Having weaned himself off opium, Coleridge mused in his 1814–1815 notebook: ‘If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & (if he) found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye? And what then?’ Those of us who have passed through paradise are left, perhaps indefinitely, with the question Coleridge poses. We find ourselves wanting to get back, somehow, anyhow, rather than move forward. Such, for me, was the summer of 1976. Part of me still wanders, sunburnt, through that parched land of relentless sun, droughted trees and brown, cracked lawns, haunted by its omnipresent butterflies.
The winter of 1975/76 was largely mild and dry, as if the power of the late summer and autumn of 1975 had never really left. By late February sallows were blossoming and some were even in leaf, Lady's Smock was flowering along the East Hampshire lanes and the Bullfinch was singing his summertime song. The last eleven months had been the driest on record, and in the South-east the last six had produced only 60% of the average rainfall.
Good summers tend to be heralded by an anticyclone at the start of March – seemingly, the stronger and more prolonged that anticyclone, the greater the summer. Sure enough, March 1976 began with a light frost that was quickly burnt off by shafts of sun strengthening through misted fields, promising glory and tempting the lark to ascend. By noon the magic temperature of 12 degrees Celsius had been reached, and the first butterflies of the year appeared. Early in Tove Jansson's childhood classic Finn Family Moomintroll it is revealed that, ‘if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about.’ Her story continues, ‘But this butterfly was golden … Gold is even better than yellow.’ Certainly, the male Brimstone that danced through St Matthew's churchyard in Blackmoor, and off and away down a path through silvered birch trees, appeared as a golden butterfly, and in golden light. The early March anticyclone intensified, peaking on the 4th, a day when chimerical Skylarks ascended en masse through early-morning mists over the nurseries and orchards of Blackmoor estate, between Selborne and the heaths of Woolmer Forest. I had worked there through the winter, reconnecting with rural people who had a profound relationship with the land, the weather and the seasons. The issue here is that the more time one spends outdoors, the more one lives under the thumb of the vagaries of our climate, the weather and seasonal extremes.
The four standard hibernating butterflies – Brimstone, Comma, Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell – were all out and about in unusually high numbers. I had determined to throw all caution to the warm summer wind and spend the season butterflying, having saved a paltry sum of money by working on the land and writing the odd article. But sometimes one develops an intuitive feel of faith in a summer, or even in an entire year. Great summers are not merely planned, however assiduously, but are faithfully dreamt and prayed for during the winter. Moreover, great butterfly years are not one-offs, but the second or even third in a sequence of good summers, which allows butterfly populations to build up incrementally and spread to establish new colonies. I had no objectives other than to relish each sunlit moment, explore the promised land of East Hampshire, experience an entire Purple Emperor season again, see some of the few remaining British butterflies I had not yet seen, record each sighting and each event in diaries, and learn as much about our butterflies and their habitats as was humanly possible. For relaxation, I would play some cricket and woo pretty young ladies, until they realised I was living in another spiritual dimension and deemed me unsuitable. My parameters were limitations in funds and transport, the latter often restricted to a bicycle.
In those days it was rare to see the Orange-tip, that quintessential harbinger of spring, before mid-April, even during the great spring of 1976. The lower hanger system between Selborne and Empshott, where the Upper Greensand gives way to heavy Gault Clay, is an especially rich area for Orange-tips and Green-veined Whites, as one of their favourite larval foodplants, Lady's Smock, grows profusely in the damp woods there, whilst another, Garlic Mustard, occurs commonly along the lanes. Sure enough, the first Orange-tip of the year was seen in a lonely winding part-wooded combe below Selborne on April 16th. Shortly afterwards the first Cuckoo of the year, a sleek dark male, flew silently off into a copse there, perching barred chest on-high in a leafing Ash tree, having been disturbed whilst feeding on the ground. Minutes later, he called, clear and deep, and in that very moment winter, and all the tedium it epitomises, was forgotten. Within three days Orange-tip males abounded around drifts of Lady's Smock in the young conifer plantations of Hartley Wood, between Oakhanger and Selborne, a sizeable Gault Clay oak wood then in the process of being replanted with non-native conifers. What surprised me, during that spring of discovery in East Hampshire, was how small Orange-tips are in that district. I have never worked out why. Perhaps the majority of them breed on Lady's Smock there, a relatively small plant that perhaps produces small underfed adults.
Over in Southwater Forest, the Nightingales were in. Two nights were spent with them – more precisely two sleepless nights, as two birds sang close by from 9.30 pm, non-stop. I lay in my tent pondering how dear Keats had managed to turn the lightning storm of the Nightingale's explosive song into a soporific. Had he, a Cockney with no natural history knowledge, actually been listening to the right species of bird?
May stuttered at the start, then quickly mended its ways as another anticyclone moved in from the south-west. Cuckoos seemed to be everywhere in the East Hampshire countryside, especially in Hartley Wood, where a knot of five was seen on May 6th, four loud males and a ‘bubbling’ female. The following day what was still called the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary was beginning to emerge at Noar Hill, a somewhat late start for this butterfly in such a fine spring, but in those days this and other butterfly species emerged later than is now considered normal. Azure-winged Holly Blues were by then almost ubiquitous around clumps of flowering Holly bushes in the Selborne lanes and gardens, and migrant Red Admirals were starting to appear. On the 11th, Pearl-bordered Fritillaries began to emerge in Alice Holt Forest, in a young plantation close to Bucks Horn Oak. A great butterfly summer had been born.
In mid-May, two lengthy searches of Southwater Forest revealed that both Duke of Burgundy and Pearl-bordered Fritillary had died out there during my three-year enforced springtime absence. This hurt, and was hard to believe, especially with the former, for it is a tiny butterfly which can subsist at very low population levels and is easily overlooked. Nonetheless, despite suffering five near-sleepless nights on account of the incessant tongues of the wanton Nightingales a double blank was drawn, and a heart-wrenching conclusion reached: I had seen the last of the Southwater Duke of Burgundies and Pearl-bordered Fritillaries back in 1972. Their lifeblood, the supply of young plantations from broad-leaved fellings, had ceased. There was nowhere for them to move to, for in woodland systems these butterflies follow the woodcutter, and the woodcutter had stopped work here. A fatal break in continuity of habitat supply had occurred.
The loss was rubbed in by the discovery of huge colonies of Pearl-bordered Fritillary in several places in Alice Holt Forest, and more modest colonies in the Oakhanger woods. Pearl-bordered Fritillary had emerged in wonderful numbers that spring. There were three sizeable colonies alone in the Lodge Inclosure of Alice Holt, and others in Goose Green, Abbots Wood and Willows Green inclosures. This most graceful of springtime butterflies almost abounded along the rides there, feasting communally on patches of Bugle flowers, fulvous amber on gentian blue. Wall Browns, today a rarity in most districts and all but extinct throughout Hampshire, were very common that May. In Alice Holt's Lodge Inclosure I counted over fifty in two hours on the 23rd. I had not seen this grassland insect so numerous in a wood, and have not since. This was 1976.
Monday May 24th was cloudless and hot, with a vestige of breeze emanating vaguely from the south-east. I cycled, some twenty miles, to the Chiddingfold Woods, in search of a species new to me, the Wood White. A male bumbled out of the entrance to Fisherlane Wood as I arrived after an hour and a half of cycling over undulating terrain. Crossing the arduous heights of Haslemere proved to be worth the effort. I fell instantly for this fragile white butterfly that flutters perpetually just above the rough ride-side grasses, forever threatening to alight on some choice plant yet changing its mind at the last millisecond and continuing in perpetual motion, ever onwards, at a constant speed, in dithering flight. I watched the females laying eggs, found other eggs and even some tiny young larvae on the leaves of Greater Bird's-foot Trefoil growing along the ride-side ditch margins. Pearl-bordered and Small Pearl-bordered fritillaries abounded in a young fir plantation at the southern end of the wood, where male Grizzled and Dingy skippers fought each other almost manfully. That evening, I took my young cat, Thomas Mouse, for his customary amble through the apple orchards to a Beech cathedral on a promontory along the greensand hanger system. There, I scratched the name of the Wood White in the dust – sinapis – whilst my cat, a highly confident long-haired black with white trimmings, played merrily with a clan of young badgers, dashing in and out of exposed tree roots, overhangs and hollows on a steep earthy bank with his mutually coloured counterparts. There is a better reality than the one we continually subsist within, Nature's.
The weather wobbled at the turn of May, producing a short spell of indecision between pulses of high pressure, as if Nature was taking a deep breath before the immortal June of 1976 commenced. The abundance of butterflies was making the news, with eulogies appearing in several newspapers. An expedition to the Moulsford Downs by John Clarke and myself somehow generated a spate of indignant letters in The Times concerning butterfly collecting. In early June 1976 the Adonis Blue was a seriously rare butterfly outside Dorset, the Isle of Wight and Wiltshire. In Hampshire only a single colony was known, at Martin Down NNR in the extreme west of the county. In Surrey it was known only from Denbies Hillside (also and wrongly known as Ranmore Common) near Dorking. In Berkshire and the Chilterns there were colonies only on the Moulsford Downs just west of Streatley. Clarke and I had travelled there as much in search of Stone Curlew, an even greater rarity, as Adonis Blues, which I had seen there back in August 1970. Despite much agricultural damage to the downs during my six-year absence we found the Adonis still present. A couple of old collectors were also present, and a spate of critical letters started. Clearly, perceptions and values were changing. Indeed, 1976 was the last year of widespread butterfly collecting in this country, a watershed year in our attitudes towards butterflies. Thereafter collectors converted to photography, switched to collecting abroad, went undercover and became paranoid, or simply gave up – most of the collectors I encountered in 1976 were never heard of again. In the ensuing sequence of poor summers Clarke hung up his net and converted to birding.
At the end of June, a Mr John Lodge wrote to The Times claiming to have rediscovered the Large Blue ‘in the Cotswolds’, supposedly near Cheltenham. At that time, the butterfly was known only from a single, top-secret site in south Dartmoor. Three years later that colony, and with it the British race, was formally declared extinct. Sadly, Lodge's claims were never substantiated, as he insisted on keeping the locality secret, but years later it was reported that a credible source knew of a colony in existence in the southern Cotswolds that persisted until after 1976, so perhaps Lodge had after all found something. We will never know. But this was 1976, and it was that sort of year.
Meanwhile, in early June the spring butterflies started to burn themselves out. The Pearl-bordered Fritillaries were replaced by a massive emergence of Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary. In the East Hampshire woods, as in West Sussex, this proved to be an even more widespread butterfly than its congener. A large population was discovered in the Oakhanger woods, which produced two acute aberrations, one of which was probably ab. vanescens. Only a verbal description exists, in my diary, as I had no camera then and was not prepared to take them as specimens. Had I done so, and they were worthy of collecting, the summer would doubtless have died on me. In brief, the wing undersides did not look remotely like a Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the uppersides, scarcely.
Another long cycle ride, past Edward Thomas country, to the sheep-grazed slopes of Butser Hill and Ramsdean Down south of Petersfield, on a stultifying hot day in mid-June, is memorable for what may be the best flight of the humble Small Heath I have ever seen. In those days, long before it showed any sign of decline, it was such a commonplace insect that one took little notice of it. The general attitude was that it got in the way of better quarry. Little Butser Hill also held a sizeable colony of Duke of Burgundy, though this spring butterfly was by then finishing for the year.
The following day I returned to Southwater Forest, in search of Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary. But none was found. It too had apparently died out there. I had seen the last of the Southwater Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries the previous year. The Nightingales were still vocal, though, at night, and White-letter Hairstreaks were emerging, somehow, from dying elms. Farmers had been hard at work, grubbing out hedges and cutting back wood edges that had encroached decades ago. The heat built steadily.
June 19th was a Saturday, and the Saturday of the Lords Test match to boot. Not a ball was bowled. I know, for I was there. Snow and Underwood had dismissed the mighty West Indies for a mere 182. Snow was a man of Sussex and of Christ's Hospital school (a few years earlier I had slept in his bed, and by that I mean only that the bed I occupied in the senior school had formerly been his, for his name and dates were etched into the headboard). Contrary to the weather forecast, light but steady rain fell from midday, ceasing mid-morning on the 20th. By then, Clarke and I had travelled up to the Oxfordshire woods in search of the elusive Black Hairstreak. I had unfinished business with that butterfly, having looked for it in past years with at best only paltry success, being miles away at boarding school during much of its flight season. Returning to Rushbeds Wood north of Brill, the scene of a failed expedition in 1971, this most evasive of hairstreaks put on a stupendous performance. I have only once seen it in better numbers since, during its annus mirabilis of 2010. It is very much a boom or bust butterfly, experiencing many lean years punctuated by occasional years of plenty. In 1976 it was abundant along the east edge of Rushbeds Wood, which was then a neglected and thoroughly forgotten tract of broad-leaved woodland that had been clear-felled during the Second World War and then forsaken (some years later Rushbeds was acquired by the county wildlife trust, and became a managed wood). Pruni, as the Black Hairstreak is known, was still flying actively when Clarke and I left at 6.30. It had started its day late, at around 1.30, due to the unforecast rain, and had been making up for lost time.
From June 22nd the weather intensified, the famous Long Hot Summer had truly begun. Britain, or the UK, or whatever it was called at the time, had just capitulated bizarrely to Iceland in the third Cod War, indicating that something was out of kilter. Clouds became almost as rare as Large Blues. In the Hampshire woods Meadow Browns had emerged in myriads and were jostling for position on every bramble flower. They had started to emerge in the meadows and along the road verges as early as June 2nd and were now threatening to reach plague proportions. But minds were on mightier, loftier matters: would it be possible to equal or even beat Heslop's record for the earliest Purple Emperor, on Midsummer Day? I failed, though not for want of sweat and effort. Later I found out that iris commenced that year in Alice Holt Forest on the 25th. Had I visited Southwater Forest, where flight seasons are a little earlier, I might have beaten that Midsummer Day record, but it mattered little.
Over the last weekend of June, Clarke and Oates staged an expedition to the Lake District. The journey north on the Friday afternoon was memorable, in that there seemed to be an overheated car every three or four miles up the M6, bonnet up, radiator steaming. The summer of 1976 was nothing if not exacting. We slept in Clarke's car, along a quiet lane near Witherslack, and were unkindly woken at 5.30 the following morning by a passing farmer: ‘Good morning, you queer bastards!’ he shouted from the safe haven of a tractor cab. Little did he know that the occupants had lulled themselves to sleep by discussing girls. Undeterred and unbreakfasted, we found Large Heath males well out on Meathop Moss, once we had stumbled upon a way into this most hidden of places, a world within a world. The Large Heath is the grey pilgrim of the peat hags, drifting about aimlessly in the breeze. Oddly, the last Pearl-bordered Fritillary of the season was seen flying over the wet heath vegetation there, a stray from the surrounding limestone hills. In those days the moss was still genuinely wet, such that even at the height of the 1976 drought Wellington boots were essential, and were regularly overtopped. Not too much had changed, then, since an Edwardian collector writing in The Entomologist's Record advised: ‘Great care is necessary in moving about, as one's leg frequently disappears well above the knee, either into a large hidden crack or into a bog hole, in either case a highly dangerous occurrence if on the run.’ Similar recommendations were made by an earlier entomological visitor, who for many years ran the ‘lunatic asylum’ at Lancaster, and escaped from there to entomologise around Arnside and Witherslack. After 1976 I witnessed the moss, a wonderful domed raised bog, dry out such that first Wellingtons became unnecessary, and then, prickles apart, even walking boots as the water table was lowered by drainage ditches cut along its boundaries to facilitate agriculture in the surrounding fields. Massive conservation effort by the Cumbria Wildlife Trust is now remedying that situation.
The mountains were calling, and even revealed a cloud or two, one like a ring of dragon smoke around the summit of Blencathra. On Fleetwith Pike, above the Honister Pass youth hostel, the Mountain Ringlets were just starting to emerge, revealing an iridescence on their wings like that of a Starling in breeding plumage. Herdwick sheep panted and bleated pitifully in the heat. Arnside Knott was also visited, but it seemed that the High Brown Fritillary season there had not yet begun and we failed to locate another target species, the Northern Brown Argus. All we saw was yet another proliferation of Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary before duty called us back south. Clarke had to return to his teaching job, for it was the exam season, and I to the Emperor.
But something was wrong with the strength of the sun, it had become if anything too strong. During a fifteen-day period, from June 23rd to July 7th inclusive, the temperature reached 32 degrees Celsius somewhere in southern Britain. Clouds were all but absent, restricted to wisps of high cirrus, often in curious shapes. Roads melted such that the tarmac became and then remained viscous. Cycling through, rather than over it, was arduous in the extreme, with the tyres making a curious dragging, sticking sound. Almost daily I cycled to Alice Holt Forest, through nine miles of melting tarmac. My nose burnt, peeled, burnt again, peeled, before giving up in abject resignation. One by one the East Hampshire heaths caught fire, seemingly by design rather than by genuine accident, for the disaffected youth of places like the military town of Bordon had problems sleeping on those warm nights. Palls of smoke rose high, before bending and drifting in some high-altitude wind. There was a searing inevitability about it all.
The Purple Emperor at last exploded onto the scene, adding iridescent purple to a world of azure and gold. It was a short but extremely sweet season. I saw my first, a brace of battling males, in Alice Holt's Straits Inclosure, early on June 28th, saw two more, and met someone out rough shooting who had earlier watched one settle and display on a rickety old wooden gate that stood at the wood's western entrance. I knew the spot – it caught dappled morning sun, framed between tall oaks. I coveted that sighting. I discovered a thriving colony in Hartley Wood, by Oakhanger: large, bold and aggressive males that threatened to rival their Dragons Green counterparts in belligerence.
On July 1st there was a mass emergence of females. I must have seen at least ten that day, whereas in previous seasons I had never seen more than three in a day. That morning, a huge ancient silver Bentley drew up at the entrance to one of the Alice Holt inclosures, and a gnome-like man emerged, clad in a string vest, Boy Scout shorts of considerable antiquity and hobnail boots – and proceeded to rub rancid Danish Blue cheese into a Forestry Commission gatepost. This was the Baron de Worms, close friend of my boyhood hero I R P Heslop and the most respected lepidopterist of the era. He swore by rancid Danish Blue as a bait for iris, but had retreated to a local hostelry by the time the first male descended. The bait was duly consumed by wasps. That morning I made a fool of myself, though mercifully there were no witnesses. A huge dark butterfly flew at 3–4 metres above ground along a heavily shaded ride. Immediately I gave chase, convinced this was a rare dark colour form of the Empress, ab. iole perchance. Whooping with delight I eventually cornered my first ever Silver-washed Fritillary form valezina, the strange dark-green colour form of this normally orange species that is found only in the female and seems to prefer heavily shaded rides, at least in heatwaves. Black Admirals were around too: I saw on average one a day in Alice Holt that season.
Two days were then spent in Southwater Forest, but the woods felt oppressive in the sweltering heat. Worse, I did not belong there anymore, for the poetic spell was broken. The signs were ominous: I found a dying Emperor, hit by a car along one of the quiet lanes, whilst a scatter of White-letter Hairstreaks fluttered round the last of the dying elms, in the knowledge that there were no living elms left for them to seek and in recognition of their doom. Huge hexagonal cracks were everywhere in the Wealden Clay. Here dwelt the ghosts of last year. The present year lay elsewhere. The sense of belonging was broken. I left after two difficult days and two sleepless nights. It was many years before I was able to return to those woods; or perhaps, until they invited me back.
Back in Alice Holt early on July 6th, the Emperors put on a truly majestic show. I had moved home, or home had moved itself. I even saw four females in a vista, which remains the most I have ever seen of Herself at once, and at last saw eggs laid in a place I could actually reach. The latter represented a major breakthrough. The butterfly was at peak season. Each morning, both sexes would descend to the grassy rides to seek whatever vestige of moisture they could find, with the bulk of this activity taking place between 8.30 and 9.30. On occasions there were three or four down at a time along my favoured 75-metre stretch of ride. The White Admiral behaved similarly. But by mid-July much of the White Admiral's Honeysuckle had wilted.
By July 8th I had been butterflying all day, every day, in intense heat, for over three weeks, and pursuing young ladies or playing cricket (or both) in the evenings – and so I failed to wake up that morning. A shame I did not manage to last another day because on the 9th the weather broke, sort of: it actually rained, a little, then stayed dull and only reached a maximum of 17 degrees. At Old Trafford, Michael Holding bowled England out for 71.
On July 10th I was back in Alice Holt, reinvigorated. There was no mistaking the valezina Silver-washed Fritillary that greeted me at the main gate at 8.30, not this time. Then at 9.40 I saw the real thing, an Empress ab. lugenda, a black Empress. Three of us watched her for twenty minutes. She even laid eggs in front of our eyes. The prominent white bands that normally run through the middle of the wings were absent, the hindwings being uniformly dark; on the forewing uppersides there were a few small white markings; the undersides lacked any white, being predominately grey and brown. At the time I considered this a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I was wrong: years later I photographed a similar female in Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire.
The following day I and two others, Peter and Joan Baines of Farnham, witnessed the courtship flight of the Purple Emperor. Now this was ground-breaking stuff, for many of our butterflies are rarely seen courting and mating, especially those which dwell up in the canopy. At 2.45 a male was seen closely following a female, as if they were playing follow-my-leader, the male mimicking the female's every move – White Admirals do this when courting, weaving in and out of foliage in synchronised motion. The Emperors settled high up on an oak and immediately joined, wings closed and motionless, tucked into a leaf spray. They remained in copula, as scientists put it, for three and a half hours, before separating and flying off into the concluding pages of a D H Lawrence novel, or wherever over-amorous butterflies go. Incidentally, it cannot have been the lady's first mating, for she was clearly worn.
Thereafter the Emperor season rapidly burnt out, though it was evident that they had deposited a large number of eggs and set themselves up well for 1977. The Alice Holt females had taught me how to look for their eggs and larvae. By July 18th the Emperor was all but over, but not before I had seen the aberrant female again, on the 14th, in the same glade. She still flies within my mind. Graylings and Silver-studded Blues were appearing in strange places, displaced from their beloved heaths by wanton fires. As the brambles and thistles finished flowering in the woods, so Silver-washed Fritillaries dispersed in search of pastures new. A roadside flowerbed of African Marigolds attracted quite a host of them, until that too succumbed to the drought. Purple Hairstreaks were regularly encountered probing for moisture on the parched ground. In the evenings they were almost too profuse to describe – an order of magnitude greater than I have experienced at any other time, and their evening flight lasted till 9 pm. At times they moved around in droves along wood edges. Their eggs later proved to be abundant: I found 225 along a 75-metre stretch of drooping oak boughs in Hartley Wood, but only twelve there the following year.
In Bernwood Forest and in the Chiddingfold Woods the Wood White produced a sizeable second brood. A spur-of-the-moment translocation was made, of six females and two males, to the Straits Inclosure of Alice Holt, as a thank you for producing such a great Purple Emperor, White Admiral and Silver-washed Fritillary season. Butterfly enthusiasts did things like that in that era. Later I found out that the butterfly had spread naturally to Alice Holt that year anyway. It took there quite well, only blowing out in 1981 when its favoured rides were pulverised when timber was extracted during wet weather.
A day of torrential thunderstorms on the 20th failed to relieve the drought. About an inch of rain ran straight through the parched ground, even on clay soils. Then another anticyclone established itself over Britain, heralding a major August drought. In the Straits Inclosure, on the Gault Clay, a huge crack had opened in the main ride, some 6 metres long and at least 2 metres deep and perhaps 30 centimetres wide. Slowly, during the late summer and early autumn, that crack gradually vanished. It has never reappeared. By now, the nation's lawnmowers had gathered cobwebs and dust in garden sheds, all lawns having been brown for weeks. In early August a stupendous gaff letter, on official paper, was issued to a number of Southern Water's customers in north-east Hampshire. It complained that they had been squandering water profligately, advised that in addition to placing the by-now obligatory brick in the loo cistern they should place another in the loo itself, and told them to bath with a friend or next door's teenage daughter. It was signed ‘R Sole’. Apparently some of Southern Water's customers took it seriously. Doubtless someone got the sack. The heat was getting to the nation.
August dragged on in sullen heat. The downs turned a pale shade of grey as the vegetation wilted, south-facing slopes even turning brown. On the thinnest soils, much vegetation frazzled away. Elsewhere, farmers took advantage of the dry conditions to drain wetland pockets and meadows for more productive agriculture. Noar Hill revealed a good population of Brown Hairstreaks, active early in the morning before entering a heat-induced stupor for the rest of the day. It was hard not to join them. Graylings and Silver-studded Blues appeared there off the blackened heaths, and Chalkhill Blues and Brown Argus from the distant downs. Wall Brown produced an even more prolific brood than it had managed in early summer, occurring along almost every sunny bank in the district. But the most interesting feature of the month was the frequency of dwarf specimens, of many species, presumably induced by larvae cutting short their feeding time and pupating prematurely as their foodplants wilted. In particular, numerous Common Blues and Chalkhill Blues were significantly undersized that August.
One late summer day, I discovered that a new track had been bulldozed along the northern edge of Noar Hill, through Blackthorn entanglements beloved by Nightingales, Turtle Doves and Brown Hairstreaks. Ancient pollard Beech trees were being felled willy-nilly and for no obvious reason in the adjoining hanger. The contractors told me they were dangerous trees and had to come out. I was not fooled. Trees are seldom if ever dangerous. My protestations culminated in me becoming a warden for the reserve, which at that time lacked any practical input. A conservationist had rather suddenly been born. It was pay-back time.
At the end of August two cataclysmic things happened, almost simultaneously. The government appointed an official Minister for Drought, and the Hindu community brought over a Holy Man to pray for rain. Within three days of the Minister's appointment and even less after the Holy Man's arrival, the weather broke, spectacularly; so spectacularly that an excessively wet autumn ensued, and Britain did not experience any sustained hot or dry weather again until the spring of 1980. Once more I retreated to the apple harvest on Blackmoor Estate, where Red Admirals feasted on fallen fruit between the deluges. In early October they drifted away south, seeking warmer climes. Weekends were spent searching for Purple Emperor larvae in and around woods in East Hampshire and into West Sussex. I had cracked how to find them, and located over a hundred. One weekend in late September, when the sun actually shone, I returned to Southwater Forest, only to find that many sallow trees there had succumbed to the drought.
The Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (BMS) dataset does not show how abundant butterflies were that year. Analysis of all the years within the scheme places 1976 some way down the hierarchy of excellence. Scientists are well aware of how inadequate Year One datasets often are, and the scheme was launched in 1976, with just a few places contributing. The truth is that reliance on BMS analysis sells the Long Hot Summer of 1976 terribly short. Hopefully this account goes a little way towards remedying that situation.