In Pursuit of Butterflies Read online

  In Pursuit of Butterflies

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  Erucam Nunquam Minoris Aestimate

  In Pursuit of Butterflies

  A Fifty-Year Affair

  MATTHEW OATES

  Butterflying heartlands

  1 Loch Arkaig, Lochaber

  2 Wallington, Northumberland

  3 Horden Cliffs, Durham coast

  4 Honister Pass – including Dale Head, Fleetwith & Grey Knotts, Cumbria

  5 Langdale Pikes, Cumbria

  6 Smardale, east Cumbria

  7 Rowallane, County Down

  8 Murlough Dunes, County Down coast

  9 Meathop Moss, south Cumbria

  10 Yewbarrow, south Cumbria

  11 Whitbarrow, south Cumbria

  12 Arnside Knott, south Cumbria

  13 Gait Barrows, north Lancashire

  14 Fen Bog, Goathland, North Yorkshire

  15 North York Moors, North Yorkshire

  16 Great Orme, Gwynedd

  17 Hafod Garregog, Gwynedd

  18 Fenn’s & Whixall Mosses, Shropshire/Powys

  19 Cwm Soden, Ceredigion coast

  20 Wyre Forest, Shropshire/Worcestershire

  21 Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire

  22 Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire

  23 Catfield Fen, Norfolk

  24 Hickling Broad, Norfolk

  25 Bircher Common, Herefordshire

  26 Malvern Hills, Herefordshire/Worcestershire

  27 St David’s Head, Pembrokeshire

  28 Haugh Wood, Herefordshire

  29 Rodborough Common, Cotswolds

  30 Strawberry Banks, Cotswolds

  31 Cirencester Park Woods, Cotswolds

  32 Bernwood Forest, Oxfordshire

  33 Rushbeds Wood, north Buckinghamshire

  34 Whiteford Burrows, Gower

  35 Watlington Hill, Oxfordshire

  36 Sand Point, Somerset coast

  37 Heddon Valley, north Devon coast

  38 Halse Combe & Bin Combe, Dunkery Beacon, Exmoor

  39 Bossington Hill & Selworthy, west Somerset

  40 Collard Hill, mid-Somerset

  41 Savernake Forest, Wiltshire

  42 Alice Holt Forest, East Hampshire

  43 Bookham Common, Surrey

  44 Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire

  45 Porton Down, Wiltshire

  46 Noar Hill & Selborne, East Hampshire

  47 East Hampshire Hangers

  48 Denbies Hillside, North Downs, Surrey

  49 Kingsdown Leas, Kent

  50 Langdon Cliffs, Dover, Kent

  51 Bentley Wood, Wiltshire

  52 Southwater Forest: Dogbarking, Dragons Green, Madgeland, Marlpost & Northlands woods, West Sussex

  53 Knepp estate, West Sussex

  54 Ashclyst Forest, east Devon

  55 Crewkerne, Somerset

  56 Kingcombe, west Dorset

  57 Hod Hill, north-east Dorset

  58 New Forest, Hampshire

  59 Teign valley, Dartmoor

  60 Bind Barrow, west Dorset coast

  61 Holywell Dunes, Cornwall coast

  62 ‘Site X’, south Dartmoor

  63 Portland, Dorset coast

  64 Ballard Down, Purbeck coast

  65 Compton Chine & East Afton, Brook & Compton Downs, Isle of Wight

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 Starting out

  2 Laudator temporis acti

  3 Escape to the woods

  4 Rebellion

  5 Into the green

  A digression, into names

  6 Desperately seeking Rima

  7 Walden

  8 The long hot summer of 1976

  9 The legacy of 1976

  Alice Holt Forest

  10 Out of the seventies

  Winter

  11 In and out of war: the early 1980s

  Noar Hill

  12 The return of the wanderer

  13 Nineteen eighty-four and all that

  14 A time of discovery

  Autumn

  15 High-blown years: the Great Storm and afterwards

  16 Paradise regained: the great summer of 1989

  Spring

  17 Spring perfected

  18 Moving on

  19 High adventures in the mid-1990s

  The New Forest

  20 Summer of the Painted Lady

  21 Leaving the nineties

  22 Time out of time

  23 The Emperor’s return

  24 Hairstreaks to the fore

  Some Cotswold places

  25 Of Iris and Adonis

  26 A fall from grace

  Summer

  27 A tale of two butterflies

  28 Adventures with caterpillars

  Savernake Forest

  29 It rained …

  30 Fifty years on

  Towards some meaning

  Afterword: On Marlpost Road

  Butterflies of the year

  Bibliography

  List of illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index of butterfly species

  General index

  Plates

  Foreword

  For centuries, men and women who go chasing after butterflies have been, at best, belittled for their eccentricity. At worst, they have been punished for their lunacy. The title of Matthew Oates's book is taken from a memorable description of pioneering butterfly lover Eleanor Glanville, who gave her name to the Glanville Fritillary. As the eighteenth-century lepidopterist Moses Harris explained:

  Some Relations that was disappointed by her Will, attempted to let it aside by Acts of Lunacy, for they suggested that none but those who were deprived of their Senses, would go in Pursuit of Butterflies.

  Perhaps some people today would draw a similar conclusion from a glance at the fifty-year butterflying career of Matthew Oates.

  How many people in Britain help hoist a huge salmon into the treetops to lure the Purple Emperor? Or sell their LPs as a teenager to fund a summer chasing butterflies? Or keep a lifetime tally of rare colour variations of the White Admiral? Here is a man who befriends individual butterflies, has named his children after butterflies' Latin and Greek names and goes hunting not just for butterflies but for their eggs, caterpillars and pupae wherever he happens to be – visiting stately homes or motorway service stations or even outside prisons.

  Thankfully Matthew has never been imprisoned for his singular passion, although he might describe the horrors of exam terms or having to attend incessant meetings in ‘anaerobic offices’ during the butterfly season as incarcerations.

  Whether you know nothing about butterflies, or almost everything, you will learn a lot from this book. Unlike many obses­sives, Matthew can communicate with those not in the grip of obsession, and he is also a superb naturalist with a keen attention to detail. Fascinating observations from the 1960s – when instead of butterfly collecting, butterflies ‘collected’ him – are remembered in exact detail, thanks to his lifelong habit of keeping a butterfly diary. For instance, he watches a pair of Orange-tips sit out five consecutive wet days before springing into action to mate as soon as the sun appears; he records how a courting pair of Small Tortoiseshells mated for eighteen and a half hours exactly; and how the Purple Emperors in the Sussex woods around Dragons Green are notably more aggressive than Emperors elsewhere.

  These details are intriguing, but they illustrate wider truths: butterflies are deceptively robust and every butterfly is defined by just one impulse – to mate. More profoundly, such close observation is the basis of all scientific endeavour: all its questions, revelations and learning. We ignore the deceptively difficult skill of close
observation and the precise recording of what we see at our peril.

  Matthew is a particular devotee of the ‘big game’ of the butterfly world, the majestic, charismatic and justly celebrated Purple Emperor. But he is also alive to the most overlooked aspects of butterflies, particularly their caterpillars. He has made many discoveries about the peculiar lives of caterpillars, and can also enlighten us about the poetic and mysterious meanings of butterflies’ scientific names. I certainly didn‘t know that 28 of our resident butterflies are named after characters in Greek mythology – including gods, demi-gods, muses, graces and a number of young ladies ravished by Zeus.

  It would be a mistake to interpret all the wit and quirkiness in this magnificent memoir as a sign that a devotion to butterflies is a suitable passion for a flibbertigibbet. Matthew Oates is a new-age Romantic: he follows in the footsteps of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, and – a particular inspiration – Edward Thomas, who have all sometimes wistfully and occasionally nostalgically described and celebrated the rapture of finding a deep connection with the natural world. He also poses some important questions for the science of ecology and for those who attempt to deny change, and loss, in nature. Conservation must be ‘concerned with mending the relationship between people and Nature,’ he argues. Ultimately, ‘the whole show is essentially about Love.’

  For In Pursuit of Butterflies is about far more than just butterflies. It will enthral anyone who enjoys the British countryside or adores summer, for it evokes the changing seasons in some of our most magical woods, moors, meadows and marshes. Their names dance with magic – Dogbarking Wood, Waterperry Wood, Alice Holt Forest – and we are transported to the atmospheric places that have become the author's heartland, from the spooky Savernake Forest in Wiltshire to the joyful inclines of Rodborough Common in the Cotswolds. Here, there is an ice-cream factory, walkers leave Christmas cards from their dogs to the place, and the slope bottoms are littered with lost balls and Frisbees.

  Matthew is alive to the precious spirit of these places thanks to butterflies, for these insects help us discover a place and then anchor us to it. He recounts watching a female Purple Emperor feeding on the sticky buds on a young Ash tree in Madgeland Wood, West Sussex, in 1975. The ash is still there and he remembers that female every time he passes the spot. ‘Butterflying does that to you,’ he writes.

  If you have spent any time in Britain in the last fifty years, I guarantee that this book will reawaken memories of summers past. You won't find a better account of the hot summer of 1976 (when Matthew cycled through viscous tarmac to find butterflies which had changed colour because of the great heat), or of 2003 or 2010. He believes, with John Masefield, that butterflies are ‘the souls of summer hours’ – and, with Tove Jansson, that the colour of our first butterfly of the year defines the character of our summer. As he puts it in these pages:

  Like no other season, summer instils memories, deep and profound. Its journey is into memory, within us as individuals and collectively. And people collect memories, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless, and are moulded by them. And butterflying is all about the collecting of memories in moments of time within idylls of place.

  We can connect with wild places by walking dogs or watching birds, but butterflies seem a particularly powerful route to a more satisfying and intimate bond with nature. For Matthew, the immense wonder of the natural world can overwhelm us, and butterflies are a way of experiencing rapture without terror. Butterflies live so deeply in the moment of being, he believes, that they can conquer time itself. Perhaps there are lessons for us here.

  In more practical terms, wandering through a wood at the most magical time of year, seeking a small, fast-moving thing, brings us alive to every possibility in the landscape – and the moment. Loiter quietly in nature and stuff happens: deer creep past or a butterfly quarrels with a bumblebee, and we become an accepted part of this world, which is a glorious experience.

  I am sure that you, like me, will find the following pages beautiful, evocative, inspirational and, perhaps most importantly of all, fun. If an eccentric is someone who is unafraid of declaring his love for nature, who inspires us to follow him into nature, and who shows us how time in nature can make us happier and kinder human beings – how it can develop our souls – then Matthew Oates is an eccentric. Every one of us should be one too.

  Patrick Barkham

  Hoveton, Norfolk

  January 2015

  Introduction

  Our lives have to be dedicated to something. Much of mine has been devoted to love – of British butterflies. Yet In Pursuit of Butterflies is as much about Nature as it is about butterflies, describing adventures in Nature, and exploring the intense personal relationships we forge with wilder places, with epochs of time, and with the seasons. It describes a journey through love and wonder. The butterflies themselves may simply be an entry point, a portal into a world so vast we need something that narrows our focus down, and so awesome we need our hand holding. Butterflies do all that, and they do it extraordinarily well.

  This book is intended as an open memoir, so that others may share the experiences I have had. It is not an autobiography. Huge chunks of biographical information have been omitted, deliberately – not because they are embarrassing, though they might be, but because they do not matter.

  But the butterflies and the special places they inhabit do matter, and need speaking for. What is written here is written on their behalf, that others might get to know them better, and by that I mean, know them better than me. Above all, the wondrous and captivating experiences I have had with butterflies more than merit being set down in print. It would be selfish not to share them. Please treat them as your own. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and back again – one tries to be serious, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

  My essential subject is butterflying, to use the Victorian butterfly collectors' term for being out and about in pursuit of butterflies. That term is used here in a modern sense, to encompass the entire spectrum of experience from ecology and conservation through to poetics and the spiritual. The book's tone is deliberately positive, despite the fact that most of our butterflies have suffered horrendous declines and a great many of the habitats and populations described in these chapters are no more. This is because butterflies are eternal optimists and may be life's great survivors.

  But why butterflies? The book will explain that, notably towards the end, but as a starting point it is worth quoting from one of the most popular Victorian butterfly books, W S Coleman's British Butterflies, first published in 1860. The ancient Greeks, he wrote, ‘gave the same name, Psyche (yυch′), to the soul, the spirit of life, and to the butterfly, and sculptured over the effigy of one dead the figure of a butterfly, floating away.’ Psyche, who became personified as the Goddess of the Soul, lies behind all psychology – along with her butterflies. So perhaps butterflies hold some deep metaphor for a profound part of the human condition.

  In Pursuit of Butterflies is a journey through time and place, amongst butterflies. Not until quite late in my career did I consider what I was seeking, or escaping from, let alone ponder why. All that came later. Sometimes the journey, the quest itself, is everything, and there may be little choice involved anyway. Sure enough, there was a thirst for knowledge, or truth even, but that was largely subjugated to a desire for experience and beauty. As Henry David Thoreau puts it at the end of his Natural History of Massachusetts, ‘We must look a long time before we can see.’ Knowledge itself can be a fickle, transitory thing, for mythology and assumption regularly dress themselves up and masquerade as truth or knowledge – even here, and even in science. Ultimately, knowledge almost invariably leads us to that most demanding of situations, a leap of faith – and abandons us there.

  If you are looking for scientific truth, you may find some fragments here, but mine is a poet's mind and I have no head for statistics. These chapters may, though, help readers deepen their own perspe
ctives on butterflies, and may strengthen the mental disciplines necessary to study and understand butterflies, and assist the development of intuitive relationships. At times I have played at being an ecologist, but essentially I am an old-fashioned naturalist, albeit one who has been privileged to work alongside, and consequently learn from, some of the country's leading ecologists. Their tuition and support is gratefully acknowledged.

  Much in this book is based on detailed diaries that have been maintained since 1971, and from sketchier accounts hazing back to the halcyon summer of 1964. These diaries state what was flying when and where, and what individual butterflies and caterpillars were doing, and provide thorough descriptions of habitat and weather conditions. They even contain some useful data. I have regularly written a 2000-word account of a day's butterflying, sometimes more. The book is in many ways an attempt to justify the hours spent writing those butterfly diaries, and is a synthesis and a sharing of that effort.

  Above everything else, these chapters are a celebration of a half-century of butterflying, a eulogy and a paean – and perhaps a prose-poem – on the beauty and wonder of British butterflies. It is written for anyone with an interest in butterflies and their immature life stages. No expertise or background knowledge is required. The index will assist those who like to dabble in books. Scientific terminology – please do not think it jargon, for it is a sophisticated and precise language – is largely avoided, and I hope it is all adequately explained whenever I have used it. English names for our butterflies are used preferentially.

  At the end of his long, and frankly rather rambling, autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’, William Wordsworth suggests, whilst musing – as ever – on the subject of Nature:

  ... what we have loved

  Others will love; and we may teach them how.

  1 Starting out

  There was no beginning, no single moment that set in motion a journey of at least fifty years, a journey through Nature. This is because Nature was central to my existence from birth. The only thing that may be remarkable here is that I did not stray away from it, as many of us do, perhaps because it had bitten too deep or because I lacked the ambition or bravery to venture elsewhere. So I journeyed with it, and it with me, and in the process I became distanced from some of the thinking and values that are prevalent in Western civilisation, together with the associated material benefits.