The swallowtail is Britain’s largest native butterfly and it looks like an escapee from a tropical butterfly house – a spectacular insect with tigerish yellow-and-black stripes and flamboyant tails on its wings.
Despite its size and power, it is also one of our rarest species, confined now to the Norfolk Broads due to its requiring large areas of undrained marshes which contain its caterpillar’s food plant, milk parsley.
An encounter with a rare swallowtail when he was seven inspired the writer Vladimir Nabokov’s devotion to butterflies. “As it probed the inclined flower from which it hung, its powdery body slightly bent, it kept restlessly jerking its great wings, and my desire for it was one of the most intense I have ever experienced,” he wrote in Speak, Memory.
Seeing a swallowtail is a momentous occasion and made more so by the fact that this celebrity often keeps its charisma under wraps. I recently moved to the Norfolk Broads, but despite regular trips to my nearest swallowtail haunt, How Hill, four miles away, they eluded me during cold, windy May and June.
Finally, this week, I found four of these magnificent butterflies, quivering just as Nabokov described, drawing nectar from thistles (they love pink flowers such as ragged robin) and milk parsley in a water-meadow by Toad Hole Cottage, an old marshman’s home turned museum by the River Ant.
The next day produced one of those moments of can-I-be-really-seeing-this? elation when butterfly geeks shout and punch the air. I was pottering in my garden when a handsome yellow creature meandered across my lawn. A swallowtail. Hooray for heatwaves.
