A strange summer of weather again. First a long, cold spring so plants and insects didn’t get going, then hot drought all of June – very good for butterflies like the holly blue, whose larvae were feeding up then – but followed by continuous cool, overcast and rain for July and August, with the odd sunny day here and there.
Every year, the butterflies of late summer in my pastures tend to be the brown family: gatekeeper, meadow brown, speckled wood, ringlet, large and small skipper. Their larvae have to feed on, and then overwinter in, the dead stems of the old-fashioned meadow grasses like couch, cock’s-foot, Yorkshire fog, foxtail, fescues, soft brome, timothy, uncle Tom Cobley and all. About 98% of such meadows have disappeared since 1945, but we are lucky to own eight acres that have not been a working farm since before the second world war, so have never been reseeded with modern foreign species. And I only graze every second year on rotation.
As I rustle between the tall grasses, I suddenly see a flicker of smaller, faster, more orange wings than I have seen here before. Hey! Could it be an Essex skipper, so called because it used to be confined to that county? With climate change our local recorders have been tracking its movements over the last few years after a population explosion around Broughton shopping park (about 13 miles from here). Since then it has been recorded along the Wales-England border and westwards.
Unlike the small skipper, the tips of its antennae look like they have been dipped in black ink, like matchsticks, and the wings (top pair held dart-like at 45 degrees) have a broader white and brown border. But why do some insects spread and not others? Research by Butterfly Conservation in Clocaenog Forest, a few miles south, showed that small pearl‑bordered fritillaries stayed within less than a mile of their breeding place for years until their population reached a density that changed their behaviour, and they flew three or four miles to start a new colony. New research also shows that greater coverage of larval foodplants on a local scale aids population growth and the energy to spread. This will all help us understand how to aid our dwindling pollinators.
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