It had to be a cracker, my fiftieth summer of butterflying, yet the starting point was somewhere deep in the minuses, as butterfly populations entered the year at an unusually low ebb. Its predecessor had been so foul a summer that my 2013 diary began: The previous year is proscribed and will never be named within these diaries. Where extreme necessity insists, it may be referred to as That Year. 2013 was going to have to conquer a slope of Sisyphean proportions. Yet it began with a glimmer of hope, for the diary reads:
As the New Year came in, scudding shower clouds dissipated to reveal a dark night sky lit by a near-full moon and a host of dancing stars … I could see the doom and gloom of That Year being physically pushed away by advancing brightness. Then the celebratory fireworks took over.
There was promise in the New Year hour, and butterflies relish a challenge.
Down in Savernake Forest, on New Year's Day, things went backwards and then forwards. One of the Purple Emperor larvae I was following had been predated over Christmas – a shame, as it was particularly well concealed, and inappropriate Christmas fare – but I found, completely by accident, a replacement, elsewhere in the forest. Also, the hibernating female Brimstone I had been monitoring, perched low in a sparse bramble patch, had fallen off her leaf, and was lying comatose on oak litter below. I roused her gently, whispering sweet nothings to a spirit of the spring, and attached her to the underside of another bramble leaf. I felt happier as she returned to her slumbers.
Two weeks later Savernake excelled itself. On a visit to show the Reverend Prebendary John Woolmer hibernating Emperor larvae, the remains of one of the previous year's Emperor pupal cases was spotted, high up in a sallow tree. The basal half of the case was attached to the underside of a withered sallow leaf, which was still affixed to its twig by caterpillar silk. Never underestimate caterpillar silk, or chitin, the pupal case material. Incredibly, the silked-on leaf remained on its twig well into the autumn of 2013, some sixteen months after it had been attached, though by then only the stub of the old pupal case remained. In mid-February I found another of That Year's pupal cases, by spotting a leaf spinning on loose strands of silk in the breeze, at Toy's Hill in west Kent. Of course! That's how to crack the mystery of where Purple Emperors pupate: look for the old pupal cases in late November or early December, after other leaves have fallen.
Then January, and indeed the entire year, decided to drag. Snow fell. Savernake's Brimstone was knocked off her bramble leaf and buried beneath several inches of snow. She was found lying horizontally on a beech leaf as the snow was melting. This time, I tilted her upright, stabilised the leaf she was resting on, and left her to it. Though asleep, she seemed to know what she was doing – butterflies are cannier than we think. She flew off during mild weather in mid-February, but was seen again on April 20th, dancing in a sunlit glade a kilometre away; I would have known her even if I had not marked her wing tips with indelible black felt-tip.
February allowed the land to dry out, as it so often does, but it was cold and spring was now running late. It got later, much later, then stalled altogether. We were due a poor March, and duly endured the second coldest March on record (after March 1962, and joint with 1947). In some districts it was the coldest March since 1892, the era of the late-Victorian mini ice age. The month produced one pleasant sunny day, the 5th, when Brimstones took to the air. I saw my first active butterfly of the year that day, a Small Tortoiseshell, in Coleridge's garden in Nether Stowey, which is a fair place to visit for a cup of tea and a piece of cake. To Coleridge it would have been a metaphor of things to come, but like Coleridge it was a will-o’-the-wisp spirit and immediately wandered away.
Easter arrived at the end of a bitter March. A hundred years earlier, during the Easter week of 1913, Edward Thomas had cycled from his parents’ home in south London to the Quantocks in west Somerset, where he wished to encounter Coleridge. The weather was variable, typical of an early Easter. His account of the journey was published a year later under the beguiling title In Pursuit of Spring. The book is the jumping-off point for Thomas's greatly admired poetry, for much of the book's prose is on the very brink of poetry, though the developing poetic trance is frequently broken by moments of laconic humour and sojourns into human trivia. He was not pursuing spring, or anything; rather he was taking winter, and all the stuff and nonsense it represented to him, as far away as he could, and burying it. A hundred years on I broadcast a tribute to Thomas and In Pursuit of Spring on Radio 4. More importantly, one hundred years on to the day, on Easter Day, a small group of like-mindedness assembled on Cottlestone Hill in the Quantocks, where Thomas ended his journey and found winter's grave. There, in his memory, we raised the banner of Poetic Nature. We had little idea what that actually meant, but did it anyway; meaning can kick in later, if it wants. With butterflying experiences too, meaning often kicks in much later.
Back in 2013, winter lingered into April, but a slow, late spring is no bad thing, for good summers often come in on the back of late, poor springs. St George's Day dawned fair, as it should, for it is the traditional opening day of the butterfly season, when Orange-tips wander the wayside and woodland ways and put the world to rights. It was time for the first expedition of the year, and it had to be a biggie. A small number of Large Tortoiseshells had been seen in Walter's Copse near Newtown on the Isle of Wight the previous spring, and this supposedly extinct species had reappeared there this year. On April 20th Neil Hulme crossed over to the island and, as is his wont, cleaned up – photographing two worn males and nearly stepping on a third, larger specimen, presumably a female. I arrived by 10 am on the 23rd, to find several other butterfly folk already present, ensconced. Half an hour later one of them nearly trod on a Large Tortoiseshell, basking on the ground – it shot off in a huff. No more were seen until 1.15, when a male attempted to set up a territory where Neil had seen his. It had been disturbed by over-keen photographers, for this can be a decidedly wary beast. I arrived in time to witness its hurried departure, a tawny speck flying up into the tree canopy, with several people pointing towards it. Nonetheless, it constituted a sighting, and a tick, just.
At 1 pm I joined the ranks of those who have nearly trodden on a Large Tortoiseshell, by almost stepping on a giant of a butterfly, presumably female, basking below a hedge line in nearby Newtown Meadows. It flew off in a fury, high and into the sun. Such butterflies do not return. I had visited the meadows in hope of seeing the butterfly there, as elms and sallows, two likely larval food sources, were numerous in the hedges. Then, towards the end of the allotted time a battered male appeared in a coppice bay along one of the Walter's Copse rides, setting up territory there. He was last seen attacking a territorial Comma and the resident Peacock, with a degree of belligerence that a male Purple Emperor would have been proud of. Perhaps the males move from glade to glade, as male Commas do, setting up territory for a while before moving on, ceaselessly.
The main road back to the Yarmouth ferry terminal was closed at Shalfleet, necessitating a detour along narrow lanes. The inevitable happened – a major snarl-up, involving a stray bus, a tractor bearing a big bale on a spike, the obligatory horse box and several hopelessly lost cars. Gently weaving her way through this stasis was a female Large Tortoiseshell, as aloof from it all as the Purple Empress herself. Disdainfully, she hopped over a hedge of elm suckers, to fly on in my mind. Great individual butterflies do that: they fly on within us, as living memories.
I returned to the island in mid-June with Patrick Barkham, to search for the salient nests of Large Tortoiseshell larvae up in the elms, sallows, thorns and Aspens in the hedges and woods around Newtown. The stakes were high, as the butterfly has not been known to have bred anywhere in the UK since the early 1950s. (This is not strictly true, as in 1983 my former colleague Dr Keith Alexander, a leading entomologist, swept a full-grown larva from elm sucker growth at Cubert on the north Cornwall coast. It turned out to be parasitised.) Butterflies do not recognise limitations, which means that their followers and students must behave similarly. Patrick and I duly gave it our best shot, but without success. The fact that a gale was blowing at the time didn't help, but the truth is that there was simply too much seemingly suitable habitat for two people to search, extending far beyond National Trust boundaries. Without Hulme, our lucky talisman who had dipped out at the last minute – pleading daughter-issues – we were doomed to struggle. I believe, though, that this supposedly extinct butterfly is seeking to breed once more along our southern shores. It is trying to come home.
It was mid-June, and the season to date had been distinctly unmemorable, largely because spring had been dominated by cloud cover. There were, though, some rays of hope. Small and Large Whites had been out and about in relative plenty for a couple of weeks or so – ‘relative’ is the operative word here, for our cabbage whites never become numerous before late July. But it was clear that this year they were plotting something, and that a stupendous brood would start to emerge later, if and only if the weather permitted.
Despite the late spring, a cool, cloud-spoilt May and a stop–start June which at best only managed to stop the rot, I still had faith in the year: it was my fiftieth summer in heaven, and it would come true. The Emperor would turn things round. But July started ominously: a Purple Emperor pupa located in Savernake Forest on June 23rd had mysteriously vanished. The leaf it had been attached to was still there, but it and all its silk wadding had gone. I had followed that animal for ten months, only for it to vanish as an immobile pupa. A Grey Squirrel had been stripping bark off the trunk nearby – perhaps it was responsible? Curse and crush it!
But after four days of stagnant cloud, July and the summer of 2013 erupted: a massive anticyclone came over from the Azores, and sat overhead for three stupendous weeks, producing a sequence of fifteen hot and cloudless days which rendered the weather forecast redundant. Redemption was in the air, time itself was being redeemed. We and our butterfly spirits had been set free.
Rarely in Britain does one book annual leave, in this case to coincide with the Purple Emperor season, and actually find the weather clement. The only gremlin was that the butterfly season was running late and the Emperor was a few days off. White Admiral and Silver-washed Fritillary had scarcely started, and needed to be out in numbers before the Emperor would appear. The solution was simple – visit the Lake District and the Morecambe Bay limestone hills.
The season was running late on the Morecambe Bay hills too. Their chief denizen, the High Brown Fritillary, was not out, though imminent. Instead, pristine Dark Green Fritillaries were dashing about everywhere, feasting on thistle heads on the lonely hill above Witherslack, and breakfasting together one early morning on yellow composites, thistles and early bramble flowers on the lower slopes of Arnside Knott. The first pulse of females was emerging. They were being vigorously courted and purposefully mated.
On Sunday July 7th the vast expanse of raised bog at Meathop Moss, near Witherslack, was in oven-like mood. I had the place to myself, for the human populace was watching Andy Murray win at Wimbledon, and the myriad biting flies were hiding, torpid, in the narrow fringe of trees around the restored bog. Large Heath was at peak season, and for once was not being blown about in the wind, for it was dead calm. The only problem was that the weather was too hot for this northern insect: the females were largely inactive, shading tail-on to the sun in the lee of grass tussocks. One slumbered in the same spot for over an hour. I had hoped to watch them laying eggs, but it was far too hot for that. Every now and then one would be flushed out by a wandering male: she would rise up and then descend, finally rejecting male advances after much wing dithering in the grasses. Eventually a mating pair was located, but they were merely conked out together amongst the cottongrass. The males were wandering freely over the bog, nectaring occasionally on Cross-leaved Heath flowers. When two met in flight they would squabble. I re-taught myself how to sex Large Heath on the wing: the females have brighter, pinkish uppersides, the males duller grey hues. The problem with the Large Heath is that it is hard to see it doing anything other than bumbling about rather aimlessly, usually being blown downwind. Also, it settles only with closed wings, and is distinctly wary of humans – we've drained too many of its bogs, perhaps. The truth is that this is one butterfly you actually need to net, to appreciate the wonderful iridescent sheen on the wing uppersides, and also to check for aberrations in the underside hindwing spotting. But the days when one could wander freely on Meathop Moss with a butterfly net are long gone, and will not come again.
The following day, the Lakeland mountains stood aloof, in total calm, fringed with thin mountain-top cloud which permitted the palest of shadows. This is perfect weather for the Mountain Ringlet, another butterfly heavily prone to being blown about in the wind, or reduced to shading in grass tussocks during heatwaves. Today they were free and fully active, with the males indulging in unusually lengthy flights, before landing, as usual, rather randomly in the grasses. They were searching for females, and were attracted to any brown object, especially sheep dung. Imagine, mistaking a female of your own kind for sheep dung!
Insulted, though earnestly sought, the females were less active, basking for lengthy periods amongst the Mat-grass tussocks. Several were gunned down in flight by amorous males, and would drop to a tussock, to hide there, wings closed, until the all-clear was given. They were already mated. Two were watched laying eggs, placing them carefully on dead needle-like horizontal blades on the edge of Mat-grass tussocks. Then a text message came in from the far south: the first Purple Emperor of the year had been sighted. The reply was succinct: ‘To iris, Emperor of the Woods, Monarch of all the Butterflies, from Epiphron, Lord of the Mountains, greetings Brother.’ The true meaning was simple: I hear and obey.
Meanwhile, people marched by, keeping to the stony paths and not experiencing the soft cushion of fell-top grass all around them. I would like to say they were diligently studying Wordsworth, or better still Coleridge, but their conversations – which fog-horned across the fell sides in ever-stilling air – were dominated by IT issues, things they had recently bought, mortgage deals, and, more realistically, blisters. A company of teenage girls marched past, singing ‘The Lonely Goat Herd’, mercifully in ignorance of the actual words. In desperation, I visited Innominate Tarn, to pay tribute to Alfred Wainwright, who understood the profound nature of the high fells. This was his favourite place in all Lakeland, his spiritual home. He was there, and so was the Mountain Ringlet.
As Kevin Pietersen was being caught by Michael Clarke off the bowling of Peter Siddle for 14, in the first Test of the Ashes series, the high spirit of the midsummer trees, the Purple Emperor, appeared. Two males tussled together over the favoured Sweet Chestnut tree at the head end of Goose Green Inclosure in Alice Holt Forest. It was Emperor Time once more, and on July 10th too, the traditional starting date for the Emperor season. For a day or two they stuttered, emerging in paltry ones and twos in increasing heat, then they stormed the world. There is only one place to be during the Big Bang emergence period of the Emperor season, Fermyn Woods.
Oates's entrance to Fermyn Woods, late in the day on Sunday July 14th, was spectacular. He did well, managing to drive through the first block of woods without being accosted, en route to staying once more in the artists’ community at Sudborough Green Lodge cottages. He was going to write a poem entitled ‘Green Lady’, exploring the physical, sensual side of our love of forests – sweat, limb ache, desire, and all. The butterfly photographers had long gone home, but a mighty ambush lay in wait at Lady Wood Head: a posse of Emperor males forced him to stop, to feast wantonly upon a disgustingly filthy car. They were desperate for any moisture, and a recently squirted car windscreen provided it. Four males instantly descended. Never clean your car in the weeks leading up to the Emperor season; in fact, spray it with shrimp-paste solution on arriving at an Emperor wood, and stand back and wait.
The following day was St Swithin's, but it was cloudless, calm and stupendously hot. St Swithin was clearly taking the year off. Perhaps he could be encouraged to take a lengthy sabbatical? For three days Fermyn provided a world apart, under azure skies and in intensifying heat. Emperors were emerging en masse, and were ardently seeking moisture along the woodland rides. The rides, of course, had been well baited by various folk, including a pair of eccentrics up from Sussex who were pedalling around the woods on cycles bearing jeroboams of shrimp-paste solution. Libations were poured, liberally, along various stretches of ride, to the gods of the summer forests. The Sukebind was splendidly in bloom, and the world had gone mad. At one point eight butterfly photographers were lying prostrate on the ground along a 30-metre stretch of ride, photographing breakfasting Emperors – much to the befuddlement of a stray dog woman who had inadvertently wandered into a different reality. ‘It's Emperor time,’ someone told her.
At 2.38 Fermyn Summer Time, a virgin Empress purposefully flew into a male territory high up amongst the Lady Wood Head poplars, and was instantly accosted by two males. Two other males launched themselves into the air, but decided to squabble amongst themselves instead, so the virgin led her two suitors to the upper spray of a Scots Pine, where she was instantly joined by the first male to arrive. The second male wasn't having that, though, and for the next 20 minutes tried to interrupt the copulating pair and muscle in instead. He eventually gave up and skulked off, terrorising an innocent Meadow Brown in a fit of pique. The successful pair, who still had not learnt each other's names, stayed together, mating, motionless, wings closed, for 2 hours and 45 minutes. This sounds epic but by Emperor standards is actually an hour short of the norm. They could perhaps be excused for under-performing in that heat.
Two insufferably hot days in Paradise followed, during which the temperature hovered around 30 degrees and the sky was blemished only by aircraft vapour trails. Emperors were flopping onto the ride surfaces, seeking any vestige of moisture, even sweaty human bodies. On three consecutive days I managed to clock up over a hundred individual Purple Emperors, peaking with 134 (a personal record) during a thirteen-hour marathon on Tuesday July 16th. That day was not without its tribulations, for I ran out of drinking water around 1 pm, having poured away much personal water to assuage thirsty Emperors – and carried on regardless. I was not the only centurion, for the Reverend Prebendary John Woolmer also notched up his maiden century, as did Gillian Thompson and Simon Primrose, who had driven over from the West Midlands for one stupendous and utterly exhausting day. They were last seen prostrate either side of a fresh pile of horse manure, photographing Emperors. It seemed the ideal situation in which a young man could propose to a young lady, so they were left to it. The Reverend Prebendary went on to write his customary letter to The Times on the state of the Purple Emperor season, but Oates failed to write more than a fragment of ‘Green Lady’.
Leaving Fermyn Woods is never easy, especially with the Emperor at peak season and the weather set fair. Part of you remains behind, but it leaps to greet you when you return. The Emperor did not want me to go either, refusing to rise up from feeding on a fox scat along the woodland ride as I drove out on the Thursday evening – so I simply drove over him, avoiding him with the wheels, of course. He carried on feeding, regardless, as the vehicle passed carefully and dutifully over him. In the course of three heady days I had witnessed one pairing, three courting pairs, three rejection flights; I had seen a male of the lugenda colour form and a group of five males feeding together on a fresh fox scat; England had won the first Test and my nose was starting to peel. But a major challenge had to be met.
One of the zanier members of Butterfly Conservation Sussex Branch is Dr Dan Danahar, a gangly schoolteacher from Brighton with a twinkle in his eye. He had come up with the idea of an annual butterflying contest, in which two teams battle to see how many species they can find in a single day, with points being awarded for each species and extra points for the difficult immature stages (egg, caterpillar, etc.). But each finding has to be witnessed by an independent judge, and the teams must cross over and operate on each others’ patches. Some fool had decided that I would captain the Hampshire side, against Sussex, and being an even greater fool I had accepted. The situation was untenable, for I was leading one of my two favourite counties against the other. The teams gathered in the village car park at Bosham (pronounced Bossam). I had last visited Bosham as a choirboy, for a school choir competition, nearly fifty years previously. But this competition, on Friday July 19th 2013, was altogether more serious.
At 9 am, the Sussex team scuttled off into Hampshire. After giving them a head start the Hampshire team then set off into Sussex. Film crews from BBC South pursued both teams, eventually broadcasting a news piece that rendered butterflying seriously intriguing – and fun. The roads were busy: malevolent horse lorries abounded along the A272 and the tarmac was melting. The wretched A27, a dual carriageway designed by Descartes’ Malicious Demon, was even bloodier. Friday was not a sensible day for this venture, but sense scarcely entered into it, certainly not common sense. Marlpost and Madgeland woods, bless them into eternity, welcomed the Hampshire Hogs, quickly presenting them with the Purple Emperor they needed, plus Silver-washed Fritillaries and White Admirals, and White Admiral eggs on dangly strands of shaded Honeysuckle. Meanwhile, the Sussex team invaded the inner sanctum of the Straits Inclosure, in Alice Holt Forest, Hampshire's Holy of Holies. Unwisely, the Straits revealed its secrets. The teams were running neck and neck.
Hampshire could be forgiven for wondering what connections Martin Warren and Nick Baker had with Sussex, men of Dorset and Devon respectively but batting for Sussex on the day, but Hampshire had managed to inveigle top field-craft ace Ken Willmott out of his native Surrey. There was some needle in all this. There had to be.
At the end of an exhausting and exhaustive day the two teams were level on points, and drinking together in the public bar of the Anchor Bleu, rehydrating and trying to recall a frenetic day that had rapidly hazed into a blur. The judges went into conclave, needing to reach a decision to satisfy BBC South Today. They made the wrong decision.
The silliness had to end. The Sukebind blossom was starting to go over, and it was time for my fiftieth season to reach up towards its zenith. ‘It won't come down!’ they complained – a couple of butterfly photographers in Madgeland Wood, determined to photograph a Purple Emperor. ‘Of course it won't,’ I grumbled back, as I headed out of the wood on to Marlpost Road. ‘It's searching the sallow tops for a freshly emerged female – and neither would you descend from on high if you were on the trail of fresh crumpet.’ People had so little idea of what these butterflies were actually doing. The silliness had to end.
There was only one place for the pilgrimage to begin, Marlpost Road; for Marlpost Road leads past Newbuildings woods, through Dragons Green, out on to the sacred road, the A272, the backbone of the Purple Empire, east and then south, to the Knepp Castle Estate's re-wilding lands, by Shipley windmill where Hilaire Belloc once lived.
No one had searched Knepp's re-wilding lands for Purple Emperors since my tentative explorations there in 2009, when the network of copses and hedge-lined fields recently taken out of arable or dairy farming was just becoming colonised. Neil Hulme had called in a few times, in passing, and had seen the odd Emperor there, but recent summers had been too dire, and Emperor numbers too low for systematic survey of a huge area of atypical habitat. But today, July 20th 2013, was the day to find out; the Emperor was fully out and in good numbers, for once. Neil and I anticipated seeing a dozen or so, maybe 20, but butterflies are extremely good at making one feel hopelessly wrong, particularly the Purple Emperor. In five hours we counted 84, within a relatively small area, and in rather cloudy weather. Clearly, the butterfly had erupted here. And they were not just numerous, but seriously violent too. We saw males attack a Chaffinch and a Blackbird, and loudly applauded a brace of females working together to extirpate a flock of young tits from a sallow stand – all to the accompanying sound of wedding bells drifting across from Shipley church. Up in the oak crowns, males were kicking each other's teeth in with gross regularity. We wound them up by singing skinhead football chants at them. At one point we saw five males hotly pursuing a female, and cheered them on.
Returning the following day, after a restless night, we added another 50, but the insects were less active and the habitat quality of the area we searched was not quite so high. Nonetheless, we had determined that within the space of a few years the huge southern block of Knepp Castle Estate, between Shipley and Dial Post, had developed what must be the second-largest Purple Emperor population in the country, after Fermyn Woods, and one that was destined to grow much larger. Never mind Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane, Fermyn Wood was moving to Sussex; a new epicentre of the Purple Empire was developing, right where I started out fifty years ago, right in my heartland. Here, the butterfly was breeding in young sallow bushes, 2–4 metres tall at the most, which had developed after sallow seed had rained down on bare ground when arable fields were taken out of productivity about a decade back. No longer was the Purple Emperor a woodland butterfly at all, let alone the mysterious ancient-woodland creature it had long been assumed to be, but an opportunist deftly able to exploit the rural equivalent of a brownfield site. At Knepp it is a butterfly of scrubland, developing pasture-woodland and outgrown hedgerows. A particularly large penny had dropped. Poor Job must have felt rather like that when the Almighty explained it all to him at the end of his book.
The crescendo was building, even though the Emperor season was on the wane – albeit after conquering new and dizzy heights. If any other butterfly wanted to win Butterfly of the Year 2013 it would have to knock His Imperial Majesty off his perch, during one of his greatest seasons. Several were trying it on. As predicted, Small Whites and Large Whites were everywhere, and Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells were emerging in excellent numbers, the latter having sprung from nowhere to fill almost every garden. Butterflies are amazingly good at coming from beyond the ninth gate of death, or however many gates there are.
Such was the paltry state of world news on August 6th, and so prominent were butterflies in the public eye, that the news release put out by the National Trust's Press Office then, celebrating my fifty years of butterflying, was taken up. No credit was due to me here, it was all down to the magnetism of butterflies, and the love and wonder they inspire. All I had done was take up butterflying fifty years previously, when given a copy of The Observer's Book of Butterflies and a net for my tenth birthday – and had never given up, but had become their vehicle.
We needed a venue with speedy access from London, and seriously good butterflies. Denbies Hillside, on the scarp slope of the North Downs just west of Dorking, offered just that. Moreover, the Chalkhill Blue population had erupted there, producing what is by far the greatest profusion of a single species of butterfly I have seen. The Denbies Chalkhills had done it before, as recently as 2006, but that year the peak count on the butterfly monitoring route there was a mere 832. This time it reached 3500. One must feel deeply for Gail Jeffcoate, who faithfully walks the butterfly transect route there each week. Normally the walk takes 45 minutes, this time it took two hours. There were massive aggregations of the Cambridge-blue males on every Marjoram clump, such that each patch glowed with iridescent blue. Earlier, in mid-morning, when the males were busy patrolling the breeding grounds in search of emerging females, whole expanses of short turf shimmered with sky blue. They also wandered far and wide, invading Dorking station and High Street. This wonder of the natural world was featured on Channel 4 News (we almost got it on the BBC1 main evening news bulletin). Sadly, photographs of such events sell the story badly short; only moving film depicts the true scale.
The following day, my sixtieth birthday, one of Christ's Hospital school's more prodigal sons returned, for the first time in decades, to conduct an interview with Patrick Barkham for a piece on butterflying for The Guardian. The place leapt to greet us. A Holly Blue met us at the entrance, and we found Purple Hairstreaks flying in the copse by Leigh Hunt house where I had begun butterflying. The school had intensified in beauty. Even then it could not hold me, for we ended the afternoon in Marlpost Wood. Once again, the forest closed around me and instilled its sense of deep belonging. A Jay's wing feather lay in the dust. At 4.45 pm one of the most majestic and memorable of female Purple Emperors ever seen flew lazily along the ride, to perch above us on an oak spray, basking in the glory of the day, before gliding effortlessly away. I knew iris would appear here, and that I did not even need to look for them – they would find me. The diary concludes: Ended up with a sublime journey ‘home’ along the A272, into the sunset of the day and of life – only I'd just been Home. And as for a party? That took place the following day in Savernake Forest, where a group of 25 friends and relations, adorned with picnic hampers and Pimms, were regaled by the last Purple Emperors of the season.
But great butterfly seasons do not go gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas put it. This one was by no means ready to bow out, and a dozen other species were preparing to do battle with the Emperor over the destiny of Butterfly of the Year 2013. Clouded Yellows invaded the UK in early August – and they seldom bother coming here in poor summers. More significantly, that most occasional of vagrants from the continent, the Long-tailed Blue, appeared – and meant business. On or just before my birthday, as a present to us all, what was probably the largest immigration of Long-tailed Blues in entomological history hit the south-east coast. They had hopped across the Channel on a fairly broad front.
By happy chance, I was destined to visit the Kent coast in mid-August, to run training events for National Trust staff there, and the weather was set fair. By then the butterfly had already been spotted in three or four places along the Kent coast, and a breeding colony had been discovered on Kingsdown Leas, a section of National Trust clifftop chalk grassland a few kilometres east of Dover. The initial discovery was made by birders, in pursuit of a rare bird there on August 9th, and was instantly put out on the birding grapevines. Given that the Long-tailed Blue is regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime experience for butterfly lovers in the UK, well over a hundred enthusiasts visited Kingsdown in search of the butterfly during the following weeks. The colony was breeding on the Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea (perennial sweet pea), which occurs in profusion along the cliff top there, and locally elsewhere in the district. This is a non-native species which frequently escapes from gardens and colonises rough or disturbed ground. It is rarely regarded as a nuisance, but on Kingsdown Leas it had benefited considerably from an autumn mowing regime, which had created myriad pockets of bare ground in which it could germinate, such that huge patches of the plant occurred all the way along the cliff top.
On August 14th at least three males and one female were present on Kingsdown Leas. These were old and tired butterflies, who merely wanted to sip nectar from their beloved pea flowers but would flit off at speed if disturbed. A systematic search of the Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea clumps revealed over 50 tiny pale-blue eggs, on the sepals of flowering sprays. These were found right the way along the cliff top, and so must have been laid by more than one female. They suggested that, weather permitting, a sizeable home-grown brood would emerge in early autumn, for the Long-tailed Blue is a fast breeder, going from egg to adult in half a dozen weeks in warm weather. It is one of the most widespread butterflies in the world, occurring in temperate zones of both hemispheres, breeding in the flowers and pods of a wide range of plants of the pea family. In some countries it is an agricultural pest. In Britain it is almost the ultimate butterfly twitch, though if our climate becomes warmer it could become a resident species in the deep south.
I also found eggs in Kingsdown village, where strands of the same Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea trailed down over a garden fence, and also in the nearby village of St Margaret's at Cliffe. However, there was no sign of butterfly or eggs on another, smaller type of perennial sweet pea, Narrow-leaved Everlasting-pea, which abounds at St Margaret's Leas cliffs. It seems that Long-tailed Blue adults fizzled out at Kingsdown in late August, with the last sighting being made on the 26th.
September started fair, then wobbled for two weeks. Fine weather returned on St Matthew's Day, the 23rd, when it so happened that I was destined to visit the Kent coast again. The home-grown brood of Long-tailed Blue was first noted at Kingsdown on September 18th, and a small emergence occurred on the 23rd, when at least six males and a female were observed by some twenty people. Twice that number of people appeared on the following day, which may have been too much for what can be a decidedly wary butterfly, for sightings were fewer and further between. Two males repeatedly attempted to establish a territory in a sheltered sunny hollow, but were quickly driven off by over-eager cameras. Long-tailed Blues lingered on at Kingsdown well into October, the final sighting being made on October 9th.
A number of other colonies were discovered along the coast of Kent and East Sussex, particularly on Thanet and around Newhaven and Brighton. Most were based on Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea. Fresh specimens were appearing until the autumn rains arrived with a vengeance around October 20th. Strangely, though, only a scatter of Long-tailed Blues was seen in West Sussex, and even fewer in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight, where a few were seen at Ventnor in early October. Despite vigilance the butterfly was not recorded in Surrey, which meant that the drifts of Broad-leaved Everlasting-pea along the old coaching road at Denbies Hillside, near Dorking, which attracted the butterfly in 2003, went untenanted.
Like so much of the best of British wildlife the Long-tailed Blue looks too exotic to be British. The uppersides of freshly emerged males display an iridescence which hints at both the Large Blue and the Adonis Blue, whilst a fresh female can flash vivid turquoise at you. Conversely, a faded male could be mistaken for an old male Common Blue, albeit a large one, and a worn female for a female Chalkhill Blue – which makes one wonder whether it might have been overlooked, mistaken for commoner species. To make matters worse, Long-tailed Blues are active only intermittently, disappearing mysteriously for periods of time. With the males, they seem to hop from territory to territory, occupying several during a day on some sort of rota system. When two meet a vicious battle ensues, in which they spiral high up in a speeded-up version of Duke of Burgundy male combat. The females are even more intermittent in appearance. In flight, both sexes fly, or rather flit, more like a hairstreak than a blue, using a flight pattern reminiscent of that of the Brown Hairstreak. A great many UK butterfly enthusiasts made the effort to see this most lovely of butterflies in 2013, and so will know how to look for it should it grace our shores again – and it will. It has designs on the United Kingdom.
Eventually the great butterfly summer of 2013 was blasted away by the autumn rains, which arrived with a vengeance in late October. From humble origins it had become great and, more importantly, had set up its successor well, at least for most of our butterfly species. My fiftieth summer of butterflying had been like none of its predecessors; or rather, it had been like each one of them, in that it was, as all others had been, intrinsically unique.
Butterflies exist within a perpetual whirligig of change that prohibits repetition, and which ensures that those who study them remain forever entranced, dancing in the sunlight with them. For fifty years I have just been scraping the surface, dabbling in the shallow end. It is time to venture deeper. That may consist of giving up all butterflies bar one, and concentrating only on the one that matters most – His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of the Woods, the one of whom the Nightingale sings, the Purple Emperor, Apatura iris, whose very name captivated a small boy half a century ago.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
Live the life you imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wild flowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end? What purpose?
Richard Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow (1889)
Nature has never been an easy path to follow, particularly in an increasingly materialistic society run by increasingly convoluted systems and forms of usury. It seems we seek perfection in (rather than through) systems. Naturalists would rather pursue Nature's wealth, and the freedom and depth of experience that Nature offers. Many of them, perhaps those who feel most fulfilled, decide at an early age that they would rather have time than money, realising of course that one cannot have both, and that money does not buy time. Time in Nature is what they seek.
Naturalists used to be loners, and were often regarded as odd individuals. To many social strata they were at best eccentrics. Certainly that is how it felt as a young person during the false dawn of the hippy era, which opted for Flower Power when Butterfly Power would have been more effective, then through the mindless nihilism of punk and the hedonism of the Thatcher years. But during the 1990s things changed, mercifully. It was the birders – clothed in anoraks and bobble-hats, by reputation only – who broke down the barriers of social inhibition, perhaps by sheer weight of numbers and downright persistence. In parts of the country, notably along the north Norfolk coast and on the Isles of Scilly, servicing their needs became a significant part of the local economy, at least seasonally – even if what they were actually seeking was poorly understood, by others and perhaps by themselves.
Butterfly people are little different, now that they no longer carry nets and killing jars. Like birders, they stand around for ages in one spot, waiting. They loiter with intent. Above all else they are seeking glory moments, moments within Nature's glory; they seek discovery, and freedom – freedom to exist purely within the moment of being. They need patience, the ability to move without disturbing butterflies, to be able to read what is going on around them, phenomenal powers of visual observation, and they need to develop an intense, intuitive relationship with Nature. These essential skills are not easily learnt. Butterfly followers who have spent time fishing should be greatly advantaged.
Rather suddenly, and perhaps due largely to the focus and fellowship provided by the dynamic charity Butterfly Conservation, and the clear conservation messages the organisation has successfully conveyed to public and politicians alike, butterflies have become cool. Butterfly people, like birders, are no longer stigmatised outcasts. Without Butterfly Conservation, though, they might still be eccentric loners. With it, they can grow and make effective changes. Anyone who has read so far in this book is effectively a member of Butterfly Conservation, though some may not have paid their subscriptions yet.
Sublimation
The truth is that people rather yearn for Nature, and perhaps especially for one aspect of it, wildlife – or wilder life. At the very least we belong alongside Nature, though some of us would be happier actually living amongst her. The success of wildlife television owes much to this poorly recognised desire, this sense of belonging, and of current separation. Interestingly, wildlife TV is based on appreciating and understanding wildlife, rather than exploiting it – there are no TV programmes about country sports, except for occasional series on fishing. At the very least TV has provided a lifeline between an increasingly urbanised and acquisitive society and Nature. The problem, of course, is that direct experiences with wildlife are infinitely greater than remote, two-dimensional sublimations – but only to those who have experienced the real thing. Super slow-motion TV can show butterflies, not as they are, but as we might like them to be – nice and cooperative, our toys.
There is a danger of augmented or supplanted reality taking over here, particularly when computer screens, IT packages and sophisticated photographic equipment are brought into play. In this context the second verse of George Herbert's hymn ‘Teach Me My God and King’ is worthy of consideration:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the Heaven espy.
There is a friendly warning for butterflying here, as increasing use is made of digital photography – a great hobby, for sure, offering the thrill of the chase, the warm glow of satisfaction, clear memories, and great days out in Nature. But we must be careful that the camera does not dominate our relationship with these creatures, or we will revert to becoming butterfly collectors again in spirit (to practise what I preach, I have determined not to photograph butterflies on Sundays).
The message here is simple. With butterflying, do not settle for two-dimensional experiences – go the whole way, seek depth of experience; it is there on offer, even though the true meaning may not kick in until much later.
In the autumn of 2010 the National Trust website ran a competition asking people to write down what butterflies meant to them. Copies of Patrick Barkham's book The Butterfly Isles were offered as prizes. The volume and depth of the responses were nothing short of astounding. Clearly, a great many National Trust supporters value butterflies greatly, considering them vital to the health of the environment and to their own lives and wellbeing. The results were summarised in an article in the National Trust Magazine (summer 2011 edition).
Most readers had fallen under the spell of butterflies in childhood, and expressed a view that these winged creatures reminded them strongly of those halcyon days. One reader wrote: ‘These fragile, winged beauties make me feel the enthusiasm and sheer joy that children know and adults forget.’ So butterflies are symbols of something precious that has been lost, some much-missed part of ourselves, of yesterdays gone by. Perhaps some fall from grace has taken place? Perhaps our understanding of metaphor?
Several readers wrote in to report profound experiences involving butterflies, including at times of bereavement. One recalled encountering the exquisite Koh-i-noor Morpho whilst preparing to lead an infantry charge in the jungle. Others described how timely appearances of butterflies had helped them come to terms with the loss of a loved one. One lady reported two butterflies flying together high up in the church rafters during her grandfather's funeral service, where a single butterfly had flown there during her grandmother's funeral a year earlier. Another freed a red butterfly battering itself against her recently deceased red-haired mother's bedroom window. I had a comparable experience at my mother's funeral, as described in Chapter 24 – only I was expecting it.
Memory, heartland and loss
People collect memories, often inadvertently, so much so that some major industries are heavily reliant on this, notably tourism and recreation. Modern naturalists collect memories, as photographs, in diary accounts and, most notably, as after-images in the mind that coalesce to provide some curious warm glow of fulfilment, of belonging to the places they have experienced, of belonging in or at least with Nature. Butterflying is exceptionally good at providing such memories, as no two days out in the woods or fields are ever alike, for butterflies are grand masters of the art of constant change, even more so than the seasons and the places they inhabit. No two butterfly seasons are remotely alike, all are unique. Butterflies take us into the living pulse of spring, and far into the totality of summer, and then provide us with memories that become distilled and enhanced over time, gilded or silvered in sunshine and framed by green leaves.
Also, and more importantly, butterflies take us deep into many of the most wonderful landscapes in the British Isles, and when those places are at the very zenith of their annual cycles of natural beauty, on sublime days in spring and summer. They take us out of the material world in which we are entrapped. They take us to where the sense of spirit of place is so awesome that when we leave part of ourselves remains behind, and we take some microbe of the essence of that place away with us. Consequently, we are duty-bound to return, and the place leaps to greet us when, almost as prodigal children, we return. This experience is deeply poetic, spiritual and, for people who like the term, religious – and should be recognised and celebrated as such.
We do not merely fall in love with each other (something we may not be as good at as we think), but with places. Such places become our spiritual heartlands, places of treasured memories, of belonging and rootedness. The Welsh language recognises the concept of places of deep belonging through a conceptual term that does not readily translate. Strictly, cynefin means one's personal habitat – cultural, ecological, geographic, historic, social and spiritual. It translates poorly into English as heartland, only a deep and highly personal heartland. There is also a Welsh concept with which naturalists, especially birders, will readily identify – y filltir sgwâr, which translates as the square mile, or home patch. All my life I have sought to develop deep cynefin. At times I have almost got there – only to be forced out, obliged to move. I am now left with a vast amount of incipient cynefin (plural cynefinoedd) – modest spiritual homes, or loving heartlands, scattered throughout the British Isles. These range from the shores of Loch Arkaig in the north-west Highlands to the cliffs of Dover, from the Lake District high fells down to the limestone hills of Morecambe Bay and across the Irish Sea to Murlough Dunes and the Mountains of Mourne, from the Ceredigion coast, through the Malvern Hills and across to the Norfolk Broads, and too many to mention which are scattered across southern England. Eventually I will settle in one, and seek to grow my true cynefin. That single word needs to penetrate the English language, and take English culture by storm – but without losing its depth. Too many of us are rootless, and are searching for rootedness, as is suggested in much of today's new nature writing.
Conversely, Welsh culture and language also include the concept of hiraeth – a longing for home. This can be positive or negative, the latter equating readily to the homesickness felt by new pupils at boarding school. At its darkest, hiraeth is the spiritual sickness that develops when one's cynefin is broken by dramatic physical change to one's heartland, or by being forced to move away from where one's cynefin dwells. The life of John Clare (1793–1864), poet, superb self-taught naturalist and devout countryman, is worth examining through the perspectives of cynefin and hiraeth. The landscape of his homeland, around the village of Helpston in east Northamptonshire, was his heartland, his real and fantasy worlds combined. But that landscape was ruthlessly destroyed by Enclosure Acts early in his adult life. Furthermore, he was lured to London by his publisher, and by the bright lights – wine, women and song, which he liked. There, however, something fundamental was missing, so much so that he broke down and became confined to a mental asylum. Yet Home was calling him. He escaped and walked back to Helpston, starving, a beggar forced to eat grass. Only Home was no longer recognisable, beyond the village buildings; his deep cynefin lay shattered by agricultural changes. In such situations there may be no safe place to go this side of cloistered religion, or madness. Clare succumbed to the latter, and spent the last thirty years of his life confined to the asylum in Northampton, suffering from severe delusions. This interpretation should have resonance amongst environmental conservationists, and amongst people for whom the countryside is dear. His tale is perhaps a mighty metaphor for the present human predicament in the UK.
Fortunately, butterflies seldom take us to desecrated places. When they start to do that our relationship with them will break, for their heartlands will have been destroyed and they will be making last-ditch stands, their vital metapopulation structures shattered. Certainly, an increasing number of quality butterfly sites are devalued by traffic noise pollution which reduces the all-important sense of spirit of place – and is also a symptom of habitat fragmentation and isolation. Seeing the spring-flying fritillaries in young conifer plantations was always a struggle, knowing that those places had had their souls sold to the devil, and would develop into arboreal slums, and their joyous inhabitants – flowers, insects and songbirds – would all be lost. At times naturalists leave such places in a state of mourning.
Indeed, most of the older naturalists alive today have witnessed so much species loss and habitat destruction that they are traumatised by it, and are living in a state of unrecognised but profound grief – especially those who have worked in nature conservation and environmental conservation. Yet conservationists carry on, they have no other choice. They are Nature's spokespeople. Some may even be part of Nature itself.
Symbolism and beauty
Yet, as John Masefield so aptly puts it late on in his gipsy-land story-poem ‘King Cole’, butterflies are ‘the souls of summer hours’. They help transport you into the vortex of spring and into the very epicentre of summer. They do not merely lead you into special places, but into special – ultra-special – time, time that is almost too virtuous and ecstatic to be of this earth. So the highs and lows, the weather-borne vicissitudes, of butterflying are massive. The problem for butterflyers in the UK is that spring and summer weather provides rather an imbalance between down-time and rapture. Also, the closer one lives to Nature, the more one exists under the thumb of the weather and the darker seasons.
If butterflies take you to special places in special times, then they are offering great depth of experience and immense freedom. Not for nothing are they forever seen as symbols of freedom, the freedom of the immortal soul, and the freedom of beauty. Butterflies can be viewed as keys to the freedom of Nature. However, their transience and vulnerability are such that they must not be regarded as symbols of perpetuity, especially as in Nature nothing persists indefinitely, everything occurs in successional phases, everything is Phase.
Those of us who are hard-wired to Beauty – which should be all of us – will find that butterflies have much to offer. This is not simply because of the beauty of their wings, and the grace of their flight, or their juxtaposition to and relationship with flowers, but because they exist in the most wonderful places, in the best of all weathers in the greatest of seasons – weather permitting, that is. Beauty will always win people over, providing it is communicated in appropriate language. The UK nature conservation movement desperately needs poets, and story tellers, to articulate this better; not least because the real battle for nature conservation lies not so much out there on the land but in the hearts and minds of people – win the people over, and the politicians will follow.
Knowledge, science and conservation
Perhaps above everything else butterflies feed a thirst for knowledge. This may well be the main reason why so many scientists, including some of the world's leading biologists and ecologists, are attracted to butterflies as objects of study. Metamorphosis does not over-excite scientists these days. They are more interested in butterfly interactions with climate, with habitat fragmentation, isolation, quality and quantity, the problem of habitat patches jumping in and out of suitability according to factors such as seasonal vegetation growth rates, as well as butterfly population structures and mobility, and with genetics. Predation, parasitism, viruses, pathogens and diseases are also on the research radar – and rightly so. One crucial area for research is the factors behind the long-term cycles of expansion and contraction, ebb and flow, rise and fall.
The more we learn about butterflies, the more we realise remains to be learnt about them. Despite the fact that British butterflies are amongst the best studied and most closely monitored taxonomic group in the world, their ability to surprise us seems infinite. They continually astound, and remain incredibly difficult to predict. What is not known about them must be more important than what is known, certainly in terms of practical conservation knowledge. Butterflies are changelings, continually moving the goal posts – including their own goal posts, by endeavouring to adapt to changing environmental situations and simply by pushing limits. Their main problem is that of keeping up with the increasing pace of environmental change. People with low boredom thresholds and a deep thirst for ecological knowledge and experience will find that butterflies will not let them down.
But what about conservation, you might well ask? Surely the whole purpose of spending fifty years recording and studying butterflies is to assist in their conservation? The answer is, well yes, of course – but not quite as you might think. Certainly, my middle thirty years of butterflying were concerned primarily with contributing effectively to their conservation, but then I began to question the meaning of conservation itself. In effect, I worked in nature conservation for some thirty years before I began to wonder what ‘nature conservation’ actually meant – and opened Pandora's box. Few of my colleagues were interested – they were too busy conserving biodiversity, setting up and attending meetings, or completing a grant application form or management plan on time. ‘It's obvious!’ they said, dismissively. It was not. Philosophical ponderings consequently took place, in places as diverse as traffic jams on the M25 and tree stumps in forest clearings.
Eventually, some truth dawned: nature conservation is essentially concerned with mending the relationship between people and Nature, and is an expression of love for, and an interaction with, the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and with belonging in Nature. This has been rather hijacked by ecology, in the vain hope that it might hold a panacea. Science provides some rationalisation and helps clarify priorities, and works alongside technology and resources to determine practicalities, but the whole show is essentially about Love. It matters not that love is scarcely rational.
And as for the conservation of butterflies, those shimmering, fickle creatures of change? In simplistic terms it is relatively easy to manage a place for a single well-studied species, such as a butterfly, for a while. Yet we are forever trying to manage small, isolated places for whole suites of species with diverse and even conflicting ecological requirements, and are continually trying to arrest successional change and freeze a place into a time capsule. Nature does not do time capsules, it runs in epochs, periodically moving on. Moreover, Nature does not recognise our targets: in Nature there is no agenda beyond the will of individual plants and animals to exist, and then only within the moment of being. The needs we attribute to Nature may actually be ours. Re-wilding is now being held up as a solution, but perhaps it is we who need re-wilding, not Nature.
And as for the butterflies themselves? Perhaps they are forever seeking to push limits – environmental limits, their own limits, our limits. After all, butterflies – led by the Purple Emperor, the ultimate butterfly – seek nothing short of world domination. Conservationists are there merely to help them realise that ambition.
It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity.
Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart (1883)