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Lepidopterists rejoice – our finest butterfly month is almost here

Nature Studies: There is a growing army of butterfly enthusiasts in Britain

Michael McCarthy
Monday 06 July 2015 17:16 BST
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All a-flutter: Marbled White Butterfly (Melanargia galathea) resting on a flower
All a-flutter: Marbled White Butterfly (Melanargia galathea) resting on a flower

Here we are in July, probably the best butterfly month of the year, not least because it means we are past the June Gap. Not many people know what the June Gap is; in fact, there are two separate such hiatuses, one referring to butterflies and the other to bees.

The term as used by beekeepers describes a shortage of nectar that bees can encounter in the plants they forage among, when spring has run out of steam and summer is not yet at full blast. It means they sometimes need supplementary feeding in their hives.

The term as used by butterfly enthusiasts is different: it refers to the fact that in June, British gardens can be butterfly-bare. Perhaps you’ve noticed? This is because the peacocks, brimstones, cabbage whites, small tortoiseshells and others which graced our flowerbeds in late spring have now died off, and the eggs they laid have not yet finished developing as caterpillars, then chrysalises, then into second broods of adults.

But they soon will – which helps make July a terrific butterfly month, along with the emergence of a trio of splendid summer species in the woodlands, the white admiral, the silver-washed fritillary, and the most magnificent of all our Lepidoptera, the purple emperor. So now is a good time to talk about two first-rate new books.

One is Rainbow Dust by Peter Marren (Square Peg, £14.99); the other is In Pursuit of Butterflies by Matthew Oates (Bloomsbury, £18.99). The authors are not dissimilar; both are leading experts in the field, are what could be described as old-fashioned naturalists, and are both in their 60s, with a lifetime’s experience of observation behind them. Both experienced 1950s childhoods when butterfly collecting was still acceptable, and both write fondly of the early adventures with a net which sparked their Lepidoptera-love.

But otherwise the books are very different. Rainbow Dust is a cultural history of butterflies in Britain, telling, among much else, the fascinating story of how these insects, in the early 18th century, at last came to be given names – for although Shakespeare, for example, cites more than 50 bird species and more than three times that number of plants, he does not name a single butterfly, even though, as Marren points out, species such as red admirals and clouded yellows had been beloved of manuscript illustrators in the Middle Ages.

His book is a scholarly and captivating excursion into the history of natural history, further enlivened by vivid portraits of some of the butterfly enthusiasts of the past (his great personal hero, Dame Miriam Rothschild, gets a chapter to herself).

Oates’s book is an extended memoir of a personal butterfly passion going back to his childhood, of which the focus is his obsession (and it is no less) with the purple emperor. It displays an unusual combination of lyricism and depth of knowledge, and is unforgettable in its descriptions of the butterfly abundance of his youth, and of how some charismatic species, such as the high brown fritillary, have vanished from most of Britain.

There is a growing army of butterfly enthusiasts in Britain – the membership of the charity Butterfly Conservation is now well over 20,000 and growing – and I would bet that most will want to own both these grand additions to our butterfly literature.

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