During a brief respite from the bank holiday rains, the garden of the small cottage where I was staying on the north Norfolk coast was suddenly filled with pristine red admirals.
This big, handsome red, black and white insect really is the quintessential September butterfly.
These late-hatching creatures must survive the winter – or migrate south – before laying eggs on spring nettles, and so they prepare by feeding hungrily on late-flowering buddleia, rotting orchard plums or the sickly-sweet blooms of ivy.
They are a most joyful sight, but in Rainbow Dust, Peter Marren’s excellent new cultural history of butterflies, we are reminded that for many people these butterflies were objects of doom.
The black and red colouring lent the red admiral a reputation as a “bloody” insect – the devil’s “fly” – and it features frequently as an ominous symbol in medieval art.
I experienced the “blood” of the red admiral first hand last weekend when I found a less-than-pristine individual with crumpled wings.
This butterfly was unable to inflate its wings properly, probably because – ironically – conditions had been too dry when it was in its chrysalis, and it was now deformed.
I picked it up and it deposited a blood red liquid over my hands – the substance which would normally allow it to stretch out its new wings and fly.
I hope I’m not cursed, but after the second successive miserable August, it does seem as if our weather gods bear a grudge against these late summer butterflies.
