28 Adventures with caterpillars
Finally, I had broken winter's grip. By following Purple Emperor larvae in the wild on their journey from autumn into spring, I had at last made butterflying an all-year-round activity, and winter had become a mere phantom. Hairstreak eggs, the staple winter activity of many butterflyers, only take you so far. Marsh Fritillary larvae, which appear in late winter, had helped, by shortening the close season. But there was a need to venture deeper, and the Emperor does go deeper; indeed, it reaches the parts other butterflies cannot reach.
Down in Savernake Forest, hibernating Purple Emperor larvae were slowly disappearing. Three vanished without trace during December, presumably to avian predation. Interestingly, though, none disappeared during January 2010, which was cold and snowy with much lingering frost. There was a ten-day spell of lying snow, which may well have protected the hibernating larvae, and may also have driven hungry birds, such as tits, out of the forest, to bird feeders in the surrounding gardens. However, although February was also cold the precipitation that fell down south occurred mostly as rain, cold bitter winter rain. A little further north much of this fell as snow. During February, unprotected by snow or ice, nine more Purple Emperor larvae vanished to assumed or actual predation, a worrying number, as it meant that twelve of the original 38 had now vanished. Worse, a butterfly collector – for such people still exist – had followed me on my rounds and had callously snipped off five hibernating larvae. Doubtless he (it would not have been a she) had been following my postings on the Purple Emperor Blog. The secateur cuts were all too obvious, as had been my location markers. Sadly, the Emperor remains highly collectable, and will remain so for so long as he is regarded, wrongly, as a great rarity.
A sequence of broadcasts on Radio 4's On The Move programme followed the fate of the monitored Emperor caterpillars. In the interests of storytelling, and against the strictures of science, the participant caterpillars had all been named after great poets of the English language. This proved unduly stressful, not least when the mighty T S Eliot vanished without trace, though the loss of a platoon of Great War poets was perhaps predictable. The real horror was when Coleridge himself was stolen, snipped off in his slumbers (I immediately upgraded a replacement caterpillar, originally named after his daughter, Sara, and can announce that Coleridge successfully pupated). The truth is that I had no idea what to expect in terms of winter mortality, as no comparable studies of similarly behaving larvae had been attempted in Britain. The Emperor was breaking new ground. At the end of a long winter only thirteen of the 33 followed larvae (excluding five which had been collected) survived into the spring, 20 having succumbed to probable predation, most likely by tits.
March began gloriously, luring out the first butterflies, then fell back into deep midwinter mode. The first fourteen nights brought heavy frosts, often as low as minus 7 degrees Celsius in central southern England. The month then ended cold and wet, with heavy snow up north. Winter would not let go. It became apparent, though, that Marsh Fritillary larvae were in excellent numbers at Strawberry Banks, near Stroud, doubtless owing to good weather when the females were laying eggs during the early summer of 2009, in Painted Lady time. Seventy-four webs of the gregarious larvae were found, containing in the region of 5600 caterpillars. Better still, the parasite load, as measured at the fourth skin change, appeared to be insignificant. If the weather was fine in early summer the Marsh Fritillary would abound here.
Our relationships with places are complex in the extreme. On March 14th I found myself travelling, unplanned, to Alice Holt Forest. The place seemed to be calling me. It felt as though something was wrong there. I arrived in the Straits Inclosure to find that most of the sallow trees growing along the main ride there had just been felled. Only 61 remained – out of the 510 I had counted, sexed and identified into taxa the previous June. I managed to rescue a lone Purple Emperor caterpillar found crawling over the felled corpses. The news got out amongst the butterflying fellowship and a mighty row ensued, which I ended up having to pacify. What the Forestry Commission had failed to comprehend is that to the hundreds of naturalists who visit the place during the high summer period, it is not a wood, let alone a standing cash crop, but a forest cathedral. A year later most of the complainers were up in arms defending the Forestry Commission against proposals made by Caroline Spellman, Minister of the Environment, to sell off the state forests. I was not amongst their number.
April came in on the back of a cold, late winter. Primroses and daffodils only got going properly at the start of the month, but after a poor and wet beginning April was dry and sunny, with a warm ending. Somehow, the spring butterflies were emerging on time or even a little early. My first Orange-tip was duly noted:
Diary, April 10th 2010: He ascended from a patch of Wood Anemone, flew through a shaft of sunlight and bumbled happily past me. He then spent 10 minutes visiting Celandines and more Wood Anemones before I lost him.
The world was slowly righting itself. On the 17th the first Gloucestershire Duke of Burgundy of the year appeared. Diary: She flew up over me as I was kneeling down to admire her, and vanished – the minx. The Painted Lady even put in an appearance, on the 24th. Apparently they had been massing again in Morocco and southern Spain. Bring them on! I wrote, but sensed that entomological lightning would not strike twice, at least not in consecutive years. Perhaps they were scared of the Emperors? At the end of the month the first Pearl-bordered Fritillaries appeared in Cirencester Park Woods, and the thirteen surviving Purple Emperor larvae in Savernake were at last feeding properly.
May behaved itself, for once. There were no frosts, gales, deluges, floodings or other ghastlinesses so characteristic of modern Mays. That meant that spring butterflies were not blasted away prematurely, for once. At the end of the month a hand-picked gang, organised by Dr Dan Hoare of Butterfly Conservation, spent two fine days surveying the northern half of the MOD's vast woodland and downland complex at Porton Down for the Duke of Burgundy. Over the two days 256 Burgundies were counted there, a huge tally by modern standards, indicative of a nationally important site. Unusually, many of them were seen well away from any visible Cowslips or Primroses, the larval foodplants. I myself found twelve male territories nowhere near any obvious Primula patches. Although our butterflies behave, and perform, differently in the few large sites which still offer them landscape-scale mobility, this was distinctly odd, and worrying. The diary concluded: I'm not sure why the butterfly is still thriving at Porton and suspect it could suddenly crash. A delightful colony of Pearl-bordered Fritillary was flying along the edge of Towerhill Plantation there, breeding in violet-filled glades where young Beech trees had died off prematurely, through what foresters call crop fail. Four Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were also seen, the first recorded at Porton for some twenty years. There are remarkably few records of this butterfly breeding on chalk downland, though it breeds freely on Carboniferous Limestone.
And the Marsh Fritillary exploded wondrously at Strawberry Banks, producing the best adult counts in twenty years of close monitoring. I counted 557 in 45 minutes over the 4-hectare site. The males were jostling for position on buttercup flowers and chasing each other about merrily all along the valley bottom. Some dispersed, and were seen as far away as Stroud. The females, though, had been driven away from the breeding grounds on the lower slopes by the over-amorous males and were sulking high up on the upper slopes, well away from their foodplants. At some point they would have to sneak back down slope to lay their eggs.
Then, over in Savernake Forest, at the end of the month, Keats ascended. He had been found as a caterpillar the previous September, when less than a centimetre long, and was now full-grown and turning pale at the feet – a sure sign of a Purple Emperor caterpillar ready to pupate. I watched him ascend from his feeding bough about 2.5 metres above ground to the top of the 10-metre sallow that had been his home for the last ten months. He disappeared into the upper canopy and was seen no more. The journey took all of seven minutes, during which time I recited Shelley's ‘Adonais’ for this most illustrious of caterpillars. It ends:
The soul of Adonais, like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
Keats was arguably the greatest caterpillar ever to walk this earth. Later, I searched in vain for his pupa, spending 45 minutes scanning every spray through binoculars, lying on the ground to obviate back and neck ache. A dog woman passed by, silently.
June produced its worst on its first day. Then, having got that over and done with, came good, delivering a superb second half. A very good butterfly year was steadily materialising, 2010 was battling its way to greatness. At Collard Hill, the Large Blue started to emerge on the 6th. Soon it became apparent that this royal-blue butterfly was set for a bumper year there. Habitat conditions were spot on, following precision grazing management, a goodly number of eggs had been laid the previous June, and the weather was set fair. The weather got a bit too fair, as the sward began to show signs of drought, which can be disastrous for the ants on which this most fastidious of butterflies depends. It was the visiting butterfly photographers who really suffered, though, for this steep slope reflects heat intensely. On hot midsummer days the males would become active after 8 am, to fly along the slope bottom for an hour or two in the hope that virgin females in need of their services would tumble down to seek them. Then, as the day heated up they would fly up to the upper slope, and patrol there, taking advantage of some vestige of a cooling breeze. When that got too hot, they would take an afternoon siesta, becoming active again as the day started to cool down.
Even the Black Hairstreak, one of my bogey butterflies, produced one of its occasional years of plenty. A visit to the meadows and hedges around Finemere Wood in north Buckinghamshire, with Dennis Dell, produced a tally of 46 individuals. That is as prolific as I have ever seen this butterfly. Luck was with us, as the day was dead calm, which meant that the butterfly could flit merrily along Blackthorn hedges that are too exposed in any noticeable breeze. It is perhaps its own worst enemy here, detesting wind but inhabiting exposed hedgerows – probably because it has largely been ousted from its preferred sheltered woodland haunts.
In some of the combes radiating off Dunkery Beacon, on Exmoor, the Heath Fritillary resurged wonderfully, due to a combination of good weather and successful habitat management work. The colony at Bin Combe put on a stunning show. Tick numbers seemed to be well down as a result of the cold winter – I found only five on me. At Halse Combe, on the edge of Porlock, experimental management enabled the butterfly to recolonise one of its strongholds. I even saw a female laying a batch of eggs, the first time I think anyone has seen this approachable and unwary butterfly laying eggs on Exmoor. Normally, the females must lay amongst the Bracken, out of sight. This particular female was spotted fluttering with dithering wings along Grannies’ Ride, the bulldozed track that runs along a contour line halfway up the steep south-facing slope of Halse Combe. I knew that flight, it was of a female intent on laying eggs. She was spying out warm hollows in the bankside vegetation.
Diary, June 15th 2010: Eventually she settled in one such Aladdin's cave, overhung by gorse, Honeysuckle, low Bracken and Bell Heather, and was clearly laying, deep in amongst dead litter. It was hard to see what she was laying on but no Common Cow-wheat [the larval foodplant] was evident there.
I returned at 6 pm to analyse the laying site and do a detailed vegetation quadrat, only to find that the footpaths gang had been along during the afternoon and strimmed the entire breeding area. Sometimes the Fates are cruel.
Late in the month the last of my Savernake Purple Emperor larvae, Ted Hughes, went off to pupate and in doing so revealed itself to be … female. Yes, Ted Hughes had transmogrified into Sylvia Plath. The folly of my naming caterpillars after great poets of the English language was finally rammed home.
In the Sussex woods, the White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries were appearing in numbers, and were promising great things. I saw two totally black ‘Black Admirals’, the rare ab. nigrina form of the White Admiral, in Madgeland Wood. There followed an excellent night at Knepp Castle, where dinner consisted of eel cutlets, partridge and guinea-fowl breasts with asparagus, a definitive gooseberry tart, a serious cheese board and three different wines. Keats's ‘endless fountain of immortal drink’ was spouting rampantly.
Diary, June 24th 2010: As a result I broke out of my garret bedroom, at 1.30 am, and rampaged on the castle battlements under a trenchant full moon, in the manner of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati. Too much coffee probably. Hornets were batting about. The only thing missing was a loose woman.
The following day the eyesight was playing up and I misidentified a butterfly. The first Purple Emperor of the year was seen that day, at Bookham Common, Surrey, by Ken Willmott – after a vigil of three consecutive days. I may have seen one earlier that morning, at a distance, in Madgeland Wood, near Knepp, but for some reason the eyes were not focusing properly. The summer of 2010 was becoming glorious.
Fermyn Woods were calling, up in Northamptonshire. This is BB's heartland, and these are his Emperors – ‘my Emperors,’ he used to call them, believing he had re-established the species there through breeding Emperors in his garden. Certainly he helped them, but it is likely that the butterfly had never died out in Rockingham Forest. Whatever, it is vital to be in Fermyn for Big Bang day, which sees the main emergence of Purple Emperor males. Big Bang day actually lasts for two or three days. In 2010 it took place on July 3rd to 5th, after the butterfly had started to emerge there on June 30th. Staying in Sudborough Green Lodge cottages again, by courtesy of Fermyn Woods Contemporary Art, I knew there was deep magic in the air early on July 4th, the sort of magic in which BB believed. Sure enough:
Diary, July 4th 2010: At 11.45 I spotted a pristine Purple Emperor male ab. lugenda flying low down the ride some 60 metres distant, in dappled shade. I recognised him as a dark variation instantly. Incredibly, I had the ride to myself at the time – for the Gods choose their moments carefully. This butterfly was one of the wariest Emperors I've encountered. He favoured dappled shade, as do ‘Black Admirals’ and valezina females of the Silver-washed Fritillary, as did last year's lugenda in Alice Holt. But he never settled for more than a minute, not finding much to his royal liking, and he led me a merry dance along half a mile of ride. I lost him at one point, but he returned three minutes later to the favoured stretch below the oaks just north of Neil's Corner. Eventually he flew off north, and I lost him as he flew away over dense sallow scrub. I lost a few pounds in weight in pursuit of this miraculous insect.
He was very similar to last year's Straits lugenda, though a little darker, with fractionally less white (two and a half white spots in the forewing only, and not a vestige of any other whiteness, at any angle). Until one has seen the true purple of lugenda (formerly iole) shimmering in low flight through the dappled shade of the July oaks One Has Not Lived. All told, I reckon I saw about forty male iris today, all pristine or nearly so. No females, again, though they must be starting to emerge.
Entomological lightning can indeed strike twice in successive years, but only with the Purple Emperor.
But it was the White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries that really stole the show in July 2010. The old collectors would have loved this year, for camilla and paphia, as they knew these two forest giants, varied strongly. My personal tally was ten ‘Black Admirals’, three or four of which were probably the rare all-black ab. nigrina, the others the less rare semi-black ab. obliterae. This haul took my lifetime's tally of ‘Black Admirals’ into three figures. Paphia also produced a scatter of black aberrations, called ab. confluens and ab. ocellata, and a fair few females of the valezina colour form. Both these two species emerged in excellent numbers in many southern woods, and Silver-washed Fritillary was seen in many new localities, outside its known range. Butterfly of the year was a toss-up between these two and the Purple Emperor, though the White-letter Hairstreak also needs mentioning in dispatches, for making one of its periodic come-back tours.
Lightning also struck twice in that St Swithun, for the second year running, brought an autumnal gale, a worse one which lasted for 48 hours. Again, Purple Emperors and the Purple and White-letter hairstreaks were decimated in the modern sense of the term, in sensu hodie. The day after the storm I visited Oversley Wood, a Forestry Commission wood near Alcester in Warwickshire. The Purple Emperor had been introduced here eight years previously, and was thriving. A spectacular emergence took place in 2010, with no fewer than eighteen individuals being seen at the start of the Oversley flight season on June 28th. I watched a courting pair.
Diary, July 16th 2010: At 2.10 a nice-looking female flew high along the ride and was intercepted by the resident male. A promising courtship flight instantly commenced, lasting three minutes before they nearly joined on a high Scots Pine spray. However, the minx suddenly changed her mind and dropped to the ground, in rejection mode, before ascending to the sallows and vanishing, leaving the poor male chasing pheromone scent in the air. Ladies, you can behave better than that. During this courtship my colleagues were led astray by a loud shout of ‘Camberwell Beauty!’ from down the ride. This I chose to ignore, and rightly so, for it proved to be a phantom.
The diary continues: I must congratulate Derek Smith, who bred and released Purple Emperors here, on his fantastic judgement of habitat suitability and sallow quality. Butterfly breeders are often castigated for their activities, and their expertise is seldom recognised or accepted, but Derek has done a superb job in establishing this lovely butterfly here, and in some other Warwickshire woods where it has thrived and spread.
Weather-wise, July 2010 saw a north-west/south-east split, with dry and sometimes hot weather dominating the south-east, whilst the north and west became increasingly cloudy and wet. Gradually the sun sank on the whole summer. August was decidedly poor, especially in the west where the holiday season was spoilt by rain. When the sun shone, butterflies were actually in good numbers, but their opportunities steadily diminished. On August 22nd I arrived at the entrance to Calstone Coombes, an unknown land of secret downland combes near Calne in north Wiltshire, and was welcomed by a stunning display of Adonis Blue males seeking moisture from mud down-slope of an overflowing cattle trough. This was an amazing, tropical-like experience. A cloud of azure butterflies rose before me. It was not of this earth. However, a wet end to August effectively wrote off the summer brood of the Adonis Blue. The late summer weather was so poor that the Clouded Yellow did not bother to cross the Channel. Maybe they sensed that September was going to be poor.
It was poor, and in consequence the butterfly season fizzled out early. I spent much of the autumn searching for Purple Emperor larvae in Savernake Forest, conducting standardised searches, repeating the previous autumn's work. The final tally was 66, down from 141. Presumably many females had been killed off by the St Swithun's night gale, resulting in a greatly reduced egg lay. The autumn was intermittently very wet, but with a scatter of glorious autumn days wherein Savernake shone. Then, quite suddenly, on November 19th conditions became intensely cold, with the leaves still on the Beech and oak trees. These leaves were bleached by the bitter weather; lifeless and colourless, they remained frozen to the trees, unable to drop. Snow fell at the end of November extensively in the north and east, and the coldest December on record in the UK ensued. Snowfalls occurred throughout much of the UK on the 1st and 2nd, the north and east became snowbound, the M25 gridlocked itself spectacularly and Gatwick airport closed down for three days. Starving birds flocked into gardens. A short mild spell provided some respite before a nationwide ten-day freeze-up commenced, which included a bitter White Christmas. The year ended spectacularly.
The new year was borne in on a calm, grey and mild night, with moths fluttering at the study window. Purple Hairstreak eggs were hard to find. The adults had been clobbered by the St Swithun's gale of 2010. Conversely, White-letter Hairstreak eggs were relatively plentiful, perhaps because this butterfly lays its eggs a little earlier in the year than its cousin and so had managed to lay the bulk of them before the gale hit. Down in Savernake, the snow and frost had protected hibernating Purple Emperor larvae, and not a single loss was incurred during December. Best of all, Mrs O found an Orange-tip pupa on a dead Garlic Mustard head. Orange-tip larvae almost invariably wander off their Garlic Mustard plants prior to pupating, so pupae are rarely found. This pupa was extra special in that it was completely black. Sadly, it vanished in late February.
Despite the cold December some Marsh Fritillary larvae emerged from hibernation at Strawberry Banks on January 19th, ten days earlier than normal. By early February they were coming out en masse. Soon it became apparent that a record number of larval webs were present. An absolute count of webs over the 4 hectares in mid-March reached a dizzy total of 340 webs, each containing an average of 75 larvae. That worked out at some 25,000 larvae in total, only a tiny percentage of which appeared to be parasitised. Numbers were also remarkably high at Hod Hill and on Fontmell Down in Dorset. It looked as if the Marsh Fritillary was going to take over the world, especially as winter petered out early and gave way to a sublime March, which in turn led into the warmest April on record, and one of the driest.
The only problem for the Marsh Fritillary was that its larval foodplant, Devil's-bit Scabious, had not grown at all in the early spring drought. Normally the emerging caterpillars make do with the previous year's leaves for a while before homing in on the fresh growth, but this time it was different: the bitter December had withered the previous year's leaves into the botanical equivalent of slivers of old leather, whilst the drought prevented fresh growth. The spiny black caterpillars carried on regardless. By early April they had eaten virtually all vestige of Devil's-bit Scabious on the Banks, old leather, stalks and all. Twenty-five thousand larvae over a maximum of 2 hectares of turf in which the foodplant grew proved to be an unrealistic stocking rate, especially in a drought. They ate themselves out of house and home, and then broke out. They invaded the adjoining Three Groves Wood, an ancient Beech wood, where they consumed Honeysuckle leaves, which Marsh Fritillary larvae will eat in captivity. They dispersed far and wide. I found one down the path 255 metres into the wood. Better still, they crossed the stream that gushes along the valley bottom, somehow. One was found up by Oakridge church, half a kilometre up a steep slope! Many died, either of starvation or from being trampled on whilst warming up along the footpaths. I found 22 squashed larvae along one 100-metre stretch of path, suggesting that far more were squashed by walkers than were parasitised.
Later, I found the pupae, the butterfly equivalent of a Yellowhammer's egg – pale, with curious and rather random black squiggles, and surprisingly cryptic amongst dead grass. They were not in grass tussocks, where I had expected them to be, but right out in the open, in sparse short turf. If the fine weather held the butterfly would abound, and take over the whole royal county of Gloucestershire. If ...
By the end of a remarkable April I had seen 27 species of butterfly, beating my previous personal end-of-April record of 23 in 2007. With a little more effort I could have seen 30 species, half the UK fauna. As it was, April 2011 produced my earliest ever Duke of Burgundy (on the 9th), Adonis Blue (30th), Brown Argus (24th), Common Blue (26th), Small Blue (24th), Marsh Fritillary (26th) and Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary (20th). More relevant, 2011 went on to claim the earliest UK sightings for a number of species, despite the fact that the fine weather ended during May.
In Cirencester Park Woods the Pearl-bordered Fritillary abounded from April 20th into mid-May, establishing over thirty colonies and wandering almost everywhere. Some of the colonies were genuinely large, where over a hundred individuals could be counted fluttering low over the clearings and young plantations, visiting Bugle and Bluebell flowers. Somehow, they out-performed the Strawberry Banks Marsh Fritillaries, who flattered to deceive. Much to my surprise, Marsh Fritillary numbers there were almost identical to those of 2010, raising the question of what happened to all those caterpillars. To recap, there were some 5000 larvae in 2010 and 25,000 in 2011, only for both years to produce peak adult counts of around 550. Perhaps a large number of 2011's larvae starved, or were trodden on, predated or parasitised? The latter seems least likely – unless my careful and assiduous monitoring of the parasite load has been grossly inaccurate.
Then along came June. The diary summarises it thus:
June 2011 was despicable, though we were due a poor one. It produced a good spell from the 2nd to the 4th, a reasonable day on the 6th, a lovely day on the 14th and short bursts of hot sun on the 26th and 27th. That apart it was Vile, with much heavy rain (especially during the second half), many clear cold nights, and many cloudy days. And it was even worse in northern Britain.
The latter remark is borne out by a weather-spoilt trip to the North York Moors and the Durham coast cliffs. Between squalls I managed to see the first Large Heaths of the year at Fen Bog, near lonely Goathland on the Moors, and visited the coastal cliffs at Easington, which are some of the loveliest, flower-rich cliffs I have seen. There, the Northern Brown Argus was just starting to emerge on cliff slopes jewelled with the flowers of Bird's-foot Trefoil, Bloody Crane's-bill, Common Rock-rose, Kidney Vetch, Northern Marsh-orchid, Common Spotted-orchid and, the best of the bunch, Burnet Rose. The adjoining beach had been used for dumping coal spoil, only for the light to be seen, the mess removed and the sea allowed to cleanse the beach. A visit there does much good to one's faith in our sensitivity to Nature, and in Nature's self-restorative powers.
The race was on for the earliest ever Purple Emperor. The records are vague, though, and emanate from the remarkable spring and summer of 1893, when March and April behaved as they did in 2011, but then led into the most glorious, if drought-struck, of summers. Certainly, iris was out in the New Forest ‘by early June’ that year and the boys of Marlborough College took a specimen in West Woods on June 10th. It is probable that the butterfly actually appeared in May that year. In 2013, after a lot of kerfuffle, the first was seen on June 13th, at Bookham Common, Surrey. It must be recorded, somewhat diplomatically, that Bookham's Emperor Watcher-in-Residence Ken Willmott was abroad at the time, and that this remarkable record was achieved by Rob Hill, his deputy. I was in Alice Holt that day, where iris was not out but White Admiral and Silver-washed Fritillary were starting. Then the weather worsened, and the emergence was held back. Purple Emperor probably started in Alice Holt Forest on the 21st, only I was in Heddon valley on the Exmoor coast that day, where High Brown Fritillary was emerging strongly (having initially appeared there as early as May 19th). The High Brown Fritillary was calling me back out on to active service, perhaps rightly so, as it is our most rapidly declining butterfly; also, I seem to have the knack of being able to separate it in flight from the highly similar Dark Green Fritillary.
Oates's grand entrance to Fermyn Woods took place on July 1st, at the start of a short spell of fine weather. I drove past, and disturbed, 21 butterfly photographers en route to the cottage I was staying in on the edge of the wood. Unfortunately there is no other way to the cottage, and at that time of year the rides are almost infested with butterfly photographers, after Emperors. I estimated that some 2000 butterfly photographers visited Fermyn Woods that season. That figure was included in a proof of evidence laid before a public inquiry that autumn into proposals for a wind farm on the edge of the wood. My argument was quite simple: this is the Emperor's heartland, this is BB's heartland, and four 125-metre giant wind turbines on the hill top would destroy the immense sense of spirit of place that exists there. Eventually common sense prevailed.
The first Emperor I saw in the woods that morning was an extreme aberration. It was a male, later identified as ab. afflicta. He possessed more white spots than ab. lugenda, having three large white spots and half a dozen small and indistinct white speckles on the forewings, though lacking the normal white bands. He had been seen, and photographed, down on the ride two days previously by Neil Hulme and others, and here he was, basking in dappled shade in front of me, slightly less than pristine but still beautiful beyond words. Three years on the trot I had seen and photographed acute aberrations of the Purple Emperor. Either my luck was ridiculously in or some god was smiling down on me. I was the last person ever to see this specimen, for despite constant vigilance from many of the visiting photographers he did not reappear. He had moved into a different phase of life and had stopped visiting the ride surfaces for sustenance. That same day I saw and photographed a superb Comma aberration, a freshly emerged ab. suffusa male, whose wings were extensively suffused with dark markings. He too was not seen again, but that mattered little: my goal was a full iole iris, without a vestige of any white markings – that and only that.
It mattered not that the rest of July was poor, that August became cool, cloudy and often wet and windy, or that to add insult to an injured summer, the hottest weather of the year occurred at the end of September and the start of October, when the temperature almost reached 30 degrees. Only the pursuit of iole mattered, and that would have to wait for another year.
That early July night I wandered the woods, to celebrate, and also to give thanks. There was no moon, but a pall of cloud overhead, and the sky was immensely dark, but I took no torch, for that would have been a gross intrusion. The air was heavy, with a warm stillness. Wisps of wood smoke hung about in a wooded hollow, yet there was no obvious sign of fire, for no woodmen had been working there. Shapes of trees could just be made out, within a deepening shadow land where dark greeted darkness, but at best they flickered in and out of focus and were merely benign. In places glow worms wanly lit the way along the vagueness that was the edge of the riding, Grasshopper Warblers reeled away in a clearing amongst Wood Small-reed tussocks, and ghosting moths flew around haphazardly in a lightless world. I was in the Emperor's kingdom, within BB's heartland, and no harm could possibly come my way. It mattered not that I was walking blind. The forest had closed around me.
Green Man
If I could but more than sense you
sudden in a wisp of smoke-wood
rising from within a hidden glade
the invisible face of the greenwood
flitting between mind and focus
betwixt countless dancing leaves
foxglove bells or sweetbriar scent
carried on the vibrant hum of insects
hoverflies through evening sunlight
midges dancing joyously to death
In every one of these you might yet be
but only in the half-seen moment
when the last swallow passes high
or the first bat flickers stilling air
as a spark explodes in vibrant flame
your spirit so rampantly appears
then disappears outside wooded time
in and out of mind and leaf and fire
there and not there yet within us
leaping the dimensions of inner life
(Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire, July 3rd 2011)
Only a forest could carry the name Savernake – or perhaps a venerable public school, or possibly a cathedral named after a canonised Anglo-Saxon bishop. The very word reeks of History, and also suggests somewhere deep, mysterious and utterly unique – which Savernake Forest certainly is. It is derived from a Saxon place name, Safernoc, for a forest of that title was known to exist around AD 934, in the far-off days of King Athelstan of Wessex. The fact that the forest's name has transmogrified only slightly over a millennium – from Safernoc to Savernake – is perhaps indicative of how strongly it relishes its sense of time, place and identity. There is over a thousand years of documented history here. Moreover, since William the Conqueror gave it to one of his knights as a hunting forest, Savernake has never been bought or sold, but has remained for 31 generations within the same family (including some female successions), though it has shrunk considerably in size and has effectively retreated to its core. Each generation of the family appoints a Warden of Savernake, who is charged with the stewardship of the forest's immense sense of place, its depth.
Essentially, Savernake Forest, which lies to the immediate east of the old borough town of Marlborough in Wiltshire, is a place apart. It is not of this age, but of Age itself, with numerous layers of history and much intrinsic mystery. It is pitted with archaeological features – old saw pits, and the like. Henry VIII wooed Jane Seymour here, and enjoyed hunting within the forest's boundless acres. Jane, of course, was neither divorced nor beheaded, but died in childbirth. Later, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a 27-metre (90-foot) stone column was erected – a sycophantic excrescence – celebrating the return to health of ‘mad’ King George III. Then, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown imposed one of his designed landscapes on the forest, including the longest avenue in the UK – Grand Avenue, which is over 6 kilometres long and is fringed by Beech trees. During the Second World War the forest hosted a massive ammunition depot and a large number of Americans, who left behind much of the graffiti on the ancient Beech trunks. There are some seriously dark moments within Savernake's history, notably several murders, including the start of the horrific Hungerford massacre of August 1987. Either there is a dark side to this forest, or to some of the people attracted to it, or both. Humanity has certainly tainted its history. Or perhaps, as veteran tree expert Ted Green argues, forests are run by fungi, which are oblivious to humanity.
Edward Thomas picked up on this feel in his biography of his mentor, the great Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, whose heartland lies to the immediate north. Thomas visited Savernake with his wife Helen in August 1907. He writes that Jefferies was attracted to Savernake, ‘liking the place for its beauty, its solitude, and its many uncertain memories.’ Later he comments on ‘the great depths below the forest roof that seem to be submerged in time.’ Jefferies himself ventures deeper: in an essay entitled ‘A Day in Savernake Forest’, he states first that the forest ‘beguiles us from the region of fact to the realms of fiction, and brings us face to face with Nature in some of her more witching aspects.’ He then becomes even more profound:
The silvery trunks and arching boughs more than realise all that poets and romance writers have ever said or sung of woodland naves and forest aisles, of which the noblest cathedrals offer so poor a copy.
Jefferies concludes by calling Savernake the ‘loveliest forest in Britain’, though to Jefferies ‘loveliness’ engenders love, and is way beyond mere visual beauty.
Savernake Forest lies on gently undulating plateau land, on Upper Chalk which is often covered with Clay-with-Flint deposits. Today, the main block of the forest totals about 1000 hectares, 904 of which are designated as SSSI. The SSSI was originally designated on account of the rich lichen flora of the forest's ancient oaks, but more recent surveys have found the fungi and saproxylic interest (‘dead wood invertebrates’) to be every bit as important, if not more so. Seemingly, this forest reveals its secrets only slowly, and is a place of ongoing discovery. It has many unique features; for example, other forests specialise in brambles and blackberries, but here the bramble cover has been inhibited by centuries of deer browsing, and instead Savernake specialises in luxurious Wild Raspberries.
Ted Green believes that Savernake Forest holds the largest number of ancient large-girth Pedunculate Oak and Beech trees anywhere in Europe, and perhaps also of Sweet Chestnut, and quite possibly sallows. Many of these ancient sentinels have names, like the Amity Oak, Duke's Vaunt Oak, King of Limbs and Saddle Oak. The best known is the Big Belly Oak, which is sited on the A346 which skirts Savernake's western flank. Other veterans stand close to the A4, an old coaching road that runs noisily through the forest's northern fringe.
For centuries, Savernake was pasture-woodland and/or a hunting forest – at one point with a deer fence (park pale) some 25 kilometres long. But silviculture gradually inveigled its way into the forest, initially through the activities of the 5th Marquess of Ailesbury during the nineteenth century. Then, in 1939, the Forestry Commission took on a 999-year lease from Savernake Estate for the timber rights. Rather predictably, large areas of Beech plantation were established, and the south-east sector of the forest was painfully coniferised, along with many of the outlying woods which were formerly part of the hunting forest. The long-term plan now, of course, is to restore native broad-leaved woodland, even pasture-woodland.
Butterfly-wise, Savernake supports a rather limited fauna (the moth fauna is far more impressive). Several of the more precious butterfly species have been lost from the forest in recent decades; as examples, the Pearl and Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries both died out in the mid-1980s, the High Brown Fritillary a couple of decades earlier. The Brown Hairstreak was last recorded in 1982, just before the extensive stands of Blackthorn it frequented were cleared away. The White Admiral, so ubiquitous in many southern woods today, is decidedly scarce in Savernake, as Honeysuckle has been heavily browsed by a rampant Fallow Deer population, though it is stronger in some of the outlying woods that were formerly part of the forest. Even the Silver-washed Fritillary is distinctly localised, occurring around the main blocks of oak woodland. A scatter of surprisingly tall and healthy Wych Elms supports colonies of the White-letter Hairstreak.
Savernake Forest essentially specialises in one butterfly species, and one only – the Purple Emperor. Indeed, the Emperor is named in the SSSI citation. Strangely, and despite the long history of butterfly collecting in the Marlborough area, led by boys from Marlborough College, the Purple Emperor was not recorded in Savernake until 1947, and then not again until 1977. I R P Heslop considered the forest unsuitable – too open – in his 1964 book Notes & Views of the Purple Emperor. Since 1977, the butterfly has been seen annually in Savernake, mainly in the southern parts, around the Column. In some years the population seems quite reasonable, in others the butterfly is scarcely seen – but that's the Emperor all over. This is not the easiest or most sensible place in the country to see Purple Emperors, for here the males fly around unusually tall Beech trees and often appear as mere specks, which is misleading, as the Savernake race of Apatura iris is unusually large. There are nine male territories in regular, though not necessarily annual, use along Three Oak Hill Drive, the straight Brownian ride that leads off from Grand Avenue to the Column. Butterfly enthusiasts, though, ignore these territories and gather only around the Column, simply because the butterfly regularly settles on this eighteenth-century folly, and can be photographed there, albeit through telephoto lenses. In 2013 one male was photographed perched on the part of the Column's inscription that reads ‘their excellent and beloved Sovereign’. The butterfly may have a rosy future in Savernake, for in the early 2000s the Forestry Commission carried out extensive thinning and clearance works along Three Oak Hill Drive and the southern end of Grand Avenue, stimulating a considerable amount of sallow regeneration in the process. The butterfly started to breed in these sallows in 2013. Prior to then it was restricted to breeding on tall and often veteran sallows that occur locally in the forest, many of which are unusually large and are nearing the end of their natural lives. Clearly, Savernake Forest treasures its Purple Emperors.
Its next-best species are, curiously, the Green-veined White and Orange-tip. These are often profuse, as one of their main foodplants, Garlic Mustard, abounds in scrapings dumped along the edges of Grand Avenue and Three Oak Hill Drive when the avenues are resurfaced, as happens regularly, given their capacity to generate potholes.
Increasingly, Savernake is being invaded by the motor car. Traffic roars along its northern and western fringes, though the sound is muffled in summer by leaves. Under the open-access agreement established between the Forestry Commission and Savernake Estate back in 1939, people have the right to drive along Grand Avenue and Three Oak Hill Drive as far as the Column. Traffic seems to have driven away the Headless Horseman ghost that reputedly haunts Grand Avenue. The forest is becoming increasingly busy, subjected to modern-day recreation. Of course, when it is full of people it simply closes itself down. But in the gloaming, especially on still deep-winter days when the air is chill and the dog walkers have all but departed, the forest wakes, to play tricks of light on its few remaining visitors. A spectral white stag is reputed to appear occasionally at dusk, along with shadowy animated figures, some vaguely human, some distinctly animal, all primeval. And in a gale, it is its wildest self: an orderless elemental place, where wildness and meekness, dark and light, peace and anger are all one. Be careful, this place speaks in tongues.
Best of all, beneath aloof Beech trees off Three Oak Hill Drive lie a series of depressions, old clay workings, which fill up darkly with water and spent leaves in autumn. These have the feel of the pools described in C S Lewis's The Magician's Nephew – the pools that lead into other worlds, in a chapter entitled ‘The Wood between the Worlds’. Savernake wishes to be that sort of forest. Jefferies was right: it is a cathedral, one of Nature's finest.