Ingham’s W RLD
ON A glorious summer’s day last weekend Dorset’s Jurassic Coast was treated to the sight of three bespectacled middle- aged men in very silly sun hats racing up a steep grassy slope and shouting like maniacs. We weren’t fleeing a swarm of bees, dodging a landslip or darting to the nearest pub.
We were chasing one of Britain’s most beautiful butterflies: the clouded yellow.
Newly arrived from southern Europe it was already patrolling a territory, its orange- yellow upperwings bright against the greenery. It soon started sparring with a rival male, spiralling upwards before parting like boxers when the bell rings.
I was with two of Britain’s top lepidopterists: Butterfly Conservation’s chief executive Dr Martin Warren and the National Trust’s Matthew Oates, author of In Pursuit Of Butterflies, a charming account of his 50- year love affair with our flying jewels.
Martin was on the last stretch of his 105- mile Big Butterfly Hike from Exmouth to Swanage, clocking up 31 species and raising £ 12,000 to help our most threatened trio: the wood white, high brown fritillary and the Duke of Burgundy.
I was there to learn. Butterflies are so tricky. There are no calls to alert you, like the high- pitched yattering which drew us to a peregrine falcon, just sudden movements in the corner of your eye and a dash to keep up.
Among our 18 species on the day were hundreds of Lulworth skippers, tiny orange- brown butterflies found only on these cliffs, dark green fritillaries gliding swiftly at chest height plus a pebble- like grayling basking on the path.
In sheltered spots the brambles were a convention of gatekeepers, chocolatey butterflies with striking orange patches.
Martin says we should prize butterflies for their beauty and their miraculous life cycles. They also reveal the state of our environment. With 70 per cent of our species in decline, all is not well.
Happily experts such as Martin know how to save them. They just need cash and co- operation. When he approaches landowners he rarely gets turned away. Butterflies, you see, are special. They make people happy.
And no one was happier than Matthew when he spotted the first clouded yellow. He’s seen them so many times before but loves them.
“They can’t be British,” he enthused. “They look too tropical.” That’s what butterflies are – sunshine on the wing.
Take part in the Big Butterfly Count which ends on Sunday. Count them for 15 minutes and log sightings at bigbutterflycount. org HUMAN babies and a sex- mad ape share a common language. Both use different sounds to communicate their emotional states and the situations they find themselves in, Birmingham University experts tell the journal PeerJ. These bonobo peeps about feeding, nesting or grooming may be the “missing link” in the evolution of human speech. TWO seabirds have done something the Aussie batsmen couldn’t yesterday: clock up a century. The RSPB says two little terns on Dorset’s Chesil Beach were first ringed in 1999 and 2000. Since then each has flown 100,000km or 62,000 miles on migration between Dorset and West Africa. Not bad for a creature the size of a blackbird. GREEN TIP: Rinse jars, bottles and plastic microwave trays before recycling them. DEATH’S- HEAD hawkmoths should be hailed as musicians. They migrate from Africa to Europe to steal honey from beehives and produce short squeaks by sucking in air and blowing it out over a lobe, just like an accordion, German researchers tell the Science Of Nature. Next they’ll be out busking. THREE chicks called Pete have become the first wild- born cranes to fly the nest in the West Country in 400 years. The long- legged waders were reared by reintroduced birds at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Gloucestershire and on the Somerset Levels.
They were named after a driving force behind the scheme, the late Peter Newbery.