Country Mouse
I can count on my fingers the times I have left the cottage in the past 30 years to attend local events, open days and lectures.
I invariably enjoy them and they add to the fund of knowledge and self-improvement, as well as making useful contacts in the wider conservation ‘community’.
However, there is in the male of the species a reluctance to obey the combined Panzer-division-style advice of both mother and wife, who over the years have advised – if not nagged me – to ‘get a life’ in Wiltshire by seeking out like-minded folk with similar interests in conservation.
My main fear, if I am honest, has been the tiresome possibility of being lectured to by inferior intellects. This has regrettably been the case during church sermons. I note also that the word ‘lecture’ has been replaced by the more egalitarian word ‘talk’, which shouldn’t annoy me but it does.
Fast-forward to a local event, a talk by Dr Susan Clarke on the noble Duke of Burgundy butterfly, which was in red ink in the calendar. Not even the prospect of watching Narcos season three, episode ten, on Netflix could dissuade me.
The ‘Dr’ was what swung it for me. I need to find facts when pontificating to my farmer and land-owning friends. There is currency in knowledge of ecology, conservation and fauna and flora. The only reason I am tolerated at a house party in Mull, where I shun charades and Highland dancing, is, I suspect, as a ‘Poundland Chris Packham’.
Also, it has to be admitted, I like to hear the sound of my own voice. As a leader of men, my hand is often the first to shoot up at local lectures during question sessions. And being an expert on the subject of dukes, I already had a trump card. The question would be ‘How on earth did this tiny creature manage without us?’ A subversive and subtle query which goes to the heart of the conservation debate and the ongoing controversy surrounding re-wilding.
This very question, it turned out, was asked by another, who seemed to be on top of his brief and got in before me at the standing room-only event.
This butterfly – which others have to travel miles to see – is on my doorstep and is good reason for keeping faith with my adopted county of Wiltshire, rather than moving to a site overlooking Church Stretton in Shropshire, where I recently felt more at home. Here, it seems – with toothless watchdogs looking on – local corruption reigns in a building free-forall. Mansions, barn conversions, hutches for divorced singletons and retirement homes are all eating up habitats as they go. Thank God for the Salisbury Plain military training area, the only bulwark against housing and agriculture.
Every year I feel a strong compulsion around cuckoo time to check His Grace the Duke’s very existence in its isolated old haunts. For this is a butterfly that literally hovers on the brink of existence.
The ongoing problem is that this tiny, elusive flying brooch has been giving conservationists the runaround. In Oldie columnist Patrick Barkham’s words, ‘Many grasslands managed for the conservation of other flowers and butterflies have been too overgrazed for the Duke’s exacting tastes.’ ‘Burgundies,’ observed butterfly guru Matthew Oates of the National Trust, ‘have been slipping through the conservation net spectacularly.’
It just so happens that the rough landscapes it prefers are a perfect fit for what I call proper countryside, as opposed to the wasteland that is farmland and serves as appropriate subject matter for my artist daughter – who sets up her easel and then I have to give up butterflying and stand guard all day, with ash staff, fending off bullocks.
Last year, I note, was the most trying for actually spotting the insect. I ended up trying to rugby-tackle it after a fruitless, ankle-breaking chase uphill through tussocky knolls.
One thing I learnt from the packed lecture hall was to remember to wait for the butterfly to come to you, or bring a child, as they are closer to the ground. This advice chimed with other years, when it had been so much more obliging, landing on the very fallen tree trunk where I was dozing off, hypnotised by a buzzard circling the azure on warm thermals.
Credibility is the goal as a budding ecologist, self-taught naturalist and fan of re-wilding. I have attained at least A-level standards of knowledge and jargon. The countryside is now an ‘issue’. Land use is rising up the agenda. You need to understand and use words such as ‘managed retreat’, ‘mycorrhizal’, ‘eutrophication’ and ‘phenology’, not forgetting acronyms such as PBR – a novel way to torment farmers intent on trousering taxpayers’ largesse. It means paying (farmers) by results.
At the lecture, I learnt a lot of new stuff and new jargon, including ‘dispersal’ and ‘feeding damage’, but also the importance of reviving coppiced woodland for butterfly conservation. I also met local wildlife writer Peter Marren, whose superior knowledge far exceeded my own and whose butterfly book Rainbow Dust will take its place in an orderly queue behind Barkham’s and Oates’s tomes. Naturally, I signed up to visit a local reserve in search of ‘dukes’ with other like-minded folk. We are all ‘extinction rebels’ now.