NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

I DISCOVERED a ladybird on my work shirt that was hanging out to dry. I took a while to examine the insect.

It was a seven spot. I carefully took the shirt and put it on a bush hoping that the beetle would fly off. I returned some minutes later to find out that it had and my luck would not be damaged.

The incident took me back to the summer of 1976. It was a time of blazing sunshine, Elton John and Kiki Dee topped the charts with ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ and we had an invasion of ladybirds.

The horde even reached Stokeon-trent as they covered gardens on the Abbey Hulton estate.

The British Entomological Society estimated that approaching 24 billion of them swarmed across the country by that summer.

According to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the seven spot ladybird (coccinella 7-punctata) are around 5-8 mm in length and almost always red with seven black spots. Their larva is grey with four pairs of orange markings and they are widespread species often found in gardens feeding on aphids.

It was a perfect set of circumstances that led to the huge explosion of numbers. The 1976 heat wave followed a very warm late summer of 1975 with a mild winter leading to high survival rates for the ladybird coinciding with a very high aphid population the insect on which the lady bird feeds.

This population of ladybirds extended across more or less the whole of England and Wales, and into Scotland.

According to entomologists, explosions in populations of ladybirds typically happened around every 15 years during the 20th Century, but after 1976 this ceased to transpire.

It remains a favoured insect and it is considered lucky and it has a long association with the Virgin Mary from which it derives its name. The name ladybird applied to the beetle is first recorded in the 17th century. It was so named on account of its seven spots, which were popularly believed to symbolise the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary. These seven sorrows are the flight into Egypt, the three days’ loss of the child Jesus in the Temple, the meeting of Jesus and Mary on the way to the Cross, the Crucifixion, the taking down of the body of Jesus from the Cross, the burial of Jesus.

The ladybird has a number of local names including the lady cow (Hereford), God Almighty Cow (Dorset) and most curiously in Norfolk Bishy Barnabee.

Iona and Peter Opie in their collection of childhood rhymes detailed one from Shropshire in use in the 19 th century which uses a dialect name for the insect:

Lady cow , Lady cow , fly thy ways home

Thy house is on fire, thy children are gone

All but one and his name is Tum

And he lies under the grindelstun.