Many years ago American educator William Mearns Hughes wrote a little poem which endures to this day:
“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away!”
That ditty seems entirely appropriate to kick off a column about butterflies.
For, as far as I’m concerned, butterflies have not been there for quite a while. In fact a check of my records revealed my last butterfly sighting occurred on November 11 last year when I spotted five red admirals fluttering around scrub on cliffs at Bockhill on the Kent coast.
So that’s more than three months without a single butterfly sighting. Of course December, January and February are hardly peak months for butterflies anyway.
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Cold and sunless conditions mean their wings cannot warm up sufficiently for them to fly and even if they do there are few plants in bloom to satisfy their nectar requirements.
Yet butterflies are aloft in these months. Clouded yellow, for example, can often be seen in November and occasionally into December around southern coastlines preparing for migratory flights. Brimstone, a butterfly of butter-coloured bright yellow on its upperwings, can be seen in almost any month.
Last year I saw one on January 26. Butterflies have been spotted this year in a wide range of places. Red admirals were seen in Dorset, Hampshire and Berkshire on January 2, a peacock surfaced in Northamptonshire the following day, a comma was spotted in Oxfordshire on January 5 and a brimstone on the Isle of Wight on January 9.
Between July 14 and August 6, 2023, volunteers acting for The Butterfly Conservation charity recorded a huge 1.5 million butterflies and day-flying moths in their annual survey, the highest figure since 2019. Red admiral was the most abundant species seen with 248,077 reports.
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Those figures slumped dramatically last year to a 14-year low of 85,000 reported in the survey. Approximately half of the UK’s 59 species had their worst summer on record. More than 9,000 counts submitted by volunteers reported no butterflies at all. A wet spring and cool summer were blamed.
Butterfly Conservation, understandably worried about the nosedive in numbers, has asked the Government to consider declaring a “nature emergency.”
Well, William Hughes may want his man who wasn’t there to go away but I certainly don’t want butterflies to disappear. So I will be out there looking and hoping a smattering of spring sunshine will encourage these winged jewels to reveal themselves again.
How about you?
