The final two years of the 1970s were characterised by cold, snowy winters, late springs and what a cynic might deem ‘typical’ summers. We were in the shadow-land of 1976, some sort of doldrums before the next sequence of good summers materialised. Butterflying requires the patience of Job at the best of times, but during poor summers it also requires the ability to use fine weather spells as and when they come along. The motto is simple: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero – or more simply, seize the day.
Five of our butterfly species pass the winter as hibernating adults – Brimstone, Comma, Peacock, Red Admiral and Small Tortoiseshell. Almost every year one of them comes through the winter better than the other four, and establishes itself as the butterfly of that particular early spring. Until recently the usual contenders in these rites were the Brimstone and Small Tortoiseshell, with the Comma and Peacock occasionally claiming the honours. On just a few occasions there was no discernible winner. Until around 2000 relatively few Red Admirals were successful in overwintering, so it seldom figured in this competition before then.
In 1978 the Small Tortoiseshell was the butterfly of the spring, at least in and around Hampshire. My first butterfly of that year was indeed a Small Tortoiseshell, seen feeding on Snowdrop flowers in West Worldham churchyard, near Alton, on March 3rd. Shortly afterwards Small Tortoiseshells were evident everywhere. March, such as it was, belonged to them, then they seized April and made it imperiously theirs. By early May they were laying eggs on the fresh growth of sunlit nettle patches that fringed the wasteland around Farnham Art College. I observed some fifty individuals there on May 7th, feasting on Dandelion flowers, seeking mates in the case of still-ardent males, and in the case of some half-dozen females laying batches of bright green eggs on the underside of Stinging Nettle sprays. What surprised me, though my new friend Ken Willmott had already observed this, was that females were adding fresh eggs to pre-existing batches. In one instance fresh eggs were added two days after the first batch had been laid. Of course, it was impossible to tell whether this was the same female returning to add to her own clutch, or some opportunism by another. Since then I have on several occasions observed Small Tortoiseshells adding to pre-existing egg batches.
Spring was backward, so backward in fact that Orange-tips did not begin to emerge before St George's Day and may not have laid any eggs during April that year – which is one of the characteristics of a genuinely late spring. Also, I saw no Green-veined Whites or Speckled Woods that April, and heard of none elsewhere. May commenced with the coldest and wettest May Day since 1940 and wobbled for quite a while. The diary for May 8th states: The ambition of today was to rain. For nineteen hours it tried desperately, eventually succeeding at 7 pm when a tedious drizzle commenced. But then May sorted itself out, even ending strongly. The Small Tortoiseshell led the way. On the 15th, when the first Duke of Burgundy of the spring was seen at Noar Hill, I at last observed Small Tortoiseshells mating, in the nettle beds bordering the lane that leads past Charity Farm up to Noar Hill. Oh, that's a common butterfly, it's always mating, you may think; but some butterflies are incredibly secretive, retiring well away from people to conduct their personal business. Such is the Small Tortoiseshell, though their lengthy chase-me-about courtship flights are frequently observed, particularly in late afternoon. At 3.40, as I was about to find out whether my motorbike was going to start or not, a pair was seen playing follow-my-leader.
Diary, May 15th 1978: They settled quickly on a nettle leaf, wings open, the male below the female, sometimes touching her with his forewings and antennae … the same thing happened on another nettle leaf. Then the female flew down at the edge of the nettle patch amongst 6-inch tall nettles and grasses. They crawled well into the nettle patch and were promptly in cop, resting on grass, in deep shade, wings closed. I left them there.
I had left them at 4 pm, and they were still there, still joined together, early the following morning. Gentlemen, ladies even, we are outdone: they mated for eighteen and a half hours.
Inspired, on May 19th I proposed to the young lady I had been courting at Farnham Art College, exactly ten years on from my life-altering dies mirabilis in Marlpost Wood. The Duke of Burgundy was again present, though no longer a Fritillary by name, for that epithet had been removed by a committee in some powerhouse of taxonomy somewhere. My own personal drama took place on a Yew log in the top chalk pit on Noar Hill, up against the Beech hanger. There was an azure haze about the sky that day, which juxtaposed and mingled curiously with the verdant yellow-green of young Beech leaves, and a poignant stillness hung within the air. The colours and intensity of light were right. Holly Blues and Green Hairstreak males darted about along sunny wood edges, whilst Dingy Skippers and Duke of Burgundy males squabbled over territorial rights down below. There was magic in the air, not all of it entomological. The young lady, incidentally, agreed to my proposal, though I had little to offer her other than love and the promise of a life of wonder within the world of Nature.
Much of that early summer was spent studying the Duke of Burgundy, particularly by following the fastidious females and recording precisely where they deposited their eggs. That, as I had learnt from Professor Jeremy Thomas, our foremost butterfly scientist, provided the main route towards understanding a butterfly's ecology. I also started systematically counting them on Noar Hill, and searched for new colonies elsewhere on the western South Downs. Holly Blues and Green Hairstreaks were also studied, the former being observed depositing eggs, unusually, on the buds of Dogwood and Purging Buckthorn on Shoulder of Mutton, the down dedicated to the memory of Edward Thomas above Petersfield. On Shoulder of Mutton Hill I studied Grizzled Skippers, watching them lay their eggs on the undersides of Common Agrimony leaves. I searched hard there for the Duke of Burgundy, and in suitable habitat patches on nearby Wheatham Hill, but found none. It should have been there, for everything was right. This was a disappointment, as unoccupied habitat is often a sign of a butterfly in decline. Edward Thomas, my poetic hero, had rather let me down.
The Marsh Fritillary colony on Bartley Heath, near Hook, was also tracked down. The butterfly had been introduced to an open expanse of humid heathland here by Peter Cribb of the Amateur Entomologists’ Society in 1970, when its original location was being converted into the Hook interchange of the M3 motorway. The Marsh Fritillary fared well there in some years, but usually managed merely to subsist from year to year. In the early 1990s, Bartley Heath was heavily grazed by ponies, and the Marsh Fritillary quietly disappeared.
Worse was to befall a much larger and entirely natural population at Foxlease Meadows, near Fleet, which I first got to know in 1978. Here, the butterfly regularly abounded in a series of marshy meadows that were owned by the Ministry of Defence and grazed by cattle run by its tenant farmer. Melancholy Thistle grew in several of the meadows and Water Violet in the ditches. On Saturday June 23rd 1979 England was playing the West Indies in the cricket world cup final at Lords. The proceedings were broadcast live all over Foxlease Meadows via a small transistor radio in my breast pocket. But the news was bad, the main Marsh Fritillary breeding area had been planted up with conifers and Collis King and the invincible Viv Richards were flaying the English attack all around the ground. Let it be known, that each time a boundary was conceded a batch of conifers was wrenched angrily from the breeding ground. The brilliance of the West Indian batting that afternoon ensured that a sizeable area was cleared. These efforts made no difference, for after a major population explosion during a fine summer sequence during the early 1980s the Marsh Fritillary spiralled into a terminal decline there. The M3 ripped through its heartland and the town of Fleet expanded onto much of its habitat. Several of the best meadows were preserved as token nature reserves, rather pointlessly as the necessary grazing proved all but impossible to implement in these isolated fragments, and the butterfly's foodplant was quickly swamped by rank grass.
Back in early June 1978, an expedition was launched in pursuit of the Chequered Skipper in the western Highlands. In many ways this was a typical southerner's expedition after this most distant of our butterflies, for a spell of fine weather ended the day we set off and much time was spent waiting for deluges to end, and then for hanging mists and vapours to clear. The mountains regularly disappeared, and at times even the loch surfaces. Grey was the dominant colour in the landscape. It was all so different to my previous expedition to that region, which had been an ecstatic romp in quintessential late spring weather only four years previously. The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, a species that is very common along the loch sides there and which, crucially, has a lower weather threshold than the Chequered Skipper, completely stole the show. As soon as the weather began to relent they appeared in myriads, everywhere, courting, mating, laying eggs, feeding on Bird's-foot Trefoil and early bramble flowers, and doing everything a butterfly ought to do, to perfection. The Chequered Skipper, however, was scarcely in the giving vein, but did appear, reluctantly, whenever the sun made more than a transitory appearance. The weather became so dreich, to use the wonderfully apt Scots term for foul and abusive weather, that in desperation we visited that most dysfunctional of Highland tourism venues, the Aviemore rubbish dump. This was a renowned site for the Kentish Glory moth, whose eggs and larvae could be found on young birch bushes around the fringes of the tip. None was found, we caught colds and were eaten alive by assorted biting Diptera (flies).
Yet, on our final day the sun shone strongly, albeit after a wet morning. Chequered Skippers were duly found in several places along the northern shore of Loch Arkaig, particularly on a promontory jutting into the loch just east of Auchnasaul and in a young conifer plantation that later became part of Butterfly Conservation's reserve at Allt Mhuic. The following week Ken Willmott visited this area, in lovely weather, and fared considerably better. My diary reads:
We must have seen getting on for a thousand C. selene [Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary] along the three-mile stretch from Clunas house to Auchnasaul today. It was worth coming all this way for them alone.
That was quite some statement. We had driven over 800 kilometres (500 miles) each way to see them in Scotland, when all along there was a huge colony in Hartley Wood, back in Hampshire, right next to where I was then living.
Back on Noar Hill, the Small Blue was having a good year. Its larval foodplant, Kidney Vetch, had proliferated there after the drought of 1976, and the butterfly was tracking its foodplant. The vetch is primarily a biennial, and seedlings that germinated there in 1977 were beginning to flower. The plant spread further in subsequent years, peaking on the reserve in 1980, and the butterfly population followed its host plant, almost doubling in 1979 and again in 1980. Strangely, though, the plant decreased there following the hot summers of 1983 and 1984. I know not why.
Midsummer butterflies were late in appearance in 1978, though they were blessed with much decent weather. For some reason or other the Black Hairstreak had one of its periodic good years. On June 30th I saw some fifty individuals at Drunkard's Corner, a solitary but deeply evocative place where a forgotten ancient drove-way winds around the south-easternmost corner of Bernwood Forest, through caverns of ancient Blackthorn stems. On a second visit there ten days later I encountered females laying their eggs, the first time I had witnessed this – only the eggs were so superbly camouflaged that they were almost invisible, especially when tucked into a striation in the Blackthorn stems or placed in the node of a thorn spike. Wood Whites were bumbling idly by, for in those days this butterfly was well established in Bernwood Forest, as was the agile Dark Green Fritillary in large grassy clearings.
White Admirals emerged in stupendous numbers in Alice Holt Forest. Strangely not a single ‘Black Admiral’ variation was recorded all summer, though a few appeared the next. I even saw them mating, for the first time. This took place high up in an oak in Alice Holt after a lengthy follow-my-leader courtship flight. It was not until 2012 that I saw this species pairing again, and then only when a pair was blown out of the oak crowns by a strong wind. Quite simply, some butterfly species are seldom if ever observed mating.
The Purple Emperor waited until mid-July before appearing, but then put on a fine performance. The males were very wound up that year, perhaps because there were enough of them around to aggravate each other into activity, and also because their activities did not get suppressed by hot weather. Occasionally in butterflying one goes back in time, momentarily but iteratively. This happened to me on July 29th 1978 when I observed a female of the ab. semi-iole variety (with significantly reduced white markings) laying eggs and skulking around in the very same Alice Holt glade where I had observed an almost identical female back in 1976.
Noar Hill produced an acute aberration of the Marbled White, a black and tan beast with little white. It then went further, producing the first of a series of blue Small Skippers. To describe them as blue is no exaggeration, and the term was used in accounts of this remarkable occurrence in the Entomologist's Gazette and The Butterflies of Hampshire. Fresh specimens of these Small Skippers possessed bright blue body hairs, akin to those of a fresh male Chalkhill Blue. The wing uppersides were steely blue when viewed at certain angles, though at other angles or in poor light they were more of a bluish-buff colour. This aberration has yet to be formally described, not least because I never had a net on me when one appeared (though I may have lacked the heart to catch and kill one anyway, even though in the interests of science I should have). When it is described, it could perhaps be called ab. noari, after Noar Hill. It is certainly far more extreme, and distinctly bluer, than the very pale variety ab. pallida, which also appeared occasionally on the reserve during that era.
August 1978 also produced a Queen of Spain Fritillary, which landed at my feet on Kingsley Common, one of the sandy heaths near Bordon, on the 14th. There was sufficient time to blink twice, expostulate loudly and verify the vision before it flew off rapidly, and was not seen again. This was an odd sighting, as 1978 was not a good year for migrant butterflies and this was the only Queen of Spain recorded then, and far inland too. I had only gone there to watch Graylings and Gatekeepers laying eggs, but then butterflying specialises in producing the unexpected.
The year then ended as it had begun, for the Small Tortoiseshell was very much the butterfly of the autumn, gathering in numbers in gardens to feed up on nectar prior to hibernation. Outside my front door they fed on an old variety of Calendula grown in large tubs. It was my first butterfly of that year, and my last.
There then began the infamous Winter of Discontent. The diary describes the winter of 1978/79 in some detail:
The autumn of 1978 was dry and mild until mid-November when it became very cold. Snow fell just prior to Christmas and some parts of southern England had a White Christmas. That was just the prelude. Heavy snow fell on the last day of the year and the New Year began with four to five inches on the ground in East Hampshire, though further west and north it was measured in feet.
I spent that New Year's Day brushing snow off the rafters and bedroom ceiling of the primitive cottage in the woods in which I was living – it had drifted in as snow dust on a brisk wind, and settled there an inch deep. The diary continues:
The third coldest January this century materialised (after 1942 and 1963). Snow lay in Hampshire all January ... Hardly a night went by without a noticeable frost and the maximum temperature recorded all month was 6°C. No Snowdrops were noted. February started dry and comparatively mild but the second week saw the return of the very cold weather, with a St Valentine's Day Massacre in the form of six inches of snow that was again loath to melt. More fell during a cold but otherwise wet final week. A few catkins appeared right at the end of the month. March saw a change in the weather, but not for the better: the sun hardly shone at all during the wettest March on record, and more snow fell on the 21st, the First Day of Spring.
Suffice to say that a cold, wet and sunless April ensued. The whole nation struggled, not just its naturalists.
I was living in a cottage deep in the woods, at the end of 2 kilometres of rutted lane that plunged suddenly down the East Hampshire Hangers escarpment between East Worldham and Oakhanger, on the edge of my beloved Hartley Wood. The cottage lacked electricity, loft insulation and double glazing, and indeed any modern comforts. Water was obtained from a spring, in containers. I had dug out a cesspit system and installed a simple toilet. Heating, as such, was provided by a Calor gas stove and open fires. Dead elm trees were in plentiful supply, though they were incredibly hard to saw and chop, and then burnt too fast and gave off little heat. The country was in turmoil, culminating in the collapse of the Labour government and the surge to power of Margaret Thatcher. Alton, my nearest shopping centre, was the first town in the UK to run out of sugar in a nationwide wave of panic buying and hoarding. All this mattered little to one whose windows iced up nightly, both inside and out. Existence degenerated into subsistence. Serotonin levels were dangerously low. The sun disappeared into the pall of winter, seemingly for weeks on end. It was all akin to the apocalyptic world that Byron describes in his poem ‘Darkness’ –
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day ...
But spring, when it eventually arrived, was all the sweeter. The bird life around the cottage had to be experienced to be believed, though it rendered sleep difficult. Nights pulsated with the songs of a dozen Nightingales, far and near, and reeled softly with the constant whirr of Grasshopper Warblers. At the first sign of dawn the Cuckoos started up, meeting noisily for courtship in a nearby prominent tree, their gathering tree. Minutes later the full dawn chorus began, such that the living air itself actually vibrated – certainly, the noise rattled my windows. Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers nested in a hole in the old sallow tree at the end of my washing line. In mid-May, I watched a female Cuckoo lay an egg in a Dunnock's nest concealed amongst the Ivy jungle on the edge of the adjoining garden. The egg better resembled a Robin's than a Dunnock's, but it hatched and the youngster was successfully fostered. I followed the development of the young Cuckoo, which eventually flew in late June. The following year I found what may well prove to be my last ever Cuckoo's egg, in a Tree Pipit's nest in Hartley Wood.
The butterfly season was late, and with one or two exceptions distinctly poor. Orange-tips hardly got going before May, again laying no eggs in April, and my first Speckled Wood was not seen until May 12th. Pearl-bordered Fritillaries did not begin to appear before the end of May. Then June was so indifferent that they almost lingered into July. The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary delayed its appearance until mid-June and lasted well into July. It was a year of record latest sightings, with the Orange-tip being the pick of the bunch: I saw the year's last on July 8th, the day after my wedding day. There was no contest for the title of Butterfly of the Year. The Purple Emperor won it fair and square, emerging in considerable numbers in late July, squabbling incessantly and at times violently, and laying eggs in the sallow tree at the end of my washing line. In one glorious moment I saw a posse of seven in a vista.
And as for the cottage in the woods, that little piece of Walden? The following winter the landowner had no proper work for his farmhands to do, so he instructed them to clear the Nightingale's (and Brown Hairstreak's) Blackthorn scrub. The year after that, much of the adjoining ancient oak woodland was felled too, and a rye grass field was duly created, where sheep developed foot rot. The farm workers were then made redundant, ending their lives in council flats in Alton and Basingstoke. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the rural poor had begun. Their cottages were sold off as second homes – a fate that also befell my little cottage, but only after all the necessary utilities had been installed. I have never been back, for the place I loved has gone.
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from ‘In Memoriam’
For lovers of sunshine, and of butterflies, our winter constitutes a spiritual prison sentence of sixteen weeks of non-existence. Think of your nightmare school-timetable day (for me, double maths, double French and double physics), and grind that out, in mindless repetition, day after wretched day, for four interminably long months: that is precisely what our butterfly lovers suffer, annually. They scarcely belong in this country, and perhaps should be migratory beings, wintering on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Winter begins in November, sometime, normally late on, depending on how unkind the Fates are feeling. Of course, we deny it for as long as possible; not least because it takes a while for winter to erase the memories of warmth and sunshine, for such pleasantries are keen to linger. December gets away with it, just, because of the helter-skelter rush that has become Christmas – that takes our minds off the dying of the light, and of the year. But when Christmas has passed we are left alone, bereft. New Year is a mirage. We should be in hibernation.
It is curious that most of our so-called country sports are winter-based activities. Perhaps they are so keenly defended because they help their practitioners endure winter, for without precious days out with hounds or gun surviving winter might prove too difficult? The humble butterfly lover survives on paltry fare, of searching for the eggs of Brown Hairstreaks on Blackthorn shoots, or Purple Hairstreak eggs around clusters of oak buds, or White-letter Hairstreak eggs placed, symbolically, where the old and new wood meet on elm twigs. The bravest search for White Admiral larvae, in tiny spun-up Honeysuckle leaves, or prospect new places. But this is subsistence fare: a bolder strategy is required. First, I shortened winter by studying Marsh Fritillary larvae, which emerge from hibernation in mid to late January; and then slew it altogether by following Purple Emperor larvae through their five-month-long period of hibernation. Once winter is placed under the spell of the Purple Emperor it is rendered impotent.
Yet winter remains at least one month too long, and that month is January. It is the slowest month of the year, with time outworn, almost still. Throughout this shadow-land of transience the sun angles remain dangerously low, and we may suffer day after day of opacity. We are in the Underworld. There is no lucidity in January skies, the days of so-called ‘crisp winter sunshine’ are at best a sad parody of the real thing, summer. No changes of any note occur in the countryside that long and pallid month, bar the mustard-haze yellowing of catkins in clouded drab copses and hedges, whilst Snowdrops apart the gardens remain soulless. We are entombed, under winter's pall.
One of the most important, and little used, words in the English language is ‘apricity’. It means the warmth of winter sunshine. The secret is to sit in it, behind a pane of glass, and allow the warmth of the light to reach the eyelids. That will help you through, but in true desperation visit a butterfly house.
Yet winter has its magic: its blood-drained sunsets, a tranquillity and calmness of air that is so seldom experienced in summer, days of embalmment when the light fades stealthily from noon, its wakefulness. It is a period of meditation, and of dreaming.
We all, as pilgrims, look out for the signs of spring – yet they are not signs, or even tokens of hope, but actualities. It is February that brings most hope. February is much maligned, yet it is the shortest and often the driest month of the year; and apart from in severe winters it is a month of transition, into spring. In a mild winter it is indeed the first month of spring, for spring begins when the Rooks start to build, which is normally around Valentine's Day. February is also the month of many firsts – Coltsfoot, Primrose, Celandine, sallow blossom, bumblebee and butterfly – and the slow inexorable lengthening of days. A good February will issue a new sign of spring almost every other day, making it a month of immense hope. Then, at the end of the month the Blackbirds begin to sing, and they sing of spring.
Early on in his rural prose-poem ‘The South Country’ (1909) Edward Thomas muses: ‘It is not Spring yet. Spring is being dreamed …’ He then loses his thread, badly in fact (he later regretted writing the book, knowing that he could and should have ventured deeper); but what he had almost stumbled upon is the concept that spring needs to be dreamed up, ideated. Surely that is precisely what the sleeping trees are doing? In which case there may be a role for us too, in the meditative conjuring up of spring; so maybe we need winter after all, though it certainly needs shortening.
Over the land freckled with snow and half-thawed,
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed,
And saw from elm tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see – Winter pass.
Edward Thomas, ‘Thaw’