burgundy season fell spectacularly apart just after his visit.

  The most significant day in the early spring of 2009 was April 11th, Holy Saturday, for a minor influx of Painted Lady took place. No one took much notice of it on the day, for small immigrations of Painted Ladies can occur at just about any time of year, and mostly come to nothing. Earlier, however, my friends Andy and Linda Barker of Hampshire had seen hundreds whilst holidaying in Mallorca, and the Reverend Prebendary John Woolmer had seen scores in the desert near Marrakesh. The entomological grapevine was buzzing with accounts of numbers in Spain, apparently all heading north. It seems that the population explosion had started in the Atlas Mountains, where good winter rains had led to massive germination of the butterfly's favourite foodplants, thistles.

  These reports came sharply into focus whilst I was leading a Romantic Nature walk for the National Trust in the footsteps of Coleridge and the two Wordsworths in the Quantocks on April 19th. There, on the summit of Dowsborough Castle, where young Romantic poets were wont to frolic by moonlight, I came upon a trio of Painted Ladies – a female being courted by two males. On the metaphorical level they seemed to represent Samuel, William and Dorothy. Never before had I opened the Painted Lady season so spectacularly, especially in somewhere as special as the epicentre of the birthplace of Romanticism. But then all went quiet: I did not see any more until May 12th when I unexpectedly flushed up three grey pilgrims along a path through a clifftop field in a howling gale near Dover. So something is happening, I wrote. But the mid-May weather was most uncooperative.

  Something had to be done, so on May 21st I bundled the foul and abusive weather into the boot of my car and deposited it in the Black Mountains, where it could not do much harm, en route to visiting the Ceredigion coast south of New Quay. That did the trick, and in the Elysian sea combe known as Cwm Soden (which is also known as Cwm Silio and Cwm Birlip) on the Ceredigion coast I saw another Painted Lady, an old grey male hurtling northwards over the Bracken slopes. The Pearl-bordered Fritillaries I had gone to see there had been knocked out by bad mid-May weather, but their eggs could freely be found on and around violets amongst the Bracken litter. Their cousin, the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, was emerging in numbers, so things were looking up, and the meeting determined a sound policy on Bracken management for the resident fritillary butterflies, whatever the cwm wished to call itself. But perhaps I was in the wrong place that day, for a swarm of Painted Ladies was sighted off Portland Bill, heading north.

  Through a piece of supreme luck I had managed to wangle a three-month sabbatical, ostensibly in recognition of many years of unblemished service. That was a major piece of good fortune, as sabbaticals are not easy to wangle, dipping in and out of corporate fashion. The main objective was to get utterly lost in the real world, though the scoping document I was obliged to write stated that I was going off to study the ecology of the Purple Emperor and help people's engagement with this elusive butterfly. Funding was tight, so I had to stay in England – which was fine if the weather behaved. And the weather was clearly going to behave, for Painted Ladies had suddenly arrived in numbers – and they meant business. Also, the Australians had come over, ostensibly to regain the Ashes – and they meant business.

  Business as usual for the Painted Lady means pushing limits – not so much their limits as our limits, and seeking to conquer the world. In late May 2009 our islands experienced an invasion which probably eclipsed that of 1996, and utterly eclipsed the Norman Conquest. Away from the coast, the invasion got going properly on May 23rd, when I managed to see seventeen whilst visiting the National Trust gardens at The Courts, near Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire.

  The following day, Sunday the 24th, the floodgates opened and the Painted Ladies flocked north in stupendous numbers. I counted 241 whilst conducting the annual survey of Pearl-bordered Fritillaries in Cirencester Park Woods, but naturalists elsewhere saw many more. In Chiddingfold Forest on the Surrey/Sussex border, Ken Willmott counted 157 in an hour in mid-afternoon, Neil Hulme timed 133 jumping over a gate in an hour at Plashett Wood, near Lewes, and Bill Shreeves saw 128 in 90 minutes following an identical route across Melbury Down valley, near Shaftesbury. Back home, Mrs O timed them at the rate of one a minute passing through our garden, following the same route: hopping over the Beech hedge at the southern end, hurtling through without a cursory look, rising over the summerhouse and vanishing. Similar events were happening in gardens throughout southern England. Nearly all these were old males, grey with scale loss, heading north or north-west. Never mind the Day of the Triffids, this was the Day of the Painted Lady. A swarm of some 18,000 was seen off Scolt Head on the Norfolk coast.

  A visit to the Isle of Wight on the 26th and 27th was aptly timed, to contribute to a TV piece about the subject matter of a new historical novel, Lady of the Butterflies, by Fiona Mountain. The lady in question here is one Eleanor Glanville, who was the first female naturalist, I think globally, and after whom is named the Glanville Fritillary, which she discovered in Lincolnshire in about the year 1700 whilst searching for an errant son. Her will was successfully overturned on the grounds of insanity, the proof of which was her keen interest in butterflies, other bugs, and thinges that creepe and crawle. In 2009, though, the Glanville was seriously upstaged by another Lady. We counted seventeen Painted Ladies during the 40-minute crossing of the Solent from Lymington to Yarmouth, all northward-bound. The island was alive with them. Most were heading north, but new arrivals paused to refuel on thistles and other flowers on the southern cliff tops. At Wheelers Bay, Ventnor, several hundred were feeding on Red Valerian flowers, and many more were feeding on clifftop thistles at Compton Bay. We were conquered, and the poor Glanville Fritillary knew it – so much so that they were reduced to hiding in the grasses. But, in contrast to the great Painted Lady invasion of 1996, which was accompanied by numbers of other immi
grant butterflies and insects, this invasion consisted almost entirely of Painted Ladies, plus a fair number of Silver-Y moths, only. At Compton Bay I managed a huge and regal Clouded Yellow and a splendid Red-veined Darter dragonfly, only.

  The influx continued almost unabated throughout late May. On the 28th Neil Hulme counted a staggering 1590 during an hour's recording at Park Corner Heath, in East Sussex, including a peak of 42 per minute, all heading north-north-west. I wrote in the diary: I can't compete with that, and neither I fear can His Imperial Majesty, the Purple Emperor. Butterfly Conservation rose to the challenge, organising a national count for two hours on Saturday May 30th. Contributors were to count them passing within a 10-metre radius. Hundreds of people rallied to the call. My contribution was 270 counted passing through a broad cross-rides in Cirencester Park Woods. All told, that day I saw over a thousand.

  The following day the sabbatical began. The diary mused: The first concern of freedom is worrying about what to do, before concluding, perhaps wisely, Let Nature lead. It led me east, to my old forest heartland in West Sussex, via a stop-off in Edward Thomas country above Petersfield. I spent the night in the old woods, hoping to be serenaded by Nightingales, only the males were ceasing singing for the year – and some fool had unleashed a Nightjar somewhere in the distance. It mattered not, for the Blackbirds and Song Thrushes ethereally sung out the last evening of May and rang in the dawn of June. They were stupendous. This is what we've lost, I wrote, celestial choirs of Blackbirds. The first butterfly of the month appeared at 7.40 am, a worn Painted Lady, but they were now very much on the wane; their invasion had ended, and another power was rising.

  It was time to penetrate deep inside the Purple Empire. Three weeks were to be spent exploring previously unvisited Purple Emperor sites, in diverse counties, before the butterfly himself would appear. June wobbled, then righted itself on the longest day. Something mighty was brewing.

  The Purple Emperor appears when the oak leaves suddenly turn deep green, and the reddish-tinged Lammas shoots appear. I looked for him in Alice Holt Forest on June 22nd, but knew instantly on arrival there that he would not be out – the oaks were still a tinge too light. But He was imminent, almost.

  On June 23rd I was scheduled to visit the Wai Yee Hong oriental foodstore in Bristol to do a piece for camera for a BBC Natural History Unit film Butterflies, a Very British Obsession. It was inevitable that the first Purple Emperors of the year would appear whilst I was purchasing various Eastern culinary delights with which to tempt the monarch of all the butterflies – jellyfish slices, maimed octopus, giant prawns and three types of shrimp paste, including the much sought-after Big Cock brand. Sure enough, Neil Hulme texted to announce the first iris of the year, in Marlpost Wood, West Sussex, at 12.05. Shortly afterwards he saw another in nearby Dogbarking Wood, and Ken Willmott saw three at Bookham Common, Surrey, battling with ageing male Painted Ladies which had arrogantly invaded an Emperor territory. Suffice to say that my oriental shopping expedition was by far the best thing I ever did for television, only it was deemed too eccentric to make the final programme cut. The cameraman was ferried round the store behind me in a shopping trolley, much to the surprise of various shoppers.

  In Stella Gibbons's classic Cold Comfort Farm (1932) the heady aroma of the Sukebind, a plant of unkempt South Downs hedgerows, sends people into the nether regions of insanity. It is also an aphrodisiac, but never mind that. Sadly, the Sukebind is entirely mythological, but the Purple Emperor does exist, and performs exactly what Miss Gibbons most feared – though seemingly without the amatorious effect (though as far as I know, and I would know, no one has ever tested this). In late June 2009 the Sukebind came spectacularly into bloom.

  On Midsummer Day I was in Alice Holt Forest early. The colours of the oak leaves were right, and male White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries were emerging strongly. But the Emperor was being recalcitrant. Surely he would appear? Then, sudden in the heat of a cloudless afternoon, the Rooks of Bentley Copse flew out into an azure sky to play, tumbling about in sullen air, before retreating back to the shade of their copse. Shortly afterwards I discovered what they were celebrating – the first Alice Holt Purple Emperor of the year, a freshly emerged male testing out his wings high on a Sweet Chestnut tree. Interestingly, the Painted Ladies had cleared out of the forest.

  The following day my old hunting grounds in West Sussex revealed eight Purple Emperor males, including a trio sparring over their favoured oaks on the cross-ride high point in Dogbarking Wood. There, the day's only Painted Lady, a grey male, was duly but spectacularly obliterated, having had the effrontery to invade the Emperor's territory. It fled. And there were aberrations on the wing too: a ‘Black Admiral’ brambling in Madgeland Wood, a freshly emerged blackened Silver-washed Fritillary ab. ocellata in Marlpost Wood, and a dark Comma ab. suffusa. There was magic in the air.

  On Sunday June 28th I walked into paradise. The old Straits Inclosure of Alice Holt Forest was calling me. Incredibly, nobody else was there – on a cloudless and hot Sunday morning early in the Purple Emperor season to boot. It was as if no one else had been invited. And there, a little way along the main ride, in a pool of dappled sunlight, was a pristine male Purple Emperor, feeding placidly on some sylvan excrescence – only there was scarcely a vestige of any of the standard white markings on his wings. This was what I knew as aberration iole. It was the fulfilment of a dream I had cherished since being transfixed by the specimen of ab. iole figured in South's British Butterflies back in the old school library during the autumn of 1967.

  Diary, June 28th 2009: And there he was, on a perfect late June morning, basking and feeding quietly on the ride, with a Turtle Dove cooing distantly. The rest of the world cut out instantly, irrelevant ... In such situations there are two ways one can react: turn it into a Eureka moment and run through the woods stark bollock naked, in front of the dog walkers (well, the dogs would surely love it), or sink to one's knees in some form of poetic or religious trance.

  One of those options still needs doing.

  After 25 minutes, into which was packed all the intensity of fifty years of butterflying, this immaculate visionary being floated effortlessly away eastwards, low over the ride, skimming over the forest gate, passing over (and beatifying) my parked car, crossing the Frith End lane, and rising over a bungalow called Oaklands and vanishing up and away into Goose Green Inclosure. I had seen many an Emperor take that precise route out of the Straits and into the main block of Alice Holt over the years, presumably en route to one of the distant hilltop territories, and now the one that mattered more than all the rest put together had followed suit. The diary entry concludes: I then lost it – something blanked out in me. I've no idea what happened to me for an hour … At last some depth of experience … I was in a waking dream. Finally, The rest is silence. Dear Reader, the truth is that for much of my life I had wanted, and had sought, precious little else. The day's magic, though, was not done. Another aberrant Purple Emperor male was watched searching the ride sallows, this time a mere ab. iolata or semi-iole, and a fully Black Admiral, ab. nigrina, also appeared. I also saw a Peacock of 2008 vintage, the latest and presumably oldest Peacock I have ever seen.

  My come-down was provided by taxonomy, for it turned out that the goal posts had been moved by the taxonomists, and that my specimen was not the elusive and much-desired ab. iole but ab. lugenda, on account of the presence of a few tiny white spots in the forewings. Ab. iole is, nowadays, void of any white whatsoever. Either way, this remains the most beautiful butterfly I have ever seen. But my dream of encountering a genuine, full ab. iole is still on. Once I finally encounter this miraculous chimera I will give up butterflying, for the dream will then have been fulfilled.

  July came in most memorably. Two hot sunny days were spent assisting top wildlife cameraman Mark Payne-Gill to film Purple Emperors, White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries in Alice Holt Forest. Mornings were spent in the Straits Inclosure, primarily targeting male Em
perors searching the ride-edge sallows for females, then at high noon we would move to the prime male Emperor territory at the top end of Goose Green Inclosure, and film the butterfly's activities from a cherry-picker there. Relatively little of the footage shot actually made the final programme cut, but other clips were used in subsequent BBC programmes. The truth is that we gained enough material for an hour-long programme purely on the Purple Emperor. In the can was footage of four males searching sallows simultaneously, a female laying eggs under the sallow canopy, males clashing and chasing, one particularly violent male pursuing Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Collared Dove, Great Tit, Great Spotted (or rather, Splatted) Woodpecker and Wood Pigeon out of his treetop territory, and a line of five chasing males. Of course, ab. lugenda, or iole, or whatever the vision was, was never seen again.

  The Sukebind was now fully in bloom, which meant it was time for something Extremely Silly. There is only one place for that, Fermyn Woods up in Northamptonshire. On Sunday July 5th The Emperor's Breakfast was staged there, as chronicled by Patrick Barkham in The Butterfly Isles. This gross eccentricity was hosted by Fermyn Woods Contemporary Art, as an Artistic event (my sole contribution to Art, contemporary or otherwise), and was filmed for the BBC East Midlands Inside Out series, with Mike Dilger presenting. The Breakfast consisted of 50 metres of trestle tables draped in virginal white table cloths. On these were set Waitrose disposable party plates bearing an assortment of offerings to the gods of the high-summer forest, in replicate plots, viz: rotten moist bananas, crushed grapes, Stinking Bishop cheese, horse manure (fresh), fox scats gathered from the rides that very morning, saturated salt, honeyed water, pickled mudfish, four types of shrimp paste (Jennies, Thai Boy Delight, Big Cock and something in Chinese), potted shrimps, giant prawns, Pimms No. 1, a wet bar of soap, the risk assessment for the day, the complete poems of M R Oates and, as a sop to Science, an empty plate as a control. The dress rehearsal the previous day had worked impressively well, with one male even perusing the poetical works, which were soaked in gin.