The Benefits of Butterflies

If I lived on the coast I think it would be different, but this years summer lull is a serious one.  Too hot to walk far, all the local water has dried up (except truly big water bodies and reservoirs) and breeding birds seem to be as quiet as I've ever known them.  I've all but given up birding since May, barring desultory wanderings on patch mourning the loss and the lack and the silence.

Butterflies and dragonflies have, as with many UK birders, stepped heroically into the breach.  An epic year of butterfly and odonata migration is the positive spin on probably catastrophic climate change that has kept half the UK as dry as I've ever known it, and the strange irony of leaning heavily into a new found passion of searching for these migrants that are only here because southern Europe is experiencing desertification in real time has not passed me by.

There is still joy to be found.  After the late spring blaze of fritillaries I wondered if I'd lose interest in butterflies, but I've actually very much enjoyed searching out some of the other families that we see here.  I don't feel experienced enough necessarily to have a favourite butterfly, and definitely not a favourite dragonfly, but there have been three species of butterfly and one dragon that have really captured my imagination in the last couple of weeks.  

Bickershaw Country Park is the less well-known neighbour of Pennington Flash, part of the Wigan Greenheart and the first and only NNR in Greater Manchester.  Remnants of a mining industry struggling in the 70s and gutted in the 80s, the CP sits between a host of housing estates to the north of Pennington.  Largely reedbed and willow scrub with some older growth mixed in, Bickershaw gets regular Cuckoo and is good for breeding warblers, Water Rail and the odd bit of glamour.  Not many local birders visit regularly - with one or two dedicated local exceptions who keep an eye on it - and there is little to see there that can't be seen at Pennington Flash or other local sites.  It's rough and ready, populated largely by people walking XL Bullies, or testing out the upper speed limits of dirt bikes on the footpaths.  It's also home to a population of both Norfolk Hawkers and Keeled Skimmers.  The Keeled Skimmers have been the bane of my life for a few weeks; they'll happily buzz into view and skim away over the water, and then they land on a favoured half-submerged tree trunk that's wallowing in the shallows.  The trunk is exposed and easy to view at the left hand end, and entirely obscured at the right.  The Keeled Skimmers of course always settle at the right hand end.  

After four visits and good views of them, I still hadn't managed a photograph at all, not even a blurry one.  The similar but much chunkier Black-tailed Skimmers got my hopes up a couple of times but I never managed a shot.  When friends told me about a tiny wooden boardwalk over an upland marsh in the Trough of Bowland which was famed for Keeled Skimmers I decided there and then I would cheat and get my local celebrity dragonfly photos 30 miles up the road.  And so I did.  The boardwalk was incredible; Golden Ringed, Common Hawker, Migrant Hawker, Southern Hawker in trees at the far end, Black-tailed Skimmer, Four-spot Chaser, Common Darter, Black Darter, Common Blue, Large Red and other damselflies all flitting about but by far the most numerous dragonfly there was the Keeled Skimmer.  They came and sat three feet away from me on the boardwalk.  They were skirmishing in the air, buzzing each other, copulating, egg-laying, defending territories, chasing hawkers off and sunning themselves in the humid patchy sunshine of a Lancashire late morning, and I sat on the edge of the boardwalk and soaked it all in.  A shame I couldn't get local photos, but the views on offer further north were stunning.  

There is an unassuming ditch at the far north of my 10km circle on the Horwich Moors from which pours a tide of glittering green every spring; Green Hairstreaks erupt en mass from the gorse and bog and on the days I'm lucky enough to be there to see it, the air is full of these charismatic butterflies.  This spring I saw one, worn and lonely, with a chunk missing from its wing.  I'd left it too late to see the main event.  What I didn't know was that half a mile further on, by the working quarry, lives a population of Wall (Brown) butterflies that usually like and require warmth and habitually rest on stone (or walls, hence the name) to warm their wings.  A local told me that she had seen one sunbathing down the slope from where I stood, and I set off to try and find it.  

I could have saved myself 16 hours of searching across five visits if I had ever walked an extra 400 metres down the footpath and across the quarry, but then I would have missed out on hunting Peregrine, a very early Redstart migrating group, Long-eared Owl and more, so I suppose it's a positive on balance.  However, the Wall butterflies prefer it a little further down the slope on a footpath adjacent to the one I had focused on.  Finally twigging that I might have been in the wrong location, I walked the extra part of the loop and immediately saw Walls sunbathing on the path, at the bottom of grass clumps, and clinging tightly to the bases of fence posts.  An hour alone with these lovely orange butterflies that aren't rare but are not easy to find in Manchester, and I was hooked.  They seemed to playfully fly behind me, gliding back into my peripheral vision every time they'd flushed up from the path where I hadn't seen them sunbathing until it was too late and dashed over the high banking that sheltered the area from the wind off the moor, returning as soon as I was confident that they wouldn't.  

With that local monkey off my back, I heard from friends that the Scotch Argus were on the wing in Smardale.  From the first time I saw a picture of Scotch Argus, I have wanted to see one; something about the smart red patches in the smoky velvet brown/black of the wing and the neat white-dotted black circles punctuating the red that speaks to my sense of aesthetic appreciation.  Smardale, for those who have never been, is the second most southerly site for Scotch Argus in the UK and one of only two places in England where they can be seen.  The other is Arnside Knott, but the population there is on a knife-edge and the extremely dry summer seems to have forced them to their limit.  So, Smardale seemed the place to go.  A gorgeous walk (though absolutely clouded with flies buzzing around my head constantly), Red Squirrel on the path, Tawny Owls day-flying, Buzzards and Ravens and Wheatears in abundance, Smardale sat in a sporadic grey drizzle and tried its best to look moody.  In a two mile walk I didn't see single butterfly despite banks of thistle in flower and ragwort grown to almost shoulder height in places.  Still, the viaduct is stunning and worth a look, so I plodded on and wandered the valley around the viaduct.  

It's here I realised that I still have so much to learn about looking for butterflies - I instinctively look at habitat in a 360 degree check for flying birds; where I usually don't look is exactly where my feet are stepping - it's rare to have a bird sit still when you're that close, barring the odd Woodcock or Jack Snipe.  The same is not true for butterflies.  I wouldn't have believed such a deeply and richly coloured butterfly as a Scotch Argus could hide on the path in front of me, but in four strides I'd flushed as many Argus up and away and hadn't seen a single one resting until they moved.  Getting my eye in a little and with the sun breaking through the glowering mizzle, in an instant Scotch Argus were everywhere.  Well over thirty on one fifty metre stretch of path and grass, and then on a stand of thistle in the corner by the style, a dozen together, wings flicking as they fed.  Between myself and a lovely couple up from Gloucestershire who were seeing their first Scotch Argus too, we counted 54 butterflies in 20 minutes.

Earlier in the year I'd managed to miss Northern Brown Argus, Marsh Fritillary, and Mountain Ringlet because I simply hadn't got my head around butterfly flight periods, so when hearing that Brown Hairstreak were not only in flight, but coming down regularly to feed on hemp agrimony on Arnside Knott, I made a bee-line for them.  I wasn't aware that they lived that far north (anymore - apparently they used to) but it seems that an unofficial reintroduction program in the early 2000s at some point has created a fairly strong colony across Arnside Knott, Gait Barrows and a number of small sites in between.  The success of the Brown Hairstreak is perhaps unsurprising there: there is so much Blackthorn in low clumps below taller stands of trees that there is an incredible amount of breeding habitat.  Though the Brown Hairstreaks further south seem happiest high up around the tree canopy, at Arnside Knott they are almost always located first on the huge amount of hemp agrimony growing in the shade of mixed glades of woodland and Blackthorn hedgerow. The microclimate in the sheltered dells of the Knott means local summer temperatures easily rise above 20 degrees C, which is usually the lower limit to see females flying.

The cool morning I chose to see my own Brown Hairstreaks soon gave way to a blazing 28C and I was fortunate to see literally hundreds of Painted Ladies patrolling the paths.  Small Heaths duelled low to the ground, Common Blues flitted constantly while a solitary Grayling flashed blue eyes at me and vanished.  Meadow Browns, Gatekeepers, even a very worn and late Ringlet hugged the ferns, and Peacocks, Red Admirals and a Small Tortoiseshell splashed colour across the tops of the wildflower meadow.  Large and Small Whites, a single Clouded Yellow, two Brimstones, Speckled Wood and Holly Blue gave character to the forest edge and then a single, small, intensely brown butterfly dropped from the canopy onto hemp agrimony and gave me the run around for half an hour.  Eventually, across the one clearing, I found six males feeding, and two higher up in trees.  A few other searchers had locked onto another couple of males in the open meadow, and I took a barrage of photographs, marvelling at the delicate colours and the gorgeously fine white lines on the underwing.

When a gentleman with much more knowledge both of Arnside and Brown Hairstreak suggested it was warm enough for females to be egg-laying I asked if I could accompany him to a stand of Blackthorn.  Within 30 seconds of our arrival a female popped up, sunned herself for a moment, and then began to crawl along the Blackthorn twigs laying eggs slowly in the sun.  The only way I can describe the intense colour of the butterfly from that first glimpse of the underwing in flight is to say it was orange/brown dialled up to eleven.  If this is brown, it's fluourescent, vivid, burning brown that blurs the lines between earth tones and citrus fruit.  It's shining brown, the orange of sunsets and the reddish blush of a highlighter.  What a delight to watch as she laid eggs, rested in the sun with her wings open, flashing those golden-orange patches in the dark velvet brown of her upperwing, the red tails that give hairstreaks their name visible as she flitted across the front of her creche.  

It has been a remarkable personal discovery for me that butterflies in particular create an even stronger feeling of calm in me than birds, and as someone who openly finds mental health struggles have an impact on my daily reality, being able to lose myself in the sunny serenity of a flower meadow, surrounded by the gentle dramas of the beautifully silent insects I'm watching is a privilege.  The benefits of butterflies have been good for me this summer.