I don’t want to jinx it so I’m only whispering but, shhh, we may be blessed with a half-decent butterfly summer. Last week, I saw a purple emperor, tipsy on sap from an old oak, lurching around a meadow on a deeply overcast day that normally only brings out the ringlets and meadow browns.
Like most of our 59 native butterflies, the midsummer-loving purple emperor has emerged ten days earlier than usual. On the exuberant rewilded farmland of Knepp Castle, West Sussex, there are more emperors flying than anywhere else in the country. This iridescent beauty inspires great obsession and its leading devotees, Matthew Oates of the National Trust and Butterfly Conservation’s Neil Hulme, spotted 148 emperors in one day last week. That’s extreme butterflying.
I’m happy enough with more mundane pleasures. After two years of rewilding my garden – basically, liberating my lawn – my wild areas are dancing with butterflies whose caterpillars feed on grass – ringlets, meadow browns, gatekeepers and the Essex skipper. It’s a tiny sign of how quickly insects can bounce back. Creating wildlife-friendly habitat is hugely rewarding.
Another good sign lies in the nettles. I stopped by a patch in intensively farmed Norfolk this week and found dozens of spiky black peacock and black-yellow-and-green small tortoiseshell caterpillars. Look on any sizeable, south or west-facing nettle patch this week and you’ll probably find clusters of peacock caterpillars. These should be on the wing before July’s end.
One caution: last summer was the fourth worst since scientific monitoring began in 1976. We’re guilty of “shifting baseline syndrome” if we get too delighted by modest improvements. But let’s be delighted and count these small blessings.
