Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
There are 59 species of British butterfly and each one deserves a couple of stunning photographs, some interesting facts about its life cycle and a poem dedicated to it. Lifelong butterfly lover and poet Jonathan Bradley and his photographer friend Yealand Kalfayan have done just that in this colourful and inspiring book. Bradley has also included a mini biography of several famous lepidopterists who have left their mark in this radiant world. This lovely, bright hardback is a feast for the eyes.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 172
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
Contents
Foreword
I am delighted to be contributing the foreword to this wonderful book written by Jonathan Bradley, a member of Butterfly Conservation (BC), especially as a donation to BC will be made from sales of the book. It is illustrated with beautiful photographs, many of them taken by another BC member, Yealand Kalfayan. BC’s vision is for a world where butterflies and moths thrive and can be enjoyed by everyone, forever. Our mission focuses on achieving four main aims: to recover threatened butterflies and moths, increase numbers of widespread species, inspire people to understand and deliver species conservation, and promote international conservation action. These aims encompass our practical conservation work, research, management of reserves, raising awareness and much more.
The impact BC has had since 1968 has been huge. We now have over 40,000 members, 220,000 days of volunteer effort per year, over 100,000 citizen scientists taking part in the Big Butterfly Count and 92 members of staff, all implementing BC’s conservation work on the ground and providing the vital data records we need to monitor the state of our butterflies and moths. In order for BC to continue its fantastic work for decades to come we need to strengthen our resilience for the future by expanding our research, connecting people to nature and green spaces, growing and supporting volunteers, and securing sufficient funding for priority species and landscape scale conservation work.
It is sobering to realise that several of the butterflies featured in the book are rare, threatened or endangered. For instance, the High Brown Fritillary has been highlighted by BC as Britain’s most threatened butterfly; the species has seen a 79% decline in distribution since the 1970s. Yet, in the words of Jonathan’s poem, it has been able ‘even so to survive against the odds’. The future of several other butterflies in this book is very precarious. We might all hope that, like the Clouded Yellow in its poem, all our butterflies could have ‘no care but to rise up and fly’ rather than be ‘condemned to perish for an unknown sin’, as in the Mountain Ringlet poem.
I hope that A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies will open the eyes and hearts of the British public to the beauty and the plight of the butterflies that all of us at BC so passionately wish to conserve.
Julie Williams
Chief Executive of Butterfly Conservation
January 2020
Preface
This is a kaleidoscopic display in words and pictures of fifty-nine species of butterfly that occur naturally in Great Britain, as well as some rare visitors and a few of the remarkable people who have loved them. Each of the butterflies has a brief story and my own original poem. They have flown into my life many times, often unexpectedly, and usually in beautiful places, so they bring happy memories. Each one also is pictured in stunning photographs, most of which were taken by my friend and fellow butterfly lover, Yealand Kalfayan, an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society.
I should stress that I am not a scientist and I do not claim to be an ‘expert’. I do love butterflies and the natural environment in which we all live, and this passion led me to write this book. The poems are in various different poetic forms, in some cases just for the fun of trying something different. As a result, some of the poems follow strict patterns of metre and rhyme, and others are frankly light-hearted and trifling. I hope that purists will not be offended.
The names of butterflies are almost as colourful as their wings in most languages, and each of them has a scientific name from the Linnaean system written in the Latin style. Many of them are derived from ancient mythologies, usually Greek or Roman, but others are obscure in origin. Where the name seems to have an identifiable meaning I have written something about it. These names are poetic, and butterflies are part of the poetry of nature. They also matter greatly for the future health of our world. From time to time scientists change the scientific names, and so to avoid confusion I have used the names that appear in The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland, by Jim Asher et al, Oxford University Press, 2001.
viMy children introduced me to butterflies. I found that trying to stalk and spot birds with noisy toddlers was very frustrating, and butterflies were less scared of us, so we searched for them instead. They are so colourful, and live in such beautiful places, that we were all captivated. Butterflies soon became a passion. Now my children themselves have children, and these grandchildren will go looking for butterflies. I hope that enough butterflies will be saved from decline or extinction that Isla, Jago, Rebekah, Merryn, Leila, Astrid and Leo can each look forward to a long lifetime of butterfly watching. If so, their lives will be lit with the pleasure of visiting beautiful places to observe some of the most remarkable creatures of the natural world.
I soon realised that without friendly habitats, butterflies could not flourish, and that they represent a highly sensitive barometer of the natural world. Pollution, pesticides, reckless building development, loss of green spaces, and reduction of plant diversity – all result in the death or even extinction of butterflies. A world without butterflies would, in the end, be a world without people.
There must be something very special about these small, fragile, short-lived creatures that could have united in their love for them such diverse people as a Bulgarian king, a French composer, a Russian novelist, the first female Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and many others. Several of them are featured here.
This book is not only about butterflies but also about people. We depend on each other. Though they may not be aware of it, butterflies give us enormous pleasure, and in my case the inspiration to write about them.
Adonis Blue
Polyommatus bellargus
Adonis was a beautiful youth in Greek mythology, and the name suits a butterfly whose male wears one of the most stunning colours of any British butterfly. The male is a brilliant iridescent blue, variously described as azure, sky blue or turquoise. This is impossible to describe adequately in words, and has to be seen to be believed. Remarkably, much of this colour is generated by light refraction rather than as a result of pigmentation in the wings. The females are brown. The poem recounts some of the story in the myth, and especially Adonis’s unfortunate need to choose between two divine women, one of whom, feeling rejected, arranges for him to be killed by a wild boar. But he was not forgotten, as the poem tells us.
Adonis Blue male displaying his brilliant azure colouring. 2
Adonis Blue, underside. The brown colour helps to camouflage it when resting on stony ground or rocky surfaces.
3The first part of the scientific name roughly means ‘many-eyed’, referring to the many-coloured spots underneath its wings. Bellargus in Latin means ‘beautiful Argus’. We meet Argus in his many guises elsewhere, and a fuller story appears in the section about the Peacock butterfly. As divorce on Mount Olympus was not straightforward, Zeus’s wife Hera revenged herself on her unfaithful husband by transplanting the eyes of Argus to the tail of a peacock. This may seem a curious form of vengeance, but Argus was Zeus’s agent in an important mission and he was blinded in the process. The Adonis Blue has small eye-spots on the underside of its wings. By no means all of the possible identities of Argus – many-eyed monster guard of an errant heifer, shipbuilder, dog or local newspaper – are necessarily beautiful, but the butterfly certainly is.
I have not often seen this butterfly, but it always delights. My sightings have been mainly on Dorset and Wiltshire downland, as its two broods occur in this country only in southern England during May/June and August/September. The larvae feed on horseshoe vetch, and then overwinter before pupating in the spring. They often have ants as personal attendants. The ants love the sweet secretions given off by the larvae, and sometimes bury larvae at night to protect them from predators.
Adonis Blue
Lovely Adonis had to choose
between the goddess of pleasure and love
and the queen of the underworld;
was it any surprise that he chose love?
After she found him near to death
Aphrodite mingled nectar with his blood,
and made of it a running stream;
every Levantine spring
his river flows blood-red.
By the bank his short-lived flower, Anemone,
evaporates in puffs of breeze.
Adonis Blues, his many souls,
released from Olympian jealousy,
are reborn in nature on the Wiltshire Downs
in brilliant turquoise incarnations:
the near-divine in frailest form
too small to be attacked
by wild boar that killed
their forebear demi-god.
Rothschilds: Walter (1868-1937) and Miriam (1908-2005)
These two members of the same famous Jewish banking family were uncle and niece, and both were keen lovers of butterflies, and in their different ways very distinguished. Miriam wrote an affectionate biography of her uncle, details of which are at the end of this book.
Walter was the second baron Rothschild, and his brother Charles was Miriam’s father. Among many other claims to fame he was an eccentric lepidopterist and nature-lover. On one occasion he drove to Buckingham Palace in a carriage drawn by zebras, and on another occasion was photographed riding on a giant tortoise in his garden.
When younger he travelled widely in search of biological specimens, sometimes on butterfly-netting expeditions in the company of ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand, King of Bulgaria and father of King Boris III who appears elsewhere in this book. He also sent members of staff and of his own family on similar missions. Butterfly hunting usually involves plenty of travel. In 1892 he opened a private museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. It housed an enormous natural history collection, including, it is said, over two million butterflies. Some of these were species named after him.
His niece Miriam was no less remarkable, as she had little formal early schooling but she still became a renowned natural scientist and author, with a special interest in butterflies and eventually a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE). She was honoured with honorary doctorates but did not take one herself. Her scientific achievements were so highly regarded that even the eminent, but famously misogynistic, Oxford biologist and butterfly expert E. B. Ford was prepared to befriend her.
For those, like the author of this book, who are as captivated by the beauty and mystery of butterflies as by the sober science of their biology, Miriam Rothschild’s book Butterfly Cooing Like A Dove is delightful to read. It is a rich anthology of butterfly (and dove) miscellany, in which she has collected pictures, stories, legends, and quotations from diverse writers such as Nabokov and Proust, all about butterflies. It is very clear that she was a true butterfly enthusiast.
Black Hairstreak
Satyrium pruni
In Britain this rare butterfly occurs only in parts of the Midlands, and is one of a family of Hairstreaks. It would be even more rare without the work of Walter Rothschild, featured here in a mini-biography. He is said to have arranged for large numbers of Black Hairstreaks to be released in the areas where they still now occur. To see some you will need to visit woodlands between Oxford and Peterborough during its single flight period, which is generally mid-June to mid-July. Even then you may find them difficult to spot.
The scientific name literally means either a herbal drink made from Satyrion (ragwort) and plums, acting as an aphrodisiac if it does not kill you, or a Satyr in trees of the Prunus tree genus, of which Blackthorn is a member. Blackthorn is the favoured food plant of the larvae of this butterfly. The male and female look very alike, and their eggs overwinter and hatch in the spring.
The English name refers to the ‘Black’ member of the Hairstreak family. In fact this one is more buff-brown with orange markings, as seen in the photograph. Hairstreaks are so called because they tend to have transverse streaks on the under-surface of the wings and delicate, hair-like tails on their hindwings.
At the time of writing I still have not seen a living Black Hairstreak insect, although I have sometimes spotted a human being with the kind of streaked hair described in this poem. A condition known as poliosis can cause coloured hair to have a streak of white. Occasionally the reverse is seen, with a dark streak in the white, as possessed by the late playwright, Samuel Beckett.6
Black Hairstreak underside. The orange and black markings on the hindwings may fool a predator to attack the rear rather than the head.
Black Hairstreak
My hair was blond with a streak of black.
Sometimes in the playground they were cruel;
while boys were busy peeing over walls
the girls were staring at my curls,
blond with a black streak.
‘Cindy’s a freak –
she kissed the devil.’
But later, older, I stood out.
Boys looked, and sometimes stroked
to see if it felt different;
it didn’t, but I did.
‘Is it dyed?’ I could have died.
Later still, the blond turned grey
but black stayed black
and I felt special,
and like the Black Hairstreak butterfly
rare and beautiful.
Brimstone
Gonepteryx rhamni
This is the original ‘butterfly’, mentioned in the fourteenth century Nun’s Priest’s Prologue of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer:
‘Your tale annoys the entire company;
Such talking is not worth a butterfly;
For in it is no sport nor any game.’
It is a shame that Chaucer does not rate highly the importance of a butterfly, but he gives us proof of the use of the word in his time.
It is so called because the male is a butter-coloured shade of yellow. It is thought that the word ‘butterfly’ may have gained a generic meaning because the Brimstone is often one of the first butterflies to be seen on the wing in spring. As it happens, yellow is also the colour of brimstone, an archaic word for sulphur, as in ‘fire and brimstone’. The females are greenish-white colour.
The Brimstone gives us a cheerful reminder on a bright day in late February or March that spring really is on the way, that we should cheer up after winter gloom, and that we should look forward to a new butterfly season. It seems to turn up all over the place, at least in England, and its spontaneous appearance is one of its attractions. It is one of the few British butterflies to overwinter as an adult, and is therefore one of the longest lived.
Gonepteryx rhamni is a descriptive name. The first part of the name is Latin for ‘angular wing’, the wings of Brimstone butterflies indeed being angular. The second part refers to Buckthorn, the favoured food plant of Brimstone larvae.
My poem imagines the life cycle of an adult Brimstone, as it first emerges from its chrysalis and then flies off in the sunshine.9
A post-hibernation leaf-like male Brimstone, its wings slightly worn, rests on apple blossom. 10
Brimstone
At the first glimmer I was aware,
even before the wrench
from tight cocoon
to daylight spring
in a bright eruption of light,
conscious but unknowing
and without speech.
There were urgencies, but which first?
I was Brimstone without fire
but nectar from the dandelion felt fiery inside.
I brought news of the fresh season and I was
Chaucer’s butter fly.
My wings stretched taut,
my legs stood straight,
then terror as shadow blocked the sun:
a great winged beast
snapped at my wing;
no scream of flight: I had no voice
but then was not my end
there were flowers to find
my own sulphur blooms
like me, fruit of the earth.
I gorged on celandine, crowfoot, clover,
always in peril from ravenous beaks.
I knew not what I was.
When on the brim
I found my other Brimstone and
we were joined on buckthorn.
Among the nursery leaves
she laid her eggs.
I sunned myself flat
on a Habsburg wall,
barely visible but nearly safe;
that night was cold,
but I felt nothing.
Brown Argus
Aricia agestis
If it is possible for any brown colour to look brilliant then that is the colour of both sexes of this butterfly. A little confusingly it is a member of the Lycaenid family of butterflies, many of which are blue, but this one is a very fine dark chocolate shade (see page 12). I have often seen Brown Arguses in early or late summer in wild grassy places such as the Iron Age hillfort at Barbury Castle in Wiltshire. It has May/June and July/September broods, and overwinters as a larva, pupating in the spring, with help from ants.
Brown Argus, underside. Superficially similar to the female Common Blue, but the wing spots are slightly different.
The scientific name Aricia probably comes from Ariccia, a town near Rome, where there was a temple of Diana. She was a Roman goddess of hunting, the moon, wild animals and woodland, as well as the virgin goddess of childbirth and women. Like many other deities of the ancient world she had to be adept at multi-tasking. Agestis has an unclear origin and has no apparent meaning. It may be an erroneous derivation from the Latin ‘ager’, meaning meadow.
My poem refers to some of the many Arguses that have appeared in history and literature. The introduction to the Peacock butterfly section explains more about them. 12
Brown Argus upperside, sunbathing and displaying. There’s no blue at the base of its wings. 13
Brown Argus
Argus history is rich,
as long as the insect is small.
Argus Panoptes, the ancient giant
with a hundred eyes never all asleep,
no longer jealously guards
the heifer-nymph, Io the goddess.
Argus of the Argo, builder of Jason’s ship,
sailed with his master in search of the fleece,
then watched him bewitched by Medea
and scoured caves for dragons’ teeth;
we know not if he witnessed
the rotting timbers from his Argo hulk
cut short Jason’s lonely disillusion.
Argus, Odysseus’s favourite dog,
as faithful as Penelope,
knew the scent of the King of Ithaca
on his return after twenty years,
even before his wife.
The Argus of Brighton
surveys and purveys
small town stories, gossip history.
The Brown Argus butterfly
carries news of natural living history:
of downland chalk and nectar flowers
of bulldozers, lost meadows,
supermarket car parks.
The same lunule-spotted wings
could have settled on the giant’s eyelid,
Jason’s wedding flowers,
Odysseus’s battered cuirass,
or Brighton classified ads,
just as they now lie defiant
on a concrete path.
Brown Argus underwing, probably roosting.
Brown Hairstreak
Thecla betulae
Thecla
