Our English names for butterflies are, or should be, a source of pride but some of the French ones are just as inventive: Souci (marigold) for the Clouded Yellow, for example, or Robert-le-diable (Robert-the-Devil) for the reddish, ragged-winged Comma. The French name for the Orange-tip butterfly is Aurora, the goddess of the dawn. They see in its brilliant orbs the rising sun, fresh and beautiful, glowing on the horizon. Perhaps it is surprising that the English missed this allusion, for those who named our butterflies were amateur poets well versed in mythology and classical allusions. We did once have a better name for it: the Wood Lady, or the Lady of the Woods. Unfortunately the butterfly with the sunrise in its wings is no lady; it is the male of the species (the much less conspicuous female has no orange tips to its wings) and it lives in wet meadows and waysides more than in woods. But at least the scientific name, Anthocharis cardamines, does justice to the Orange-tip. Anthocharis means flower-grace, and what could better describe this pretty, dancing butterfly as it patrols the hedgerow ‘searching every shrub and tussock for a mate’.1
The Orange-tip represents the dawn in another sense. It is one of the first butterflies of the spring, and when you see one, then several more, then, with luck, dozens, you know that winter is over and that the blossoming and greening of spring is with us at last. It welcomes us to a new beginning, nature’s wakening.
Summer 2013 was, in the end, a wonderful year for butterflies. It was slow in coming; spring was cold and wet; early summer disappointing. There were even fewer butterflies than the previous year when it seemed to rain non-stop from April to August. But, towards the end of June, the skies cleared and what the weathermen call the Azores High was at last on its way. July 2013 became the third-warmest month in the past hundred years, some 2.5 degrees C above the average. We enjoyed six weeks of sunshine. By autumn it had turned into the best summer for seven years; one of the best of the new century.
And the butterflies responded. Brimstones and Peacocks feasted on garden buddleia. The Small Tortoiseshell, whose numbers were so low over the previous decade, suddenly returned in force. Large and Small Whites also flew in numbers rarely seen in recent years. Someone on the North Norfolk coast witnessed coming in from the sea a ‘cloud’ of white butterflies whose numbers he estimated at 40,000. Someone else, walking a butterfly transect in Sussex, had to give up counting the ‘shimmering’ Chalkhill Blues for there were simply ‘zillions’ of them. The Purple Emperor was spotted in places where it had been absent for decades. And it was also the best year ever for that very rare migrant, the Long-tailed Blue. Usually recorded only in single figures, if at all, it was seen by many people along the south coast from Devon to Kent, and above all in gardens. Almost for the first time, a British-born generation of Long-tailed Blues appeared in September. This pretty butterfly, its wings a harmony of shimmers, bands and eye-spots, further distinguished by a pair of delicate, whiskery ‘tails’, may be on its way to joining the Red Admiral and Painted Lady as a regularly breeding migrant. It makes a statement: the weather is getting warmer. The south is moving north.
The butterfly bonanza of late summer 2013 lingered as late as September and it seemed to lift many spirits. You sensed it from the blogs and twitters of butterfly watchers like Martin Warren and Matthew Oates. Slightly despondent in May and June, with the coming of warm weather their messages turned into a kind of thanksgiving. ‘Days like this do the soul good,’ tweeted Matthew Oates. ‘Heaven has decided to come down to earth,’ and, quoting Ruskin, he evoked ‘“the poetry of Nature … which uplifts the spirit within us”’.2
Summer 2014 was just as uplifting but in a different way. Though actual numbers rarely matched the previous year, the unscheduled appearance of two spectacular species gave notice of further change. The immigrant, continental form of the Swallowtail arrived on the south coast in numbers unprecedented since the hot summer of 1945. Some of them laid eggs that hatched into gaily striped caterpillars which fed up on fennel in gardens and waste places. Some of them survived to turn into chrysalids and some of those chrysalids hatched into British-born Swallowtails the following spring. Like the Long-tailed Blue, the continental Swallowtail may be in the process of turning British. A Swallowtail in the garden would feel like a holiday. Perhaps we will all see them soon.
It was also the year of a completely unexpected species – the Scarce or Yellow-legged Tortoiseshell. This is another colourful, strong-winged butterfly, very similar to the lost Large Tortoiseshell but distinguished by its pale legs and a white spot near the apex of the forewing. Hitherto almost unknown in Western Europe, let alone isolated Britain, it arrived in small numbers along the coast of eastern England during July 2014. Single butterflies were also spotted in Devon, Tyneside and the West Midlands. The survivors among them will attempt to hibernate like the sleepy individual spotted in a cupboard under the family TV in Norfolk in September.3 And, if all goes well, they will emerge again in the spring. The Scarce Tortoiseshell has always been a butterfly of comings and goings; in recent years it appeared in large numbers in Finland and Sweden, and lately it has also turned up further west, in the Netherlands. Whether we will see more stray Yellow-legs from across the North Sea, and whether some of them might lay and settle remains to be seen. There would be a poetic justice in it: having lost one large tortoiseshell, we would gain another, and solely by its own efforts.
Yet there is still hope for the Large Tortoiseshell. Its numbers seem to be building up in the Channel Islands and there have been springtime sightings of tattered tortoiseshells in the Isle of Wight, which suggest that they have been overwintering there. And if they spent the winter with us, there are presumably eggs in some as yet undiscovered place along the island’s elm-rich hedgerows. This lost butterfly could yet return.
So, while we are losing butterflies, we are also gaining them. The stability that has marked British wildlife for centuries has gone, perhaps for ever. In the climatic turmoil that awaits us, some species, such as the Swallowtail, the Long-tailed Blue and perhaps the two larger tortoiseshells, may be able to take advantage. For those who live by the south and east coast, especially, there will be more excitements ahead to compensate, in some measure, for ongoing losses among our resident species. We will learn to live with new circumstances, and weave them into our sense of nature and the natural world. The inner butterfly that animates our feelings and sensitises our perceptions will live on regardless of the cancer-like spread of bricks, tarmac and concrete.
As I write, it is early autumn – a warm dry September of the sort that is still called an Indian summer, long after colonial memories of the Indian climate have faded away. It has fully lived up to Keats’s ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ with the bees filling their honeycombs with the produce of ‘more, later flowers’. When I walk up my lane on a still, warm evening the scent of ivy and mint hangs in the air. It draws you in, like expensive perfume; it is not, you suddenly realise, merely a scent but an attractant. Briefly you glimpse the butterfly’s world of invisible, chemical messages, in Miriam Rothschild’s words, ‘loading the night air and sometimes the sunny afternoon breezes with intense sexual stimulation and imperious desire’.4 I pass the great masses of ivy tumbling over the wall in whose dark, windless recesses Brimstone butterflies will pass the winter. I wander into the village pub and sit in the bay window where a Victorian glassmaker has added some whimsical butterflies to his border of finches and sparrows. I watch the barman draw the cork of a new vintage with a bottle opener named after a butterfly – the Valezina, the dark variety of the female Silver-washed Fritillary – invented by a bygone collector, Edward Bagwell Purefoy, the man who first elucidated the mysteries of the Large Blue.
Edward Lorenz, the American mathematician, claimed that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world can create a hurricane on the other. He called it the butterfly effect. I have never understood it, and I don’t really believe it. But I do believe that the same flutterings can summon up at least a small breeze in the human soul. Let it blow. Let it rustle the treetops and bend the grass and ripple the waters. Let the inward breeze remind we earthbound humans everywhere of the power and the wonder of the natural world.
