By reviving butterflies, we will be helping a whole host of insects and plants
some species potentially not being able to adapt quickly enough to changing temperatures and weather patterns.
“You ask what is the use of butterflies,” wrote the 17th-century naturalist John Ray. “I reply, to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men: to brighten the countryside like so many golden jewels.” Their beauty is reason enough to save them but because butterflies have been so well-studied, they also serve another purpose. Their fate tells us what is happening to other less visible but equally crucial winged insects and pollinators. So butterflies today bring a stark message: we must stop damaging our planet.
A HARBINGER OF HOPE
Nevertheless, our joy when we see a butterfly need not be tempered by the pain of loss. They also bring inspiration. My favourite symbol of hope this year is the Purple Emperor. This is the “big game” of the butterfly world. It soars and swoops dynamically on large wings and the male flashes iridescent purple in the sunlight. Ian Heslop, a schoolmaster and devotee of the His Imperial Majesty (as the Victorians called this beauty), wrote in 1953 that he had caught “exactly as many Purple Emperors as I have shot elephants” (four in each case) but “nothing in all my sporting or collecting career has ever given me so much joy as the seeing of my first Emperor safely in the net”.
These days, thankfully we don’t catch butterflies but we still collect them in the form of digital photos, and if you take a midsummer trip to a romantic old English woodland – Fermyn Woods in Northamptonshire, Tugley Wood in Surrey or Finemere Wood in Buckinghamshire – you will find worshippers on their hands and knees, crawling along forest rides to obtain the perfect photograph of an Emperor. This butterfly inspires particular obsession because it is so elusive, spending most of its life hiding in sallow shrubbery or tucked away in oak tops. And secretly, rather suddenly, it is thriving.
Today’s leading Purple Emperor devotee, author and naturalist Matthew Oates, says the best site to see one in Britain is Knepp Wildland in West Sussex (see page 84) but, remarkably, in 2015 it was spotted for the first time in years on Hampstead Heath in London; in 2016 it was seen in Milton Keynes, and it now appears to be marching north and east, returning to Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire after decades of absence.
SAVING SPECIES
We are getting better at spotting these creatures but the Emperor is also one of several butterflies that appear to be adapting to climate change more adeptly than we might expect. Many – from Commas to Essex Skippers and Marbled Whites – live at the northern limit of their natural range in southern Britain. Warmer weather is helping them move northwards. Others, such as the Brown Argus, have switched food plants to thrive in new conditions.
So butterflies continually confound us. They also bring out the best in us. The last one to become extinct in Britain was the Large Blue in 1979 but it has been brought back from the dead – via caterpillars collected from Sweden – and successfully reintroduced onto grassland in Somerset and Gloucestershire. Last year these sites boasted the largest concentration of Large Blues anywhere in the world.
Hope is perhaps the most precious commodity in conservation, and butterflies give us hope. We can save species. And by reviving butterflies we will be helping a whole host of less beautiful or visible insects and plants upon which, ultimately, we all depend.