The more we learn about butterflies, the more we realise remains to be learnt about them. Despite the fact that British butterflies are amongst the best studied and most closely monitored taxonomic group in the world, their ability to surprise us seems infinite. They continually astound, and remain incredibly difficult to predict. What is not known about them must be more important than what is known, certainly in terms of practical conservation knowledge. Butterflies are changelings, continually moving the goal posts – including their own goal posts, by endeavouring to adapt to changing environmental situations and simply by pushing limits. Their main problem is that of keeping up with the increasing pace of environmental change. People with low boredom thresholds and a deep thirst for ecological knowledge and experience will find that butterflies will not let them down.
But what about conservation, you might well ask? Surely the whole purpose of spending fifty years recording and studying butterflies is to assist in their conservation? The answer is, well yes, of course – but not quite as you might think. Certainly, my middle thirty years of butterflying were concerned primarily with contributing effectively to their conservation, but then I began to question the meaning of conservation itself. In effect, I worked in nature conservation for some thirty years before I began to wonder what ‘nature conservation’ actually meant – and opened Pandora's box. Few of my colleagues were interested – they were too busy conserving biodiversity, setting up and attending meetings, or completing a grant application form or management plan on time. ‘It's obvious!’ they said, dismissively. It was not. Philosophical ponderings consequently took place, in places as diverse as traffic jams on the M25 and tree stumps in forest clearings.
Eventually, some truth dawned: nature conservation is essentially concerned with mending the relationship between people and Nature, and is an expression of love for, and an interaction with, the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and with belonging in Nature. This has been rather hijacked by ecology, in the vain hope that it might hold a panacea. Science provides some rationalisation and helps clarify priorities, and works alongside technology and resources to determine practicalities, but the whole show is essentially about Love. It matters not that love is scarcely rational.
And as for the conservation of butterflies, those shimmering, fickle creatures of change? In simplistic terms it is relatively easy to manage a place for a single well-studied species, such as a butterfly, for a while. Yet we are forever trying to manage small, isolated places for whole suites of species with diverse and even conflicting ecological requirements, and are continually trying to arrest successional change and freeze a place into a time capsule. Nature does not do time capsules, it runs in epochs, periodically moving on. Moreover, Nature does not recognise our targets: in Nature there is no agenda beyond the will of individual plants and animals to exist, and then only within the moment of being. The needs we attribute to Nature may actually be ours. Re-wilding is now being held up as a solution, but perhaps it is we who need re-wilding, not Nature.
And as for the butterflies themselves? Perhaps they are forever seeking to push limits – environmental limits, their own limits, our limits. After all, butterflies – led by the Purple Emperor, the ultimate butterfly – seek nothing short of world domination. Conservationists are there merely to help them realise that ambition.
It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity.
Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart (1883)
Afterword: On Marlpost Road
And I rose up, and knew that I was tired;
And so continued my journey …
Inscription on the Edward Thomas Memorial Stone,Shoulder of Mutton Hill, Steep, Hampshire
In the forest the clay cracked, gaped and chasmed in awesome summer heat. Weeks of scorching drought had removed all moisture from the paths and rides, turning mud to earth, earth to dust, and dust to desiccation. Finally, the particles rose to hang low within pulsating air. At night the trees trapped the day's heat and held it close to the ground, threatening suffocation, only for the new day to add more. And so the heat accumulated and intensified, as if the summer was building towards some cataclysmic climax of intense power, and almost unnatural beauty. There may have been some grand purpose behind it all; it seemed almost so, but that remained hidden to man and was understood perhaps only by Nature. Each leaf strained for relief from the searing sun; some had fallen early, forming a carpet of crumpled Hazel and Silver Birch leaves upon the woodland floor. Beneath the shade of brooding oaks the Dog's Mercury had turned its leaves downwards, in abject surrender. The Honeysuckle leaves would follow, for they were yellowing and would soon turn brown and wither. The long hot summer had returned. Metaphor and reality had harmonised.
Somehow he had left himself behind. He had done this sort of thing before, though not always through the power of Nature, or through Psyche. Those early experiences now mattered little, being at best training exercises for the real thing. For now it was different, involving the truest reality, Faith. He had left himself staring up at some high tree, where something small and distant had flickered momentarily, once or twice, iteratively, perhaps calling from a different dimension of existence. Was it an Emperor, or an Admiral perhaps, or more? It mattered little, for the naming of something is only one small part of the experience of it. We can venture deeper than the meaning of words, as poets do; but, paradoxically, we can do this only through the medium of words, and words shimmer between their meanings.
The real him had wandered out of the wood and off down the oak-lined Marlpost Road; not quite as before, though still journeying from glade to glade, hurrying through the overhung sections where autumn lurked, and dallying in the sunlight glades where summer dwelt. Others had gone the other way, into the wood, bearing cameras and binoculars. Butterfly photographers – New Age collectors – seeking images, two-dimensional experiences; trophy hunters, collecting visual memories. But Nature would entrap them too, in time. The meaning of the experiences they were having now would kick in later, in ordained time. Psyche, the butterfly-winged goddess of the human soul, would entice them, further up and further in.
Now here, through the collective memory of place, some deeper, truer reality was being penetrated. The silliness had been left behind – a shame, as it was fun. Lucidity was breaking through, like shafts of sunlight in which hoverflies were dancing within the miasmic dust of endless summer days. It had been threatening to break through for some time, but had been resisted stubbornly, perhaps simply on account of innate humanity. There was no stopping it now, on Marlpost Road, where he had always been. He had never left the road he had taken as a schoolboy, though it had twisted and turned, perhaps trying to shake him off, and had never run straight as a Roman road, as now it did, calmly.
Some power had straightened it out. Through leaving himself behind, if only by mere lapsus, he had surrendered to that power. It had absorbed him. Nature had fulfilled its task with him. Nature was not his religion, and never had been, for though deeply fascinating it made no sense without a creator, and made most sense when given back its rightful name – Creation. Voltaire was right: a clock needs a clockmaker. Instead, Nature had been his mentor and had latterly become his cathedral, his place of spiritual development and, indeed, of ministry and worship. Of course, it had distracted him, but only as part of the teaching process. There was also a healing there, though from what and for what remained absurdly obtuse, and may not ultimately matter. He had failed worldly peer-pressure atheism rather splendidly – the myriad ecstatic experiences he had had in Nature had ensured that. Marlpost Road was his Road to Emmaus. In gratitude he had openly campaigned to give Nature back its meaning. Psyche, though, had proved to be a flibbertigibbet, a veritable minx, a green lady of the woods who flickered in and out of focus (mainly out), who practised beguilement and succeeded only in causing confusion. She wa
s all too human. Metamorphosis was a doddle of a metaphor: we are caterpillars, we periodically change our skins; death is the pupal period, and then ... we are destined to fly!
Butterflies had long held his hand, for Nature is so vast, so utterly wondrous that we need a focus, we need to narrow it down. Send for the cameras and the binoculars, or even the dog lead! Butterflies had helped the development of his soul. He had long felt, as Keats most earnestly believed, that we are on this earth to grow our souls, whatever that may mean – it links to skin changing. Also, he had long suspected that butterflies, as members of the lower orders (not that any living thing is low), share some form of communal soul, as species. He did not need to understand any of this. Some things we are not meant to understand, but merely to believe. It is easier, though we consider it harder.
Then there is the small matter of ministry, of individual purpose on this earth. Many today do not believe in this. He did, eventually.
Iridescence
Scatter me, these living ashes, here
Within this forest, my cathedral,
For all I sought through ministry
Of place, was Nature's meaning,
Deep within the sanctum of a dream
That dreamt itself in wonderment,
And danced a wayward life
Along some woodland path
Before becoming, sudden, real,
Inside the calling of a summer day.
Spirit, on iridescent wings,
As words of life in living light
Descending, that all true dreams
May, through glory, be fulfilled.
Butterflies of the year
Memoria in aeterna…
Criterion: the butterfly species by which the individual year is best remembered. Occasionally two species cannot be separated and have to share the title.
1964 Clouded Yellow
1965 Orange-tip
1966 Painted Lady
1967 Red Admiral
1968 Pearl-bordered Fritillary
1969 White Admiral
1970 Holly Blue
1971 Purple Emperor
1972 Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary
1973 Purple Emperor
1974 Purple Hairstreak
1975 Purple Emperor
1976 Purple Emperor
1977 Brown Hairstreak
1978 Duke of Burgundy
1979 Purple Emperor
1980 Silver-spotted Skipper
1981 Wall Brown
1982 Duke of Burgundy
1983 Clouded Yellow & High Brown Fritillary
1984 Duke of Burgundy
1985 Dark Green Fritillary
1986 High Brown Fritillary
1987 Small Tortoiseshell
1988 Brimstone
1989 High Brown Fritillary
1990 Holly Blue
1991 Meadow Brown
1992 Peacock
1993 Green Hairstreak
1994 Marsh Fritillary
1995 Scotch Argus
1996 Painted Lady
1997 Mountain Ringlet
1998 Chalkhill Blue
1999 Heath Fritillary
2000 Clouded Yellow
2001 Purple Emperor
2002 Purple Emperor
2003 Purple Emperor
2004 Pearl-bordered Fritillary
2005 Brown Hairstreak
2006 Purple Emperor
2007 Purple Emperor
2008 Purple Emperor
2009 Purple Emperor
2010 Silver-washed Fritillary & White Admiral
2011 Marsh Fritillary
2012 Purple Emperor
2013 Long-tailed Blue
Bibliography
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Wordswort
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List of illustrations
The Christ's Hospital school uniform
Jay's feather
Purple Emperor ab. iole (upperside)
White Admiral ab. obliterae
One-man tent and camp fire
Holly Blue (female)
Winter (Barn Owl)
Comma perched on a radio
Duke of Burgundy, Noar Hill
High Brown Fritillary, Arnside Knott
High Brown Fritillary larva
Duke of Burgundy larval damage on Cowslip
Morris Minor in Selborne
Autumn (Blackbirds)
The Great Storm
Glanville Fritillary, Compton Bay, Isle of Wight
Spring (Nightingale)
Mountain Ringlet
Painted Ladies
Clouded Yellows
Brown Hairstreak (female)
Marsh Fritillary larval web
Emperoring in a cherry-picker
Small Tortoiseshells at Martin Down
Summer (Swallows)
Purple Emperor ab. iole (underside)
Purple Emperor autumn larva
Purple Emperor winter larva
Raindrops falling in a puddle
Boy with butterfly net
Acknowledgements
Many friends, human and otherwise, have helped and inspired me over the years. In particular, two great and gloriously unique British institutions moulded me, somehow – Christ's Hospital school, in West Sussex, and the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. Above all I must thank my late mother, Helen Oates, and my dear wife, Sally, for putting up with an awful lot for far too long. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of my lifelong friends Dr Nigel Fleming and Derek Longhurst, and of my close butterflying friends Dr Andy & Linda Barker, Dr Sue Clarke, Lynn Fomison, Doug Goddard, Dr Simon Grove, Neil Hulme, Gail and Stephen Jeffcoate, Caroline Steel and Ken Willmott, along with ecological mentoring support I have received from John Bacon, Alan Stubbs, Professor Jeremy Thomas and Dr Martin Warren. My friends and colleagues from the National Trust have helped more than they could possibly imagine, notably Dr David Bullock, Mike Collins and Katherine Hearn. I must thank Andrew Branson, founder of British Wildlife, for his unwavering belief in this venture, Patrick Barkham for opening the genre of imaginative writing on butterflies and for his enthusiastic encouragement, my artist and butterflying friend Tim Bernhard, copy-editor Hugh Brazier for his patient translation of gibberish into English, Abe Davies, Katy Roper and Nick Wright of British Wildlife Publishing, and Vicky Beddow, Jamie Criswell and Jim Martin of Bloomsbury. Brokenborough Poets commented helpfully on draft poems. Charlie Burrell and the Burrell family, Fermyn Woods Contemporary Art, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Sufi Way and the Test Match Special commentary team have conspired, somehow, to keep me marginally on the right side of sanity.
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