The summer of 1996 had set up its successor nicely. The new year started amidst a prolonged period of cold coming from the east. I welcomed it in whilst taking my cats for a midnight walk across snowy fields. Earth stood hard as iron. It took five days for the temperature to rise above freezing. Then, a dry January developed, which of course gave way to a mild, wet and windy February, which predictably led into a dry, warm and sunny March. I got through the winter on a diet of Brown, Purple and White-letter Hairstreak eggs, searching for them on Blackthorn stems and around oak and elm buds respectively. All three seemed to be in unusually good numbers, presumably as a result of the hot summer sequence. Then, at the end of January, Marsh Fritillary larvae started to emerge out of hibernation at Strawberry Banks, near Stroud.
The butterfly season began impressively, on March 2nd, with first a Brimstone and then a Peacock followed by a Comma, all in Three Groves Wood, a classic Cotswold Beech wood by Strawberry Banks; all within a whirligig five-minute spell as spring magically burst through. The year was off to a flyer, and we were seriously overdue a good spring. We got it, almost.
Hours were spent studying Pearl-bordered Fritillary larvae in Cirencester Park Woods, mainly in lunchtime visits from our office in Cirencester. They have the habit of basking on dead leaves whilst the day is warming up, favouring oak and bramble leaves, close to the violets on which they feed. When populations are high, as they were in early 1997, they are relatively easy to find – in the right weather conditions. One magical visit produced 20 in an hour. Once the day has warmed up properly, and the leaf litter has dried out, though, they go into feed-and-retreat mode, in which they hide under dead leaves for long periods, only emerging for brief frenetic feeding spells, consuming fresh violet leaves, buds and flowers. The amount of feeding damage on the violets in one of the Cirencester Park Woods clearings, a spot known as Botany Bay, was enormous, suggesting a massive emergence to come. This was a clearing of some 2.5 hectares where mature broad-leaved trees and Scots Pines had been felled the previous winter, and promptly planted up with Corsican Pines. Colonisation took place on Day One of the 1996 flight season for, apart from rows of young pines and a scatter of retained young oaks, the clearing consisted mainly of myriad bramble seedlings and clumps of Common Dog-violet amongst tree leaf litter – and little else. Patches of Bugle and Primrose grew along the adjoining rides. This was paradise for the Pearl-bordered Fritillary. They don't actually need anything else, just scattered violets amongst leaf litter, and as little green grass as possible – for green grass cools the microclimate down, and the caterpillars need heat.
Butterflies were emerging unusually early: Orange-tip, Green-veined White and Small White on the last day of March, Holly Blue on April 1st and Green Hairstreak as early as April 8th in the Cotswolds. Duke of Burgundy appeared at Noar Hill on the 10th, though much later at Rodborough Common. Grizzled Skippers were out in early April in amazing numbers. I saw impressive flights of them on the North Downs near Dorking, on the East Sussex downs either side of Lewes, and on Hod Hill in north-east Dorset. It was definitely the butterfly of the month throughout southern England. All told, I saw nineteen species by the end of April, a third of our fauna, and could have managed one or two more.
The weather wobbled late in the month, which meant that the Cirencester Park Woods Pearl-bordered Fritillaries did not start to emerge until early May. Then the woods erupted with them. In Botany Bay clearing I counted 100 in 23 heady minutes on May 3rd. I would have been able to count far more than that later, but something despicable happened: the weather collapsed, horribly, on May 5th. First it rained, hard and near-continuously, then it became cold, with frequent heavy showers. Ash leaves and Bracken fronds were frosted off. The Pearl-bordered Fritillaries made the most of whatever sunny spells came their way, roosting during inclement weather on bramble stems, Bluebell heads and dead Bracken fronds, often for a day or two at a time. Somehow a great many of them managed to sit out the mid-May deluges, whilst others held back from emerging from their pupae until the weather improved. Spring butterflies have to be tough and able to leap into action the moment the sun comes out. This one is Tough, and springs instantly into the air as the sun appears. All butterflies need to be able to stagger their emergence, usually over a period of 10–20 days, so that an entire brood does not get written off by a single bad-weather event.
In good weather at the end of May I carried out mark-and-recapture work on Pearl-bordered Fritillaries in clearings at the north end of Cirencester Park Woods. These young plantations were separated by blocks of mature trees but linked by a mix of open and overhung rides. It was hard work, for the butterfly is difficult to catch, especially in flight. In these woods, there is too much snaring bramble for net swishing, so one has to drop down on one knee and quickly drop the net over a basking or feeding butterfly. Knee pads are essential, to prevent impalement on bramble thorns. The work determined that Pearl-bordered Fritillaries move quite freely between clearings during good weather. One female travelled as far as 4.5 kilometres, over arable fields, being accidentally found in the upper Frome valley. Some individuals lived for as long as three weeks.
The family wanted to go somewhere nice for half term. The weather said Go East, so we drove to the Norfolk Broads, a journey of some five hours. Except by boat, public access to the Broads is poor, due to intensely private large estates and a paucity of rights of way. Families in search of wildlife experiences are effectively restricted to pay-for-entry nature reserves. The children loved the place, its Swallowtails, and above all the constant bird song all around them. Millie, a budding naturalist if ever there was one, found several Willow Warblers’ nests. Cuckoos called all through the mornings, and Marsh Harriers hung meditatively in azure skies. Our first Swallowtail flew over us as we were picnicking, fifteen minutes after we had arrived. But they were in aloof mood, flying across the lodes (ditches) and scarcely visiting flowers. We had one good session with three males visiting Yellow Iris and Red Campion flowers at Hickling Broad, in a sheltered area along the boardwalk called Derrys, a renowned spot for close encounters with the Lord of the Broads. But after two glorious days a strong east wind sprang up. Swallowtails detest wind, retreating to sheltered areas in the lee of trees and perching interminably on reed heads there.
June became the wettest of the century in England and Wales. The weather was particularly savage during the Wimbledon fortnight. June butterflies, such as the Large Blue, suffered accordingly. Yet the midsummer butterflies were emerging earlier than normal, having got ahead of themselves as their larvae had grown rapidly during the fine spring. Marbled White, for example, made its appearance on June 9th at Rodborough Common, and a visit to Meathop Moss in south Cumbria on Midsummer Day found Large Heath fully out, and High Brown Fritillaries emerging in numbers on the nearby hills. At Meathop, Swallows were swooping low over the bog, picking off Large Heaths as they bobbed about above the cottongrass. Then the weather worsened as a front became stuck over England, and June ended rottenly. The White Admiral, a butterfly highly prone to being knocked out by poor midsummer weather, suffered badly. It had an especially difficult time in Alice Holt Forest, down in Hampshire, where contractors working under the antagonistic name of Euroforest were harvesting trees, and pulverising the butterfly's breeding grounds with considerable insensitivity.
We were due a poor July. Rather incredibly, we got a reasonable one. There was even the opportunity for a three-day Mountain Ringlet expedition to the Lakeland fells, primarily to follow the egg-laying females. With this butterfly it is imperative to pick the right weather – and an anticyclone was stationed over western Britain. Go! The valley farmers were busy making hay and the rivers were quietening down. Mountain Ringlet numbers were, though, disappointing on the slopes of Grey Knotts, above the Honister Pass youth hostel, but increased the higher we ascended. Perhaps the butterfly was starting to go over at the lower levels? The following day, July 9th, a more ambitious route was taken, over the Langdale Pikes. That is as demanding a day's butterflying as any on offer in the British Isles. The weather was cloudless, with the temperature reaching 23 degrees on the mountains. From Dungeon Ghyll we took the arduous route up Mark Gate to Thorn Crag and towards the summit of Pavey Ark, then over to the flanks of Thunacar Knott. Mountain Ringlets were in goodly numbers over an extensive area of west-facing slopes above Thorn Crag and in pockets around Thunacar Knott. But it was too hot for them, and the females had taken up shading in the Mat-grass tussocks. Thunder was brewing there, unforecast; it did not materialise but we took no chances, and got down quickly, to swim in a deep sun-drenched pool. The following day the females were shading by 11 am, on the slopes of Cold Pike and Wrynose Breast, above Wrynose Pass. The journey home from this trip was difficult – my companion, my eldest daughter, insisted on playing a Spice Girls CD for the entire journey. In desperation I started translating ‘Spice Up Your Life’ into Latin (Populus mundi condi vester vita! Hic quassate ad sinistrum, etc.).
It was Emperor time, only there were precious few of them about. But it was worse than that: I had spent so little time working them over the previous ten years that I had all but lost the ability to find them, especially as the population in my beloved Alice Holt Forest was at a low ebb, due to Euroforest's merciless activities. A diary entry for a visit to Alice Holt's Straits Inclosure on July 19th recalls: Nightmare visit to the sound of chain-saws ripping through oak. Horrific dearth of butterflies – even the common Browns were scarce. No White Admiral, which is unthinkable. I had struggled to glimpse one Emperor in the woods west of Mottisfont in west Hampshire and failed altogether in West Sussex. Then, accompanied by Dr Chris Luckens, an entomological GP, I saw a splendid female in Abbots Wood Inclosure in Alice Holt. It was no good, my relationship with the one butterfly that mattered most to me had all but dwindled away. I had been hijacked by nature conservation.
August started and ended wet but was otherwise superb. It began at Kingcombe in west Dorset, with my annual butterfly-course weekend. Brown Hairstreaks were emerging on Lydlinch Common, outside Sturminster Newton. We found a fresh female and two males settled in – and I mean in – an Ash tree. They were busy probing the following spring's tiny black buds for some sugary sustenance. Then something Ghastly and unprecedented happened on my Kingcombe course – it rained. Death By PowerPoint? No! Never! We looked at the centre's butterfly collection, donated by Bill Shreeves, who had collected butterflies as a boy at Christ's Hospital school a decade before me. There were stories in each of those specimens. There were specimens there from the woods in which Bill and I had gone under the spell of butterflying – Pearl-bordered and Small Pearl-bordered fritillaries, and some Duke of Burgundies too, all from Marlpost Wood, near Southwater. And some old specimens from the New Forest, bought or handed down, collected by ace Edwardian collector and dealer A B Farn. Then the rain eased, so we went out, finding Grizzled Skipper larvae in rolled-up Wild Strawberry leaves over bare clinkers in the old railway cutting at Powerstock Common, a sizeable web of Marsh Fritillary larvae and, surprisingly, some freshly laid Dingy Skipper eggs, indicating that rare second-brood adults were out and about.
The Isle of Wight called, hosting a short camping holiday at Compton Farm. The National Trust warden, Paul Davies, informed me that there had not been any Clouded Yellows on the island all summer – so we immediately saw a large male patrolling the lower slopes of Brook Down. Don't blame the warden, butterflies do things like that on purpose. That trip also brought my ninth and tenth Painted Ladies of the year; they had been conspicuous by their absence, in stark contrast to the previous summer. The diary recalls a plethora of Large White pupae in the Compton Farm campsite washrooms: Counted thirteen in the Gents. Apparently there were even more in the Ladies. Quite a few on the outside walls too. There was a particularly silly one on a loo-roll holder and another on a light switch. Later, at home, I found one in the attic light switch. Beat that! It needed rescuing, of course. Caterpillars can wander far and wide prior to pupating, and find their way into the most incredible places. The following spring a Small White was spotted emerging from a pupa in the redundant keyhole of our front door!
August belonged to the Small Tortoiseshells. They seized the month, outscoring the Peacock and even the cabbage whites. In our garden, counts of over a hundred were made on several occasions. They lasted unusually long into a fair September. They saved their best show for a visit to Hod Hill in early September, the famous old collecting ground above Blandford Forum in Dorset. Hundreds were feeding on Devil's-bit Scabious flowers there, having bred profusely on nettle patches growing in the rampart ditch bottoms.
Gradually, the Small Tortoiseshells went into hibernation, and a pleasant autumn was lorded over by the Red Admiral. There is always one butterfly that claims the autumn for its own. This was a Red Admiral autumn. The weather was ridiculously mild, such that Common Wasp workers persisted almost into the New Year – I suffered the indignity of being stung by one on December 9th.
A severe storm brought 1998 roaring in. It was the fiercest in southern Britain since January 1990, but, flooding apart, it did not do much damage. After nine horrendously wet days January took the pledge and dried out.
February became the warmest on record, both by day and by night. Friday February 13th was remarkable, achieving a maximum of 20 degrees Celsius in Herefordshire. Several Butterfly Conservation volunteers managed to walk Week Minus 6 of their butterfly transect route – the butterfly monitoring season is not scheduled to start before April 1st, when Week 1 commences, but it regularly jumps the gun, notably so in 1998. Butterflies took to the air that day, but so did Hazel pollen, generating one of the worst hay-fever days I have suffered. For the record, I developed the condition aged four, inherited from my mother, and have had it ever since. My allergies have changed over time, moving from grass, sedge and rush pollens to tree pollens. Medication has proved at best mildly effective, and, during my teens, counter-productive – the school doctor put me on sedatives during my O-level summer. None of this has stopped me butterflying, though it can be used as an excuse to avoid paltry corporate events and the like.
March was mild, though dull. Pearl-bordered Fritillary larvae were even more profuse in Botany Bay clearing in Cirencester Park Woods than they had been in 1997. Twenty-five were found there in two hours on March 23rd, many of them nearly full grown. The system needed slowing down. Sure enough, April 1998 was the wettest in England and Wales since 1818. It was also dominated by cold northerly winds. That slowed things down, such that Pearl-bordered Fritillary larvae were still around on May 9th. I searched hard for their pupae then, and later, when the adults were emerging, by looking for freshly emerged butterflies drying their wings, in order to home in on the vacated pupal case. However, the mysteries of where this butterfly pupates have evaded me: I have never found one. The larvae definitely move away from the violets on which they have been feeding, and I suspect the freshly emerged adults crawl some way before expanding their wings. Someone else can crack the mysteries of where the Pearl-bordered Fritillary pupates. I have failed.
The first of Cirencester Park Woods Pearl-bordered Fritillaries appeared on May 15th. This year they were in luck, for the weather was terrific between the 12th and the 22nd – which is enough for a spring butterfly to do its thing. June, though, was extremely cloudy, and wet, and Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were rapidly eroded away. February had actually been better! It was a struggle merely to carry out the weekly butterfly monitoring transect at Rodborough Common.
July was little better. It was not especially wet, just sunless, and went down as the dullest since 1934. We were worried about the Heath Fritillary on Exmoor and the High Brown Fritillary on Exmoor and in Herefordshire and the Malverns. The Heath Fritillary was collapsing on Exmoor, and not simply because of poor weather – if it lives on Exmoor it has to cope with Extreme Weather, full stop. One of the best colonies, in Halse Combe on the edge of Porlock, had all but died out. There the butterfly had gone from abundant to rare within five years – on my watch, and on my patch. Halse Combe was almost bereft of the butterfly's foodplant, Common Cow-wheat. The combe had become dominated by tall dense Bracken, and European Gorse was spreading rampantly. Similar problems were developing in other Heath Fritillary combes. Stock grazing had collapsed, largely at the instigation of the government's new Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) scheme which was (rightly) concerned about the over-grazing that was taking place in other parts of the moor.
Across Porlock Vale, the High Brown Fritillary was found in modest numbers on the lower slopes of Bossington Hill, but again Bracken and gorse were intensifying, and habitat conditions were deteriorating. Up on Bircher Common, in north Herefordshire, the High Brown Fritillary colony seemed to be thriving, though only in a relatively small area of the common. The butterfly, though, was declining rapidly in the Malverns, where a visit by the 1986 Malverns High Brown Fritillary survey gang of Oates and Grove struggled to see three individuals, only.
An expedition was launched to rediscover Purple Emperor in Ashclyst Forest in east Devon, where the butterfly had occurred until about 1990, and following reports of a ‘probable’ sighting. One should always be a trifle sceptical about ‘probable’ Emperors, for 99 per cent of the time this butterfly leaves you in no doubt. With Emperor sightings, ‘if in doubt chuck it out’ is a good maxim. We failed to turn him up, but I made good by seeing an impressive flight at Bookham Common in Surrey. Better still, a splendid female was seen laying eggs at the far end of my beloved Straits Inclosure in Alice Holt Forest, the first Emperor recorded in the wood since 1996. Euroforest's contractors were leaving the wood alone that summer, and its butterflies were returning.
A weekend running a butterflying course at Kingcombe ushered in what proved to be a fair August in the south, though the north had a rotten month. A Clouded Yellow kicked off the weekend – my second of the year. The Brown Hairstreak was starting at Lydlinch Common. However, an early evening walk around Kingcombe meadows found that Purple Hairstreaks were in decidedly low numbers, and down on the coast at Burton Bradstock the small and isolated colony of Lulworth Skipper (which I studied for some years) was having a miserable season. The windblown state of its beloved Tor-grass patches suggested that pulses of severe weather were responsible.
Kingcombe did what it does best and restored the fortunes of the summer. Then, Graylings appeared in stunning numbers on the scarp slope of Selsley Common, just south of Stroud in the Cotswolds. I counted 325 there in a 55-minute amble. I wanted to observe egg laying but it was hot and the females were shading in grass tussocks. The Grayling also impressed during a short holiday in Pembrokeshire, walking sections of the coastal path around St David's with four children, rock pooling, and playing on sandy beaches bedecked with washed-up jellyfish – jellyfish are essential to a good seaside holiday, but so are butterflies. Wall Browns were also impressive, in sheltered places on cliff slopes, rocky outcrops and cliff paths.
Back home, the Chalkhill Blue had erupted at Rodborough Common. Its foodplant, Horseshoe Vetch, had grown unusually lush during the spring, seemingly due to weather conditions. Back at my other home, Selborne, the Brown Hairstreak was out and about in good numbers, for once. And for once they actually outnumbered photographers wanting to photograph them. Perhaps the butterfly had benefited from the late spring, with eggs hatching in early May, so that the larvae avoided the bad April and were then able to feed up fast in reasonable weather during May? The truth is that we have little idea as to what really makes most of these butterflies tick, which means that we can speculate and theorise like mad. That is really what makes butterflying so fascinating.
Yet another mild winter, snow-less down south, introduced the 1999 butterfly season. The children's childhood was passing, and they had scarcely played in snow, let alone gone tobogganing – and this was in the Cotswolds to boot, with a reputation for winter snow. Clouded Yellow larvae successfully got through the winter on the Bournemouth cliff system, monitored by retired biologist Michael Skelton. Home-grown adults began to appear there in March. This was radical stuff, the first evidence of the butterfly surviving the British winter, fuelling the growing conviction amongst British ecologists that climate change was indeed a reality.
But the legacy of the disappointing season of 1998 was already becoming apparent. Pearl-bordered Fritillary larvae were hard to find anywhere in Cirencester Park Woods, and there was such concern over the status of the Marsh Fritillary at Hod Hill, in Dorset, that I hastily organised a gang of four to search for larval webs there in mid-March. We found sixteen larval webs. By Hod Hill's high standards that is poor, but it exceeded expectations and represented a viable population.
April was all over the place: good one week, lousy the next. The first Orange-tip of the year was a gem, a male flying in the garden of the National Trust's moated medieval manor house at Brockhampton in north Herefordshire on April 9th. He fed on Honesty flowers along the moat edge before sauntering off through sunlit damson orchards in full bloom. Such butterflies fly on in the mind. They do, after all, seek eternity.
In early May I was invited back to Noar Hill, to explain why the Duke of Burgundy population was in decline. The place had changed radically since I left in 1992, and from a Burgundy perspective it had not changed for the better. Cowslips had declined considerably in areas which had been major breeding grounds during the 1980s – I had good data to prove it. The sward in these areas had tightened up, choking Cowslips out. Also, the chalk-pit banks, habitually used by the butterfly for breeding, had become far more dominated by scrub. These would not have constituted a problem if other areas had improved in suitability, but none had. In effect, the reserve had declined in suitability significantly. The good news, though, was that Rabbit numbers were low, for high Rabbit populations are anathema to His Grace, shortening the turf height too much and rendering the Cowslips unsuitable for breeding.
Back in the Cotswolds, Green Hairstreak and Dingy Skipper were the two immediate beneficiaries of conservation grazing by the National Trust's new small herd of Belted Galloway cattle at Rodborough Common. Both appeared in pleasing numbers in what was a disappointing May. The grazing, carried out during the winter, had reinvigorated their foodplants, Common Rockrose and Bird's-foot Trefoil respectively. Elsewhere, Pearl-bordered and Marsh Fritillaries both began to emerge on May 15th. They experienced mixed fortunes during an indifferent May: Pearl-bordered Fritillary appeared in at best modest numbers in Cirencester Park Woods, whilst the Marsh Fritillary emerged in bumper numbers on Strawberry Banks – I counted 287 there in an hour on May 27th, regularly counting three or four at a time. Sadly, however, a four-day spell of heavy rains at the start of June decimated these and all other spring species.
June was plagued by stagnant cloud, and was also cool and, in the south-east, unusually wet. Butterflies suffered further. There was a scatter of decent days, or rather decent half-days. One such afternoon produced a delightful flight of the dainty Wood White at Butterfly Conservation's woodland reserve at Monkwood in Worcestershire, visited en route from running a training course on conservation grazing at Plas Tan y Bwlch in Snowdonia. Monkwood had supplied handles for the Harris paint-brush manufacturers, before plastic intervened, so it had a long history of active coppice management. Then the wood became redundant and was put up for sale: Butterfly Conservation came to the rescue, in partnership with the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust. In the late 1990s the Wood White was quite numerous along the narrow, flowery rides, but then the butterfly suddenly nose-dived there and is now almost extinct. There are not many modern-day examples of rare butterflies dying out on nature reserves managed specifically for them, and it is hard to envisage what, if anything, went wrong here. The truth is that despite the best of endeavours conservation effort does not always work.
Neither does parenting. All parents fail every now and then, but the following is an example of extreme failure. After several days of intensive work surveying Heath and High Brown fritillaries on east Exmoor, then High Brown Fritillaries in Herefordshire, and seeing Purple Emperors in Surrey on my ‘day off’, I deemed it sensible to shoot up to the Lake District early one Sunday morning in pursuit of the Mountain Ringlet. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. To compound that, as I was leaving I inquired whether any of the family wished to come. Two girls, aged nine and six, immediately volunteered, including Millie who was a veteran of the Great 1996 Mountain Ringlet expedition and knew what she was letting herself in for. The weather was set fair, very fair. The girls bundled themselves into the car, followed by camping equipment, books, CDs, cuddly toys etc., and off we went. I wanted to check out the Blea Rigg colony on the Langdale Pikes, last visited in 1992. The M6 was bloody, but we eventually squeezed into the last parking space in the Dungeon Ghyll car park and, rather in the manner of Abraham and Isaac, started up the mountain. The girls skipped on ahead, their doting father lagging behind, carrying Everything. Lunch was taken by Stickle Tarn, and toes were dipped in the crystal water whilst cotton-wool clouds scudded past the sublime landform of Harrison Stickle. The girls were in paradise, and knew it. Up on Blea Rigg, I set them up making fairies out of cast-off pieces of Herdwick sheep wool and floating them down a little waterfall, and sauntered off to find the ringlets. Unfortunately, the butterfly proved hard to find, having moved location.
At that point I somehow forgot that I had taken two children up the mountain with me. It took a while to find them, one weeping helplessly, the other hands-on-hips in fury and indignation. Despite frequent and copious expressions of eternal remorse the tender hand of forgiveness has still not been offered, even sixteen years later. I spent the rest of the summer contemplating giving up butterflying in order to concentrate on parenthood, then thought better of it and carried on regardless.