19 High adventures in the mid-1990s
The 1994 butterflying season was launched by a Small Tortoiseshell at Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill's former residence west of Sevenoaks in Kent, with shimmering views over the High Weald. There are many hidden aspects of Churchill, such as his ability as an artist, his passion for bricklaying, his love of cats and, most notably for us, his interest in butterflies. He began collecting butterflies at prep school, on the Sussex downs, then maintained his interest abroad as a young man, collecting in India, South Africa and the West Indies. It was, of course, a common hobby at the time. His collections, sadly, have not survived. Indeed, one was eaten by a rat. A letter home recalls that he then caught the rat, and had it dispatched by his pet dog, which happened to be called Winston. After the Second World War Churchill's passion was revived, partly through the energies of L Hugh Newman, who ran a butterfly farm at nearby Westerham, selling livestock and specimens from home and abroad. The farm had been started by Newman's father, Leonard, a deeply respected lepidopterist, in a back garden in Bexley in 1894. Hugh Newman persuaded Churchill to breed and release butterflies at Chartwell, and advised on how to develop a butterfly garden in the grounds, elements of which still survive. Churchill knew his butterflies, and not merely by their English names. In correspondence with Newman he freely uses the scientific names.
When it came to butterflies and moths, Hugh Newman epitomised over-enthusiasm. He got carried away with himself at Chartwell, making naive attempts to establish the Black-veined White and the continental subspecies of the Swallowtail there. These attempts ended farcically, when the gardeners burnt the muslin sleeves containing the Black-veined White caterpillars and cut down the Swallowtail's Fennel plants. Churchill wanted the garden full of butterflies for his famous summer parties, but quickly realised that butterflies have a strong dispersal instinct, a fact that Newman had curiously overlooked. Churchill therefore tactfully dispensed with Newman's services. Nonetheless, Newman went on to other great things, becoming a regular contributor to Nature Parliament on BBC Radio's Children's Hour and appearing on Desert Island Discs.
On the positive side, Newman converted a summerhouse, originally built as a game larder, into an insectorium. Here Churchill used to watch caterpillars feeding, and would release freshly emerged butterflies into the gardens. In effect, the butterfly borders at Chartwell are probably the oldest surviving butterfly garden in the country. Moreover, we can regard Churchill as a pioneer of wildlife gardening. The National Trust, which runs Chartwell, restored Churchill's butterfly house and breeds a small number of common butterflies for release into the garden.
Winter sogged on, enlightened by a few periods when the rain turned briefly to snow, only to melt as the temperature rose fractionally and the rains returned. Churchill would have loathed it. March dripped and dripped, before eventually producing a few reasonable days. One pleasant day in early March was spent looking for Heath Fritillary larvae at Halse Combe, with naturalist colleague Nigel Hester. We found 20 of these tiny dark creatures, fresh out of hibernation, basking in loose groups of two or three amongst Bracken litter where their foodplant, Common Cow-wheat, was germinating. The plant is hard to spot, consisting of a pair of tiny leaves which can be mistaken for baby gorse seedlings. It was interesting to find that the caterpillars appeared from hibernation just as their foodplant, an annual, was germinating.
April roared in, with a gale which uprooted a large number of trees. It then became cold and wet, ensuring a terrible lambing season. Marsh Fritillary larvae, though, were numerous at Strawberry Banks, a magical Cotswold combe near Stroud. The Orange-tip started late, kicking off on St George's day. May began well, producing an abundance of Green Hairstreaks on the lower slopes of Rodborough Common, and the first Duke of Burgundies of the year. Things were looking up, not least when a scatter of Painted Ladies and Red Admirals turned up during a visit to the south Devon coast. The first Marsh and Pearl-bordered fritillaries appeared in the Cotswolds on May 15th. Then the weather fell apart, spectacularly, and spring butterflies suffered terribly. The year went into free fall, producing a wet end to May and a truly vile first three weeks of June. A spectacular emergence of Marsh Fritillary at Strawberry Banks was blasted away by foul weather. It was money-back time.
Suddenly, and dramatically, the year turned itself round, on June 23rd, as the first proper anticyclone of the season developed. I was surveying Heath Fritillaries in Bin Combe, the deep heathy combe running eastwards off Dunkery Beacon, on Exmoor. It seemed that the fritillaries had all hatched at once. At one point I counted 225 in 20 minutes, which by modern butterflying standards is top notch. A few fresh Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were skimming low over the rushy streamside in the combe bottom and, surprise surprise, a stray female Pearl-bordered Fritillary. The latter proved to be both historic and melancholic, for it was the last Pearl-bordered Fritillary ever recorded on Exmoor.
A week-long trip to Northern Ireland followed. By Northern Ireland standards the weather was reasonable, but the butterfly season was struggling. High-summer species like the Dark Green Fritillary and Large Heath had not started to emerge, in fact Primroses and Bluebells were still in flower along the North Antrim cliffs. It was on this trip that I discovered, and fell deeply in love with, Murlough Dunes NNR, a wild land of mobile and fixed acidic sand dunes and heathland on the County Down coast, in the shadow of the Mountains of Mourne. It is one of Northern Ireland's top butterfly sites, with fifteen species breeding annually including Marsh Fritillary, Dark Green Fritillary, Grayling and what in those days was simply regarded as the Wood White. The Marsh Fritillary first appeared at Murlough in 1978, colonising one or two of the more inland dune slacks (hollows). Then, it expanded considerably during the great Marsh Fritillary years of 1982–1985, in keeping with its performance on the mainland. Since then its fortunes at Murlough have ebbed and flowed, but as in the Cotswolds it had emerged in good numbers in 1994. During damp drizzly weather the males were at roost, but the females were crawling around, seeking to lay their eggs. Butterflies cannot hang about waiting for perfect weather in Northern Ireland. The Wood White colonised Murlough in 1981, breeding on Bird's-foot Trefoil growing amongst loose Burnet Rose scrub on the inland dune slopes. Since then it has steadily expanded, to colonise the fore dunes. My diary entry for June 30th 1994 is almost visionary: It's a very different butterfly in NI to how it is in England; much more widespread, less woodland associated, different habits, and a different colour. In little over a decade the Northern Ireland Wood Whites had been proven to be a different species, the Cryptic Wood White.
The weather had sorted itself – either that or I had dumped the lousy weather in Northern Ireland. An excellent July and a reasonable August materialised. The high-summer butterflies emerged and made the most of the sunshine. Marbled Whites, Ringlets and Small Blues abounded on the Cotswold limestone grasslands, and White Admirals, Silver-washed Fritillaries and even the elusive Purple Emperor impressed in the woods. It was an unusually good year for White Admiral and Purple Emperor, two species that normally appear in low numbers after a miserable June. They broke their own rules in 1994, but that's butterflies all over. I saw impressive flights of both species in the Straits Inclosure in Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire, and went on to find a goodly number of Purple Emperor eggs on shaded sallow leaves. However, back near Porlock, in north-west Somerset, the High Brown Fritillary appeared in rather disappointing numbers, presumably the victim of poor spring and early summer weather. July butterflies hurried over in the heat – a matter of short, sharp and sweet flight seasons. By the end of the month patches of drought were showing on some downland slopes.
As July ended a host of immigrant butterflies, moths and hoverflies suddenly appeared, crossing the English Channel in the wake of a series of thunderstorms. During five hours on Ballard Down, the towering chalk down above Swanage, I saw six golden Clouded Yellows, twenty or so Painted Ladies, a dozen or more Red Admirals and innumerable Small Whites. They eclipsed an excellent flight of Dark Green Fritillaries. The Ladies and Admirals had reached Arnside and Silverdale, on the Cumbria/Lancashire border, by the time I got there a few days later. The Scotch Argus was at its peak on Arnside Knott but its numbers were unimpressive. The Knott had been grazed during the late winter period by Shetland ponies, who took a strong liking to the Blue Moor-grass, and hammered it. We had grazed the Knott too hard, to the detriment of the Scotch Argus. The eggs I saw being laid were all placed in the few remaining ranker areas of Blue Moor-grass grassland. There was a need to follow the egg-laying females and discover precisely where they laid, and also to search for the larvae in early summer.
Two important discoveries were made during that trip, both involving my children. They now numbered four, but only my two elder daughters had accompanied me on this occasion. Firstly, I discovered that children fall instantly in love with limestone pavement, that other-worldly terrain of bare Carboniferous Limestone rock, clints and grykes, of ferns and stunted trees. Secondly, Miss Camilla ‘Millie’ Oates picked a bunch of Common Knapweed flowers from the lane below the Knott, and stuck them in a grass tussock in the main Scotch Argus area, where few plants were in flower. A procession of hungry Scotch Argus butterflies visited that bunch of flowers, as many as three at a time, and an old High Brown Fritillary. In those days very few plants flowered on the Knott in early August.
Kingcombe called, for a weekend ‘butterfly course’ in mid-August, down in Dorset. The weather was set fair, and the butterflies fairer. Hod Hill, a historic butterfly collecting ground on a steep chalk dome outside Blandford Forum, laid on a stunning Clouded Yellow show. Half a dozen or so were parading over a field of Lucerne growing on the slope below the hill fort, and others were flying at pace over the sunny rampart slopes. One was the pale white female, form helice, which the diary recalls was caught with a reverse sweep (a legitimate butterfly-catching stroke long before Sir Ian Botham pioneered it in cricket – one of the glories of running a butterfly course is that one can carry and even use a butterfly net without causing offence). We saw 24 species of butterfly that afternoon, and found well over a hundred gregarious ‘webs’ of tiny Marsh Fritillary larvae. Fuelled by Kingcombe's homemade cake and serenity we saw 30 species of butterfly on the wing that weekend, and found the immature stages of six more. That's quality for you.
Butterflies are essential to childhood, and to any seaside holiday; and there are few better venues for butterflies and seaside than Compton Bay on the south-west coast of the Isle of Wight. This is truest in mid-August when the weather is set fair and Clouded Yellows are in. Furthermore, there are few better campsites anywhere in Britain than the site run by the Phillips family at Compton Farm on the island. In the mid-1990s, when old Denny Phillips was still alive, the farm was a glorious adventure playground for children, for Denny collected old tractors and other ancient farm equipment. The deader it was, the more he liked it. Children could play on the rusting Fordson Majors, watch the cows being milked in an old herringbone milking parlour, and help with some farm jobs. It was a return to my own childhood days. To young Arion Oates, aged four, it was Paradise. Health and Safety thinking had scarcely penetrated the farm. Instead, the place was run by common sense, a love of life, and rural contentment. Butterflying had to take second place on this trip, but that was no problem, for Clouded Yellows patrolled the camp site and Adonis and Chalkhill Blues descended from the downland slopes to visit clover flowers. Also, Compton Beach is not just a superb sandy beach, for those who do not require ‘facilities’, but is backed by sandy slumped cliffs alive with Common Blues, Wall Browns and, in early summer, Glanville Fritillaries. Larval webs of the latter were frequent on the cliffs that August, suggesting that Compton would host a massive flight of the butterfly the following June (it did). Here a father can relax, and listen to England's fast bowlers blasting South Africa away on the radio (Devon Malcolm, nine for 57), whilst the children play in the sea. Our first and last butterflies of the trip were Clouded Yellows. It was the sort of holiday after which one needs a couple of days off, to recover.
Unfortunately, September was dire, the poorest since 1983, and early October brought some sharp frosts. This terminated the 1994 butterfly season prematurely, though the odd Clouded Yellow was seen on the Isle of Wight when I returned there on a work visit in October. But the 1994 butterfly season had set its successor up very well.
The new year was seen in on a clear, black night, with England under-performing in a Test match Down Under. Winter was wet and mild, and London experienced its wettest January. The first butterfly of 1995 did not appear until March 10th, late, when a golden Brimstone was seen dancing through sunlight that slanted its way past Beech trunks on the slopes of Three Groves Wood, by Strawberry Banks in the Frome valley east of Stroud. Such sightings can only portend a good summer. Every winter Brimstones hibernate on the south-facing slope of the sheltered combe at the mouth of that wood. They seem to have habitual wintering quarters.
The National Trust had just acquired Collard Hill in mid-Somerset, a stretch of steep downland on the south-facing escarpment of the Polden Hills, the calcareous clay ridge that runs east from Bridgwater to Street before turning south towards Somerton. Collard Hill offered spectacular views over the Somerset Levels and along the flanks of the Poldens. Moreover, the hillside, which had been heavily grazed by sheep, shouted two words at me: Large Blue. It would need to be assessed by the Large Blue experts, Jeremy Thomas and Dave Simcox. The butterfly was thriving at Green Down, a Somerset Wildlife Trust reserve a few kilometres away, and there were aspirations to restore it to other sites in the Poldens. Little is known about the history of Collard Hill, though for years the word FISONS was embossed on its steep slope, as a novel advertisement aimed at travellers on the Somerton-to-Street road below – and perhaps as a statement of the power of agriculture in Somerset. In 1995 the gentler slopes consisted of fertilised rye grass, cut annually for silage. These areas have since reverted splendidly to calcareous grassland and have become heavily studded with ant hills. The place was obviously keen on butterflies, offering up the first Small Tortoiseshell of the year and a few Brown Hairstreak eggs on young Blackthorn shoots. There was history in the making here.
In early April the first migrant butterflies showed up, testosterone-loaded male Red Admirals and a Painted Lady, battling for possession of a sheltered hilltop glade high up in the Blackdown Hills, south of Taunton. It seemed a long way to travel, just to squabble, but these boys knew where females in need of their services would appear, and were up for it. Spring was breaking through nicely, only for a cloudy northerly airflow to develop, which dominated for the rest of the month. May then got off to a flyer, bringing out the first Pearl-bordered Fritillaries in Cirencester Park Woods and on Daneway Banks, at the head of the Frome valley in the Cotswolds. But once again, spring capitulated, after having all but broken through. The weather collapse commenced on May 8th, Victory in Europe Day, fifty years on. Butterflying stalled, then the butterflies themselves stalled as quotidian gloom descended, alleviated only by a couple of bright days in late May. Gradually the spring butterflies gave up the ghost, exasperated. Like us, they can take only so much.
There was only one thing to do, work caterpillars – and there was an urgent need to look closely at Scotch Argus larvae on Arnside Knott, which had been too heavily grazed. Scotch Argus larvae, like most other members of the Brown family, Satyridae, are night feeders. That meant there was time for short visits to Meathop Moss and Yewbarrow, two of my heartlands at Witherslack in south Cumbria, before ascending the Knott at dusk. At Meathop Moss, a raised bog, Green Hairstreak females were observed laying eggs on the buds and terminal leaves of Cranberry. The young larvae would then feed on, and even in, the developing fruits. In the secret glades surrounded by ancient Yew trees on lonely Yewbarrow, Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were numerous, feeding on Bird's-foot Trefoil flowers, and fresh males of its close cousin the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary were also emerging. Then, in the midst of them all was an extremely pale, almost white specimen. But was it a Pearl-bordered or a Small Pearl-bordered, euphrosyne or selene? This proved to be one of the hardest pieces of butterfly identification I have ever attempted. It was a male, that much could be determined by its behaviour, and it was obviously freshly emerged. Of course I had no net, and the beast proved distinctly camera-shy. The underside, which should have revealed all, proved to be decidedly unhelpful. Before it flew tantalisingly away over a belt of Hazel bushes, it visited a few flowers for nectar – Cat's-ears – and it completely ignored the Bird's-foot Trefoil flowers that the Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were favouring. This pushed it towards Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary. My guess is that it was Boloria selene ab. pallida, but the truth is that these things are sent to try us – and they do.
At dusk, naturalist colleague John Hooson, MSc student Steve Beaumont and I ascended the Knott, to search for Scotch Argus larvae. Our aim was to set Steve up to conduct an ecological study of the larvae. A Little Owl repeatedly mocked us from the bushes, so much so that a ten-minute bombardment of scree and clitter was necessary to move the irritating thing on. The literature on finding Scotch Argus larvae proved misleading, not least a 1895 claim by a Mr Haggart of Galashiels that, ‘no artificial light can be used as the larvae immediately drop down.’ In three heady hours we struggled to find six larvae between us, finding none until it was pitch black. Part of the problem was that under lamplight they mimic the dead flower heads of Blue Moor-grass, in size, shape and colour. Interestingly, the two smallest larvae were both feeding on Sheep's Fescue, the larger ones on Blue Moor-grass. We returned the following night, which was warmer; so much warmer that I stumbled upon an active pairing of Homo sapiens: ‘I hope you have twins, dear!’ I muttered as a blessing on their union, and scuttled off. We found seven larvae, all in the final instar and feeding on Blue Moor-grass, all in turf about 10 centimetres tall. Steve went on to spend several more nights looking for Scotch Argus larvae on the Knott, though he was hampered by a lengthy spell of utterly vile weather in mid-June. His conclusion was that, on Arnside Knott, the butterfly requires turf that is at least 8 centimetres tall during May and June. Had he been able to start earlier in the year he could have investigated whether the very small larvae prefer Sheep's Fescue, then grade on to the broader-leaved Blue Moor-grass as they develop. Years later, Paul Kirkland from Butterfly Conservation published an excellent study on the ecology of Scotch Argus larvae, indicating that grasslands can be grazed too tight for this lovely butterfly.
Diary, June 12th 1995: Vile. Uniform leaden grey skies, slow moving on a northerly airstream. Again cold, only 14°C max. Identical weather to what we had late last May. All because for the last three weeks a big anticyclone has been stuck in the Atlantic. Had it become stuck a few hundred miles further east we would be having a heatwave. As it is we've got the central heating on and the chickens have gone off lay.
Eventually the grot cleared away, and the high pressure moved in. I was in Cornwall on the first sunny day, June 21st, close to where my paternal grandfather grew up, a blacksmith's son in Holywell, near Newquay. On Holywell Dunes the Silver-studded Blue was emerging in numbers. This was subspecies cretaceus, which breeds on Bird's-foot Trefoil. And they were unusually large, almost the size of a Common Blue. Fortunately the first brood of the Common Blue had finished, for separating the two species out on the wing might have proved difficult. The females were laying their eggs close to small clumps of Bird's-foot Trefoil amongst open sand, placing the tiny white discs on the undersides of leaves and on moss fronds. The incredible thing is that Holywell Dunes did not exist in grandfather's day, being less than a century old. Grandfather caught Methodism, Strict Methodism at that, and ‘went abroad’ as the Cornish say, settling near Gloucester.
The last few days had been set aside, optimistically, for the Mountain Ringlet on the Lake District high fells. John Hooson and I had found a student, Sarah Shannon from Leicester University, who was keen to do some research on the butterfly for an MSc thesis. Get her to follow the egg-laying females, we thought, and do detailed vegetation quadrats where eggs are laid. Incredibly, the weather came good, and remained so for the rest of the summer: 1995 had broken through. The Mountain Ringlets were only just starting to emerge when I arrived up on Wrynose Pass on June 26th. England was beating the West Indies at Lords, with Dominic Cork taking seven wickets. The world was righting itself.
So was the weather. In fact, from the point of view of studying the Mountain Ringlet the weather righted itself rather too well, for it quickly became too hot for a dark butterfly whose body is covered in black hairs designed to absorb and retain heat in a cool montane environment. In hot weather this butterfly, the females especially, resort to hiding, wings closed, in Mat-grass tussocks – for ages. Hooson, Shannon and Oates stormed the Langdale Pikes, where my rucksack thermometer soared to 26 degrees Celsius. We managed to spot one egg-laying female, who laid two eggs on horizontal blades of Sheep's Fescue grass at lunchtime. Then the ringlets effectively went into a siesta. Eventually the three of us staggered down to the Stickle Tarn Inn to rehydrate. The following day was even hotter, with the Lakeland valley roads melting. We took a more gentle route, up to the saddle between Fleetwith Pike and Grey Knotts, above the Honister Pass youth hostel. There, the Mountain Ringlet was emerging in numbers, Big Bang day, but again most females were shading in grass tussocks. Only two egg-laying females were seen, again laying on horizontal blades of Sheep's Fescue amongst Mat-grass tussocks. I watched one shading female for an hour and a half, before she eventually sprang into action and laid a couple of eggs. At one point a fell runner sped past us, in training for a 72-hour, fourteen-peak marathon to be staged in mid-July, and for which Hooson was also training. There was madness on the high fells that day. Day three was hotter and madder still: the ringlets had retreated to the tussocks before we ascended, and were not in the egg-laying vein at all. Instead, I came upon an elderly couple, National Trust members it later transpired, standing stark naked beneath a minor waterfall: ‘Come on in!’ they shouted, ‘it's fantastic!’ History does not record whether their invitation was accepted or not. Sarah remained up on the fells for several more sweltering days, but only saw a few more Mountain Ringlet eggs laid. The experience probably put her off butterflies for life.
The High Fells had not experienced anything as mad as the 1995 Mountain Ringlet Expedition since Samuel Taylor Coleridge's great ‘Circumcision of the Lakes’ in August 1802. Then, Coleridge set off for a two-week feral jaunt, taking the house broom handle as a staff, and leaving the besom twigs scattered on the kitchen floor. That angered Mrs C considerably, for the marriage was already in free fall. He lost the broom handle during a lunatic descent of Skiddaw. We know all this because he sent a detailed account of the expedition to the woman of his insatiable dreams – who was not Mrs C but one Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law. Coleridge effectively invented fell walking, and probably fell running. He would have been an excellent partner on the 1995 Mountain Ringlet expedition.
July dragged on in stupefying heat. The Purple Emperor emerged only in low numbers, and went over rapidly in the heat. White Admiral numbers, however, were impressive. Several days were spent searching for High Brown Fritillaries in the New Forest. But I was too late, the butterfly had almost certainly died out. It turned out that the female I had seen in Matley Passage, south-east of Lyndhurst, back in early July 1992 was the last High Brown Fritillary recorded in the New Forest, formerly one of its national headquarters. Radical changes in the Forest had led to the collapse of the metapopulation structure so vital to the butterfly. The High Brown had been booted out of the inclosures (the woods) by twentieth-century forestry and had become restricted to the open heaths, where the bracken stands it could breed in jumped in and out of suitability. We must stand in silence for the New Forest adippe.
My sojourn in the Forest had one memorable moment of gross eccentricity. Late on in a sweltering day, of intense heat and high humidity, I wandered off the beaten track in one of the less well-frequented inclosures and followed the course of a gravel-bottomed stream in search of a pool in which to bathe. This was a tradition amongst the old New Forest butterfly collectors; Sydney Castle Russell himself was a keen exponent. Within seconds of immersing myself in a cool shaded pool a swarm of teenage girls burst through the bracken. Worse, they were French, and though hopelessly lost, ooh-la-laad me mercilessly. Unfortunately, I could understand them. There is only one thing a gentleman can do in such a situation.
There was some good news on the High Brown Fritillary front that summer. The butterfly resurged well on the steep Bracken slopes of Bossington Hill, near Porlock on the edge of Exmoor. Surveying for them here, however, necessitated swimming, breast stroke, through head high Bracken, with bramble and rubble underfoot. Up at Bircher Common, in north Herefordshire, the High Brown positively abounded, at least over the core 10-hectare area of Bracken. Best of all, the southern end of the Malvern Hills revealed a respectable flight of this magnificent golden insect for the first time in years, on the slope below the obelisk in Eastnor Park and on the east-facing slope of Swinyard Hill. Numbers seemed to be back to their 1988 levels, though way below the abundance of 1986. Sadly, though, the High Brown Fritillary collapsed horrifically throughout the Malverns after the summer of 1995, and now appears to be lost from those loveliest of hills, from Edward Elgar's heartland. I saw my last of the Malvern High Browns that summer. It hurts now to return, not least because I believe conservation effort could have been more successful there.
Thursday July 20th dawned cloudless and calm – the sort of weather in which The Sun newspaper runs its ‘Phew What a Scorcher!’ headline. Indeed, the temperature went on to reach 32 degrees in central London. It was the National Trust's centenary year, and staff were invited to a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, attended by Her Majesty, a small prim figure beneath a pale green parasol, held perpendicularly without a single waver. She was, as ever, Duty personified. I had butterflyed before in St James's Park and knew there was a strong colony of Holly Blue there. Indeed, a dozen freshly emerged males were present, buzzing around bushes. Then, about twenty were seen in the Palace grounds. This was of significance, as nationally the butterfly was at a low ebb at the time: I saw but a singleton in 1994, and had not seen any in 1995 before this day. The Palace gardens also revealed a small colony of Essex Skipper along the lake margins, and a large colony of the rare mining bee Macropis europaea. It was well worth having to wear a suit and tie.
August began with a heatwave, and carried on regardless. It was the hottest August since records began in the seventeenth century, and almost the hottest month ever. It was also the sunniest August, and the fourth driest. August 1st was staggeringly hot, and was spent unwisely trying to count hyperactive Silver-spotted Skippers whizzing over the short turf of Watlington Hill, my old butterflying heartland on the Chilterns escarpment. It was the best flight of this challenging little butterfly I had ever encountered, certainly in terms of density of butterflies, though the population at the MOD's Porton Down in Wiltshire ranges over a far greater area. The skippers were omnipresent. At one stage a dozen or so males shot off together in pursuit of a virgin female. God knows what happened when they forced the poor girl to the ground – I had had enough by then and left Nature to sort itself out. The weather had got into a strange phase: day after cloudless day thunder clouds developed in late afternoon, offering a few rumbles, bad-light-stop-play conditions for cricketers, and one or two large drops of rain – before dissipating, to clear into a sultry evening. A hot weekend followed at Kingcombe, in west Dorset, running another butterfly course, only the Clouded Yellows were not in. Indeed, I did not see a Clouded Yellow all year. They tend to take a season off after a bumper year.
A new anticyclone moved in, this time over northern England. I followed it, with the family, to study the Scotch Argus on Arnside Knott further. We camped at a low-facility camp site on the south-west flank of Arnside Knott. In contrast to the drought conditions down south, the Morecambe Bay limestone hills looked positively verdant, though here too the grasses were destined to brown off as the heat intensified. The Graylings and High Brown Fritillaries were going over fast, but the Scotch Argus was just a little past peak season. My timing was perfect, the females would be laying the bulk of their eggs. Hooson appeared, bronzed, to assist me. We were armed with colour-coded plant support stakes, to insert close to each egg as it was laid, carefully keeping watch on the female. We would return to analyse the vegetation structure at the egg site later. A familiar problem befell us, though: it was so hot that the females were sitting around, wings closed, shading, for ages, comatose.
Diary, August 9th 1995: I followed one from 12.30 until I lost her amongst a sudden bevy of other females at 1.50. She sat still, wings closed, until 1.02 when she literally jumped 30 cm and quickly laid one egg, 6 cm up on dead Blue Moor-grass in a dense, 8 cm tall tussock. After a short bask she jumped again, at 1.07, to lay another egg on a live Sheep's Fescue grass 4 cm up in 7 cm turf, before flying 2 m to settle, wings closed, shading again. At 1.30 she again jumped 30 cm and, after a short crawl, laid 6 cm up on the underside of a Common Tormentil leaf amongst 8 cm tall Blue Moor-grass turf. Then she returned to shading before, suddenly, she joined a loose pack of similar-looking females that arrived in the glade.
The diary continues:
We then spent ages watching inactive females shading before two females suddenly crash-landed at my feet, at 3.06. One of them quickly laid an egg, in a similar situation.
And that was it for the day: four eggs, hours and hours of inaction, and a lot of sunburn. The family had gone off to visit Beatrix Potter, wisely.
A change in tactic was required, so the following day we visited Smardale, a Cumbria Wildlife Trust reserve on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, vaguely near Kirkby Stephen but actually near Nowhere, deep in the heart of tranquillity itself. It is one of the most idyllic, if lonely, places I have ever visited, with an intense spirit of place. The reserve consists of some 2 kilometres of disused railway line (one of dear Dr Beeching's, probably), with steep grassy cuttings and embankments, and a spectacular viaduct over a river valley. Smardale is an essential pilgrimage site for anyone with an interest in our butterflies, and is the only other site in England where the Scotch Argus occurs, after Arnside Knott. Here the butterfly was in stupendous abundance, in a series of colonies strung out along the old railway. It is very much a morning butterfly here, as the afternoon sun leaves many of the colonies in shade. Of course, in the intense heat of August 1995 the females shut up shop for the day at lunchtime, and not a single egg was seen being laid. One of the difficulties was that the butterfly was in such profusion here that males were forever encountering the females, and pestering them, such that egg laying became extremely difficult. The children loved this place deeply, not least the viaduct (by Thomas Bouch). Also, they found Otter spraints along the river and, best of all, piles of White-clawed Crayfish shells left over from Otter meals. On this day the Scotch Argus claimed the crown of Butterfly of the Year 1995.
The summer had another trick up its sleeve. The Brown Hairstreak put on an annus mirabilis show on Noar Hill, back in Hampshire. The emergence began there in late July – the first time I had recorded the butterfly in July at Noar Hill, as traditionally it started there around August 7th. A visit on August 14th produced a tally of 41 in two hours, 25 of them feeding on Hemp Agrimony flowers. This Hairstreak had been relatively numerous on the reserve back in September 1977, but this was significantly better. Perhaps the butterflies were more keen than usual in seeking nectar in the sustained and intense heat? I can offer another theory. Throughout the 1980s and into the nineties Noar Hill was frequented each September by the West Sussex naturalist Doris Ashby. This was her butterfly, and she loved it dearly. Doris was Midhurst born and bred, and spoke with a strong Sussex accent – such that many people found her unintelligible. She was one of the best all-round naturalists I have had the privilege to meet, and entirely self-taught. Her relationship with Nature was deep and honest, and was shared with her beloved dog Cathy, an adorable Battersea dog. She abhorred blood sports, was secretary to the Midhurst branch of the Labour Party, and had worked as a gardener on various big estates. Doris had a dodgy heart and had been instructed to slow down, but being Doris, and it being early spring she did the opposite – and suffered a massive heart attack after a morning watching Adders on a local common. What I witnessed at Noar Hill on August 14th 1995 was the Doris Ashby Memorial Flight.
A long lazy week was spent camping on Compton Farm on the Isle of Wight again, only this year there were no Clouded Yellows. Instead, the Camberwell Beauty had showed up. Some 350 were seen nationally, mainly in eastern counties, having migrated across the North Sea from Scandinavia on easterly winds. They frequented the shady side of Buddleia bushes – apparently, for I never saw one. The downs above Compton had turned grey with drought but were alive with Adonis and Chalkhill Blues. The diary recalls that I spent much time floating on an air bed in Compton Bay contemplating Tennyson's poetical works. After a lengthy debate I decided not to open Tennyson's poetical works but to find out whether they floated or not. They did.
But the great summer of 1995 descended suddenly into the wettest September since 1976. The fine weather returned for October and early November, enabling the Red Admiral to appear in immense numbers, and Small Coppers and Wall Browns to put on a good third brood. Some butterflies lingered on during a decidedly mild November, before a cold December ended what had been the warmest year on record for the UK.
Culturally and historically, the New Forest is the spiritual homeland of butterflying in Britain. For well over a century it was the epicentre of butterfly collecting, being revered by collectors as a place of pilgrimage, a promised land, a place of deep belonging. Throughout these decades the Forest hosted annual influxes of collectors, many of them from London. Collectors came as individuals, as groups of friends, or as families, often for short collecting holidays. During the main season, in July, they occupied most of the inns and boarding houses in Brockenhurst, Lyndhurst and Ringwood, small towns which were endeavouring to become holiday venues. There was also a minor season in late spring. Collectors came from many walks of life, but particularly from the professional and upper classes. A number participated in the often lucrative trade of dealing in specimens and livestock, for one unusual specimen could pay for an entire collecting holiday, or more. Snobbery, competitiveness and downright skulduggery were rampant, along with gross eccentricity.
Collecting, not just of butterflies but also of moths, beetles and bird eggs, and some other taxa, was almost a mania during the Victorian era. The Forest, as it was and is still known, gained a reputation for being a great collecting venue as rail links with London became established, primarily during the 1860s. The Forest, being Crown land, was effectively open-access land at a time when most countryside was distinctly private – and butterflies and moths abounded there. During the heyday of butterfly and moth collecting, from the late 1880s through to the First World War, the pastime generated a massive seasonal industry in the Forest – providing accommodation, food and drink, transport hire (pony and traps and the like) and forest guides. Some of the Forest keepers (crown foresters) ran rather lucrative side-line businesses selling insects and acting as guides, notably the Gulliver family. Livestock and specimens were traded by dealers in hostelries on Saturday nights, particularly in The Rose & Crown in Brockenhurst. The pioneer conservationist W H Hudson (1841–1922) thought very little of it all, describing Lyndhurst in Hampshire Days (1903) as being the place where:
London vomits out its annual crowd of collectors, who fill its numerous and ever-increasing brand-new red-brick lodging houses, and who swarm through all the adjacent woods and heaths, men, women and children (hateful little prigs!) with their vasculums [plants], beer and treacle pots [moth bait], green and blue butterfly nets, killing bottles, and all the detestable paraphernalia of what they would probably call ‘Nature Study’.
Hudson was not normally so vitriolic.
The more experienced collectors were after unusually marked specimens – aberrations or variations – such as the White Admiral with the distinctive white bands completely absent (ab. nigrina) or reduced (ab. semi-nigrina, now called ab. obliterae). Such specimens are symptomatic of strong populations. The collectors particularly prized the greenish colour form of the female Silver-washed Fritillary, form valezina, which at the time was regarded as being a New Forest speciality. They would go to great lengths to procure desired specimens. For example, one account in The Entomologist magazine reads:
In August, 1887, whilst driving in a dog-cart from Christchurch, I saw Apatura iris [Purple Emperor] flying along the hedge of a bare roadside. I immediately gave the reins to a friend who was in the cart with me and pursued it with the dog-cart whip, and through a piece of luck I managed to disable it enough to capture it. It was a fine male specimen and not in the least damaged.
It was to the enclosed, ungrazed woods on the more clayey soils that the collectors flocked, though they also made sorties out onto the open heaths. The woods, or inclosures as they are known, had been created under various Acts of Parliament. Some had been established by sowing acorns. Perhaps the most significant of these Acts was that of 1851, known as the New Forest Deer Removal Act, which effectively transferred the Forest from being a royal hunting forest to being a centre for producing oak timber, primarily for the Royal Navy. This act brought about the slaughter of almost the entire deer population – the animals took decades to return. The removal of deer (mainly Fallow Deer) must have led to massive regeneration of brambles and scrub, to the benefit of many butterflies and moths. Many of the descriptions in entomological literature tell of broad rides fringed with luxurious growths of bramble and shrubs such as sallows.
It is difficult for the modern naturalist to imagine the super-abundance of butterflies in the New Forest inclosures of old. Sydney Castle Russell (1866–1955) describes a visit during the hot summer of 1892:
As I slowly walked along, butterflies alarmed by my approach arose in immense numbers to take refuge in the trees above. They were so thick that I could hardly see ahead and indeed resembled a fall of brown leaves.
The summer of 1893 was probably the greatest summer in the history of butterflying in Britain, completely outgunning the likes of 1976. One experienced collector had a remarkable experience in one of the inclosures near Ringwood:
I followed the bed of one of the streams in search of water to drink, and was disappointed in not finding sufficient to quench my thirst, not a pool being left, but I was repaid by the sighting I witnessed; the said bed of the stream for more than a mile was literally crowded with butterflies, the bulk of them being adippe [High Brown Fritillary], paphia [Silver-washed Fritillary] and sibylla [White Admiral].
The great lepidopterist and wildlife artist F W Frohawk (1861–1946) made almost annual pilgrimages to the Forest, and became known by fellow enthusiasts as The Old Man of the Forest. A ride in Parkhill Inclosure, south-east of Lyndhurst, is dedicated to him. He recalls his first visit to the Forest, entering the woods just after a thunderstorm in July 1888:
I shall never forget the impression it made upon my friend and self. Insects of various kinds literally swarmed. Butterflies were in profusion. A. paphia [Silver-washed Fritillary] were in hordes, the var. valezina was met every few yards, as were A. aglaia [Dark Green Fritillary] and A. adippe [High Brown Fritillary]. L. camilla [White Admiral] were sailing about everywhere. On a bank under a sallow in the sunshine a large female A. iris [Purple Emperor] with wings expanded, evidently washed out of the sallow by heavy rain. N. polychloros [Large Tortoiseshell] was of frequent occurrence.
Other, less desirable insects also abounded. Castle Russell recalls: ‘A fly resembling the common house fly [the muscid Hydrotaea irritans] was in clouds and followed one in a dense stream. Immediately you stopped ... they settled on you in a mass.’ He covered his exposed skin with nicotine juice obtained from his pipe, as did other collectors. Some wore beekeeping veils.
Perhaps the most eccentric collector was Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe, of Calke Abbey (now National Trust) in Derbyshire. A second-generation collector, Sir Vauncey was a recluse who surely suffered from what is now recognised as obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). He specialised in Lepidoptera and taxidermy (mainly birds), and amassed perhaps the greatest collection of British butterflies ever assembled, collecting in the field with his trusty head gamekeeper Agathus Pegg, and by means of his chequebook at sales at Stevens Auction Rooms in The Strand and privately. Sir Vauncey had the habit of issuing forth from the Crown Hotel in Lyndhurst and bagging an inclosure, for a day, or two, or three. He would station flunkies at the entrances to keep out the riff-raff. This led to a series of rumpuses, for he was deemed to be denying rights of access. He banned his four daughters from marrying, communicated with them mainly by means of notes conveyed by footmen, and banished one of them altogether for smoking. Perhaps predictably, he outlived his son and heir. When Sir Vauncey died, in 1924, the bulk of his vast Lepidoptera collection was sold in lots to meet death duties. Many entomological store boxes remain at Calke, containing uncatalogued specimens. This residue includes several boxes of valezina Silver-washed Fritillary females from the Forest, making one wonder just how many valezina females a man actually needs.
All this troubled the Hon. Gerald Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor (senior Crown officer), who published his memoirs in a book entitled Thirty Years in the New Forest. But Lascelles was heavily outnumbered, and effectively powerless. Even his keepers ignored his instructions.
Of course this Elysium could not last. A generation of collectors was lost to the First World War, along with cohorts of Forest trees. Then, the sleepy old Office of Woods, which had administered the Forest for the Crown, was replaced by the Forestry Commission, a new organisation geared to economic forestry using fast-growing and largely non-native conifers. The war fellings were accepted by the collectors as a necessary evil, not least because several of the fritillary butterflies thrived in the resultant clearings and young plantations, but the Forestry Commission changed the feel of the place greatly and became instantly disliked by collectors and naturalists alike. One collector bemoaned, ‘The Forest generally appears to be well on the way to becoming a second Black Forest of pines.’ The Second World War changed the character of the Forest woods further, and indeed of the open Forest. The writing was on the wall – a silvicultural revolution was in full swing.
Matters steadily worsened during the decades after the war. Coniferisation became rampant, the ride-edge shrub zone – so crucial to butterflies – was systematically obliterated, and after 1965 commoners’ ponies and cattle were finally allowed into most inclosures, to the great detriment of the ground flora. In many parts of the Forest deer numbers rose astronomically, which led to Fallow Deer browsing out the White Admiral's Honeysuckle. By 1970 more than 60 per cent of the inclosures were under conifers. It then became apparent that the Commission planned to reduce broad-leaved woodland to mere cosmetic fringes around pure conifer plantations. In the ensuing row the Minister of Agriculture issued a moratorium prohibiting further fellings of broad-leaved woodland. That moratorium, known as the Minister's Mandate, is still in place today. Ironically, it led to the decline of the ‘spring fritillaries’ – by cutting off the supply of clearings from broad-leaved woodland on which they had become strongly dependent.
Today, many of the New Forest inclosures consist of anodyne plantations of non-native conifers, through which the wind soughs vacantly. We are told that William the Conqueror, who founded the New Forest, would recognise today's Forest. He would not, and neither would the old butterfly collectors, due to the gross intrusions of the twentieth-century silvicultural revolution, of which the Forest's woodland butterflies were unscheduled victims. In places there are narrow vistas back into history. Pondhead Inclosure, to the immediate south-east of Lyndhurst, is perhaps the best relic of the New Forest inclosures of old. Outside the silvicultural inclosures – which were admittedly started for silviculture – elements of the old Forest are still recognisable, notably the ancient pasture-woodlands such as those at Mark Ash and Pinnick Wood, and vistas across the ancient heathland, both dry and wet. But it is hard to wander anywhere in today's New Forest without hearing the sound of traffic, at least distantly, especially when the leaves are off. And everywhere, against the skyline, near and far, stand sullied ranks of sombre, brooding alien conifers. On the eastern skyline glows the towering beacon of the Fawley oil refinery.
Much laudable heathland restoration work has been carried out by the Forestry Commission over the last two decades – restoring bogs that had been partly drained in order to provide better grazing land, removing invasive Rhododendron and, at places such as Highland Water, removing some of the more modern conifer plantations to restore open heathland. Better still, from the narrow point of view of the woodland butterflies, since the mid-1990s commoners’ stock (ponies and cattle) have again been excluded from most of the enclosed woods and the fences reinstated. Habitat conditions have improved dramatically for some butterflies following the removal of commoners’ stock, notably for long-grass species such as the Ringlet which had become a rarity, but in many of the woods flowering bramble patches are scarce and few Honeysuckle tangles exist for the White Admiral. The latter, for so long one of the Forest's most ubiquitous butterflies, is now decidedly scarce here in its former national stronghold, on account of deer browsing and because forestry thinning works have acted heavily against it. Mercifully, the Silver-washed Fritillary, with which it flew in close companionship, remains reasonably well established in many inclosures, though nowhere is it remotely as profuse as it once was. Var. valezina, as the old collectors knew the beautiful fulvous-green colour form of the female, still occurs – sparingly.
Recently, the fortunes of the Pearl-bordered Fritillary have turned round wondrously in its traditional heartland north-east of Brockenhurst, where it became very scarce during the 1980s. There, this nationally rare springtime butterfly has resurged spectacularly as a result of ride widening work and the felling of some large blocks of conifers. Its congener, the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, which was always a butterfly of damp hollows in the New Forest, is still hanging on, mainly in the Forest's south-west sector, both inside some of the inclosures there and along stream sides in the open heath. Formerly, though, it was far more widespread. The third of the ‘spring fritillaries’, the Duke of Burgundy, appears to be extinct in the Forest – the intrusion of ponies into its favoured inclosures probably proved too much for it – but it is a tenacious little butterfly, capable of pulling off surprises. The Dark Green Fritillary has increased somewhat of late, at least on the open heaths and in some of the inclosures between Brockenhurst and Beaulieu. Best of all, the Purple Emperor has made a most welcome return to the fringes of the Forest, albeit at low population density. The golden High Brown Fritillary, sadly, is almost certainly extinct. I have the melancholy privilege of having seen the last of the New Forest High Browns, back in 1992. Outside the woods, the drier heaths are currently just a little too heavily grazed for most butterfly species, though Grayling and Silver-studded Blue colonies are plentiful enough.
But forests can restore themselves, though they function over longer timescales than we do, and butterflies are tougher than we sometimes think. Despite everything, the New Forest inclosures remain of realisable potential for many of our butterfly species, whilst the open heaths and pasture-woodlands merely require a drop in grazing pressure for butterfly populations to increase spectacularly. This will occur in time. Time creates difficulties, and time alone will solve them; it is merely a matter of how we work with time. In time, lovers of our butterflies may return to their New Forest heartland.