A year of extremes has triggered some unexpected variations in butterfly behaviour, distribution and population. But before we look back, I’m still looking forward with hope.
The similarly hot summer of 1976 produced the last vintage season for our most exciting migratory butterfly: the Camberwell beauty. This big, powerful and completely gorgeous insect with wings the colour of crushed plums bordered with blue studs and primrose yellow will be blown in from Finland and Scandinavia if we are blessed with easterly winds in the next few weeks.
It has also been an excellent summer for moths, according to Mark Parsons of Butterfly Conservation, and the coming month is peak season for migratory species. So far, warm southerlies have brought in two equally monumental migratory moths. The death’s-head hawkmoth is an awesome gothic-looking beast with a skull pattern on its enormous thorax; it has been seen at Sandwich Bay and Lydd-on-Sea, Kent.
More common has been the convolvulus hawkmoth, another massive moth that might be mistaken for a bat if spotted at dusk. They are sometimes seen in gardens poking their long proboscis into tall, tubular flowers such as tobacco plants. So far, they have been spotted along the south coast, the Suffolk coast and as far north as Yorkshire.
