Keep an eye out for purple hairstreaks
Hot days at the end of June were almost suffocating here in the garden. The scents of buddleia, rose became cloying and we shrank into the shade of the house on our picnic chairs for lunch and tea breaks and started for relief at the brilliant green umbrellas of the oaks against that steely blue sky. Not that I am complaining. Because the butterflies have never had it so good. The heat made them hyperactive. Many emerged a fortnight sooner than normal.
Most amazing was the sight of a purple hairstreak on June 20. Normally these secret little insects which hardly anybody ever sees wait well into July. Then my wife shouted: “Quick. Come and look at this, it can’t be true!” She had seen a small dark butterfly darting around like a dervish past the phyteuma, the azalea, the comfrey, the red roses which are as big as jam doughnuts, and the lavender spikes growing out of their garden-centre pots.
The butterfly was not looking for flowers. It didn’t want those. It was just too glad to be free of the clammy winter leaf-mould of the forest floor where it had lived inside its shell as a chrysalis since March. It wanted to unfold and show off those little wings with their bright purple colours on the upper surface that would be used to attract a female. She also has two smaller purple patches on the discal cells but much of her wings are black.
However what my wife had seen was a small dark greyish butterfly, that was because the underside of the wings that hide it from prying eyes are a sort of bold battleship grey, quite a different colour scheme to that which the butterfly unfolds and flaunts for the sexual act. That grey colour has the most exquisite little jagged line running down its entire length. It is like the pin stripe in a Savile Row suit, or the swage line along the coachwork of an old Rolls Royce motorcar. All the hairstreaks have this.
It also reminds me of those weird zebra stripes that First World War naval camouflage experts painted on the battleships. It focuses the eye of a predator but also tells it that it is not looking at a butterfly’s wing, but a small crack in the bark, or perhaps a lump of lichen. You and I hardly ever see this lovely little black and white zigzag because the purple hairstreak immediately takes to the top of the oak trees and dances its merry little nuptial well out of the reach of humans.
It is the only hairstreak which wildlife photographer Brian Henham has not yet photographed. He has captured other Sussex hairstreaks including the black hairstreak, shown here, recently discovered breeding in the county, a rarity indeed. Another hairstreak you will easily see is the brown hairstreak in September flying around blackthorn bushes where it dances its crazy circular flight like a spinning top.
Meanwhile, keep those eyes on the tops of the oak trees where dozens of purple hairstreaks are dancing together like girls and boys in Tess of the D’urbervilles’ early days – when she was a carefree maid looking for a partner.