In Pursuit of Butterflies

by Matthew Oates

  The following day was St Swithin's, but it was cloudless, calm and stupendously hot. St Swithin was clearly taking the year off. Perhaps he could be encouraged to take a lengthy sabbatical? For three days Fermyn provided a world apart, under azure skies and in intensifying heat. Emperors were emerging en masse, and were ardently seeking moisture along the woodland rides. The rides, of course, had been well baited by various folk, including a pair of eccentrics up from Sussex who were pedalling around the woods on cycles bearing jeroboams of shrimp-paste solution. Libations were poured, liberally, along various stretches of ride, to the gods of the summer forests. The Sukebind was splendidly in bloom, and the world had gone mad. At one point eight butterfly photographers were lying prostrate on the ground along a 30-metre stretch of ride, photographing breakfasting Emperors – much to the befuddlement of a stray dog woman who had inadvertently wandered into a different reality. ‘It's Emperor time,’ someone told her.

  At 2.38 Fermyn Summer Time, a virgin Empress purposefully flew into a male territory high up amongst the Lady Wood Head poplars, and was instantly accosted by two males. Two other males launched themselves into the air, but decided to squabble amongst themselves instead, so the virgin led her two suitors to the upper spray of a Scots Pine, where she was instantly joined by the first male to arrive. The second male wasn't having that, though, and for the next 20 minutes tried to interrupt the copulating pair and muscle in instead. He eventually gave up and skulked off, terrorising an innocent Meadow Brown in a fit of pique. The successful pair, who still had not learnt each other's names, stayed together, mating, motionless, wings closed, for 2 hours and 45 minutes. This sounds epic but by Emperor standards is actually an hour short of the norm. They could perhaps be excused for under-performing in that heat.

  Two insufferably hot days in Paradise followed, during which the temperature hovered around 30 degrees and the sky was blemished only by aircraft vapour trails. Emperors were flopping onto the ride surfaces, seeking any vestige of moisture, even sweaty human bodies. On three consecutive days I managed to clock up over a hundred individual Purple Emperors, peaking with 134 (a personal record) during a thirteen-hour marathon on Tuesday July 16th. That day was not without its tribulations, for I ran out of drinking water around 1 pm, having poured away much personal water to assuage thirsty Emperors – and carried on regardless. I was not the only centurion, for the Reverend Prebendary John Woolmer also notched up his maiden century, as did Gillian Thompson and Simon Primrose, who had driven over from the West Midlands for one stupendous and utterly exhausting day. They were last seen prostrate either side of a fresh pile of horse manure, photographing Emperors. It seemed the ideal situation in which a young man could propose to a young lady, so they were left to it. The Reverend Prebendary went on to write his customary letter to The Times on the state of the Purple Emperor season, but Oates failed to write more than a fragment of ‘Green Lady’.

  Leaving Fermyn Woods is never easy, especially with the Emperor at peak season and the weather set fair. Part of you remains behind, but it leaps to greet you when you return. The Emperor did not want me to go either, refusing to rise up from feeding on a fox scat along the woodland ride as I drove out on the Thursday evening – so I simply drove over him, avoiding him with the wheels, of course. He carried on feeding, regardless, as the vehicle passed carefully and dutifully over him. In the course of three heady days I had witnessed one pairing, three courting pairs, three rejection flights; I had seen a male of the lugenda colour form and a group of five males feeding together on a fresh fox scat; England had won the first Test and my nose was starting to peel. But a major challenge had to be met.

  One of the zanier members of Butterfly Conservation Sussex Branch is Dr Dan Danahar, a gangly schoolteacher from Brighton with a twinkle in his eye. He had come up with the idea of an annual butterflying contest, in which two teams battle to see how many species they can find in a single day, with points being awarded for each species and extra points for the difficult immature stages (egg, caterpillar, etc.). But each finding has to be witnessed by an independent judge, and the teams must cross over and operate on each others’ patches. Some fool had decided that I would captain the Hampshire side, against Sussex, and being an even greater fool I had accepted. The situation was untenable, for I was leading one of my two favourite counties against the other. The teams gathered in the village car park at Bosham (pronounced Bossam). I had last visited Bosham as a choirboy, for a school choir competition, nearly fifty years previously. But this competition, on Friday July 19th 2013, was altogether more serious.

  At 9 am, the Sussex team scuttled off into Hampshire. After giving them a head start the Hampshire team then set off into Sussex. Film crews from BBC South pursued both teams, eventually broadcasting a news piece that rendered butterflying seriously intriguing – and fun. The roads were busy: malevolent horse lorries abounded along the A272 and the tarmac was melting. The wretched A27, a dual carriageway designed by Descartes’ Malicious Demon, was even bloodier. Friday was not a sensible day for this venture, but sense scarcely entered into it, certainly not common sense. Marlpost and Madgeland woods, bless them into eternity, welcomed the Hampshire Hogs, quickly presenting them with the Purple Emperor they needed, plus Silver-washed Fritillaries and White Admirals, and White Admiral eggs on dangly strands of shaded Honeysuckle. Meanwhile, the Sussex team invaded the inner sanctum of the Straits Inclosure, in Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire's Holy of Holies. Unwisely, the Straits revealed its secrets. The teams were running neck and neck.

  Hampshire could be forgiven for wondering what connections Martin Warren and Nick Baker had with Sussex, men of Dorset and Devon respectively but batting for Sussex on the day, but Hampshire had managed to inveigle top field-craft ace Ken Willmott out of his native Surrey. There was some needle in all this. There had to be.

  At the end of an exhausting and exhaustive day the two teams were level on points, and drinking together in the public bar of the Anchor Bleu, rehydrating and trying to recall a frenetic day that had rapidly hazed into a blur. The judges went into conclave, needing to reach a decision to satisfy BBC South Today. They made the wrong decision.

  The silliness had to end. The Sukebind blossom was starting to go over, and it was time for my fiftieth season to reach up towards its zenith. ‘It won't come down!’ they complained – a couple of butterfly photographers in Madgeland Wood, determined to photograph a Purple Emperor. ‘Of course it won't,’ I grumbled back, as I headed out of the wood on to Marlpost Road. ‘It's searching the sallow tops for a freshly emerged female – and neither would you descend from on high if you were on the trail of fresh crumpet.’ People had so little idea of what these butterflies were actually doing. The silliness had to end.

  There was only one place for the pilgrimage to begin, Marlpost Road; for Marlpost Road leads past Newbuildings woods, through Dragons Green, out on to the sacred road, the A272, the backbone of the Purple Empire, east and then south, to the Knepp Castle Estate's re-wilding lands, by Shipley windmill where Hilaire Belloc once lived.

  No one had searched Knepp's re-wilding lands for Purple Emperors since my tentative explorations there in 2009, when the network of copses and hedge-lined fields recently taken out of arable or dairy farming was just becoming colonised. Neil Hulme had called in a few times, in passing, and had seen the odd Emperor there, but recent summers had been too dire, and Emperor numbers too low for systematic survey of a huge area of atypical habitat. But today, July 20th 2013, was the day to find out; the Emperor was fully out and in good numbers, for once. Neil and I anticipated seeing a dozen or so, maybe 20, but butterflies are extremely good at making one feel hopelessly wrong, particularly the Purple Emperor. In five hours we counted 84, within a relatively small area, and in rather cloudy weather. Clearly, the butterfly had erupted here. And they were not just numerous, but seriously violent too. We saw males attack a Chaffinch and a Blackbird, and loudly applauded a brace of females working together to extirpate a floc
k of young tits from a sallow stand – all to the accompanying sound of wedding bells drifting across from Shipley church. Up in the oak crowns, males were kicking each other's teeth in with gross regularity. We wound them up by singing skinhead football chants at them. At one point we saw five males hotly pursuing a female, and cheered them on.

  Returning the following day, after a restless night, we added another 50, but the insects were less active and the habitat quality of the area we searched was not quite so high. Nonetheless, we had determined that within the space of a few years the huge southern block of Knepp Castle Estate, between Shipley and Dial Post, had developed what must be the second-largest Purple Emperor population in the country, after Fermyn Woods, and one that was destined to grow much larger. Never mind Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane, Fermyn Wood was moving to Sussex; a new epicentre of the Purple Empire was developing, right where I started out fifty years ago, right in my heartland. Here, the butterfly was breeding in young sallow bushes, 2–4 metres tall at the most, which had developed after sallow seed had rained down on bare ground when arable fields were taken out of productivity about a decade back. No longer was the Purple Emperor a woodland butterfly at all, let alone the mysterious ancient-woodland creature it had long been assumed to be, but an opportunist deftly able to exploit the rural equivalent of a brownfield site. At Knepp it is a butterfly of scrubland, developing pasture-woodland and outgrown hedgerows. A particularly large penny had dropped. Poor Job must have felt rather like that when the Almighty explained it all to him at the end of his book.

  The crescendo was building, even though the Emperor season was on the wane – albeit after conquering new and dizzy heights. If any other butterfly wanted to win Butterfly of the Year 2013 it would have to knock His Imperial Majesty off his perch, during one of his greatest seasons. Several were trying it on. As predicted, Small Whites and Large Whites were everywhere, and Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells were emerging in excellent numbers, the latter having sprung from nowhere to fill almost every garden. Butterflies are amazingly good at coming from beyond the ninth gate of death, or however many gates there are.

  Such was the paltry state of world news on August 6th, and so prominent were butterflies in the public eye, that the news release put out by the National Trust's Press Office then, celebrating my fifty years of butterflying, was taken up. No credit was due to me here, it was all down to the magnetism of butterflies, and the love and wonder they inspire. All I had done was take up butterflying fifty years previously, when given a copy of The Observer's Book of Butterflies and a net for my tenth birthday – and had never given up, but had become their vehicle.

  We needed a venue with speedy access from London, and seriously good butterflies. Denbies Hillside, on the scarp slope of the North Downs just west of Dorking, offered just that. Moreover, the Chalkhill Blue population had erupted there, producing what is by far the greatest profusion of a single species of butterfly I have seen. The Denbies Chalkhills had done it before, as recently as 2006, but that year the peak count on the butterfly monitoring route there was a mere 832. This time it reached 3500. One must feel deeply for Gail Jeffcoate, who faithfully walks the butterfly transect route there each week. Normally the walk takes 45 minutes, this time it took two hours. There were massive aggregations of the Cambridge-blue males on every Marjoram clump, such that each patch glowed with iridescent blue. Earlier, in mid-morning, when the males were busy patrolling the breeding grounds in search of emerging females, whole expanses of short turf shimmered with sky blue. They also wandered far and wide, invading Dorking station and High Street. This wonder of the natural world was featured on Channel 4 News (we almost got it on the BBC1 main evening news bulletin). Sadly, photographs of such events sell the story badly short; only moving film depicts the true scale.

  The following day, my sixtieth birthday, one of Christ's Hospital school's more prodigal sons returned, for the first time in decades, to conduct an interview with Patrick Barkham for a piece on butterflying for The Guardian. The place leapt to greet us. A Holly Blue met us at the entrance, and we found Purple Hairstreaks flying in the copse by Leigh Hunt house where I had begun butterflying. The school had intensified in beauty. Even then it could not hold me, for we ended the afternoon in Marlpost Wood. Once again, the forest closed around me and instilled its sense of deep belonging. A Jay's wing feather lay in the dust. At 4.45 pm one of the most majestic and memorable of female Purple Emperors ever seen flew lazily along the ride, to perch above us on an oak spray, basking in the glory of the day, before gliding effortlessly away. I knew iris would appear here, and that I did not even need to look for them – they would find me. The diary concludes: Ended up with a sublime journey ‘home’ along the A272, into the sunset of the day and of life – only I'd just been Home. And as for a party? That took place the following day in Savernake Forest, where a group of 25 friends and relations, adorned with picnic hampers and Pimms, were regaled by the last Purple Emperors of the season.

  But great butterfly seasons do not go gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas put it. This one was by no means ready to bow out, and a dozen other species were preparing to do battle with the Emperor over the destiny of Butterfly of the Year 2013. Clouded Yellows invaded the UK in early August – and they seldom bother coming here in poor summers. More significantly, that most occasional of vagrants from the continent, the Long-tailed Blue, appeared – and meant business. On or just before my birthday, as a present to us all, what was probably the largest immigration of Long-tailed Blues in entomological history hit the south-east coast. They had hopped across the Channel on a fairly broad front.

  By happy chance, I was destined to visit the Kent coast in mid-August, to run training events for National Trust staff there, and the weather was set fair. By then the butterfly had already been spotted in three or four places along the Kent coast, and a breeding colony had been discovered on Kingsdown Leas, a section of National Trust clifftop chalk grassland a few kilometres east of Dover. The initial discovery was made by birders, in pursuit of a rare bird there on August 9th, and was instantly put out on the birding grapevines. Given that the Long-tailed Blue is regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime experience for butterfly lovers in the UK, well over a hundred enthusiasts visited Kingsdown in search of the butterfly during the following weeks. The colony was breeding on the Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea (perennial sweet pea), which occurs in profusion along the cliff top there, and locally elsewhere in the district. This is a non-native species which frequently escapes from gardens and colonises rough or disturbed ground. It is rarely regarded as a nuisance, but on Kingsdown Leas it had benefited considerably from an autumn mowing regime, which had created myriad pockets of bare ground in which it could germinate, such that huge patches of the plant occurred all the way along the cliff top.

  On August 14th at least three males and one female were present on Kingsdown Leas. These were old and tired butterflies, who merely wanted to sip nectar from their beloved pea flowers but would flit off at speed if disturbed. A systematic search of the Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea clumps revealed over 50 tiny pale-blue eggs, on the sepals of flowering sprays. These were found right the way along the cliff top, and so must have been laid by more than one female. They suggested that, weather permitting, a sizeable home-grown brood would emerge in early autumn, for the Long-tailed Blue is a fast breeder, going from egg to adult in half a dozen weeks in warm weather. It is one of the most widespread butterflies in the world, occurring in temperate zones of both hemispheres, breeding in the flowers and pods of a wide range of plants of the pea family. In some countries it is an agricultural pest. In Britain it is almost the ultimate butterfly twitch, though if our climate becomes warmer it could become a resident species in the deep south.

  I also found eggs in Kingsdown village, where strands of the same Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea trailed down over a garden fence, and also in the nearby village of St Margaret's at Cliffe. However, there was no sign of butterfly or eggs on anothe
r, smaller type of perennial sweet pea, Narrow-leaved Everlasting-pea, which abounds at St Margaret's Leas cliffs. It seems that Long-tailed Blue adults fizzled out at Kingsdown in late August, with the last sighting being made on the 26th.

  September started fair, then wobbled for two weeks. Fine weather returned on St Matthew's Day, the 23rd, when it so happened that I was destined to visit the Kent coast again. The home-grown brood of Long-tailed Blue was first noted at Kingsdown on September 18th, and a small emergence occurred on the 23rd, when at least six males and a female were observed by some twenty people. Twice that number of people appeared on the following day, which may have been too much for what can be a decidedly wary butterfly, for sightings were fewer and further between. Two males repeatedly attempted to establish a territory in a sheltered sunny hollow, but were quickly driven off by over-eager cameras. Long-tailed Blues lingered on at Kingsdown well into October, the final sighting being made on October 9th.

  A number of other colonies were discovered along the coast of Kent and East Sussex, particularly on Thanet and around Newhaven and Brighton. Most were based on Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea. Fresh specimens were appearing until the autumn rains arrived with a vengeance around October 20th. Strangely, though, only a scatter of Long-tailed Blues was seen in West Sussex, and even fewer in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight, where a few were seen at Ventnor in early October. Despite vigilance the butterfly was not recorded in Surrey, which meant that the drifts of Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea along the old coaching road at Denbies Hillside, near Dorking, which attracted the butterfly in 2003, went untenanted.