“Well, she’s walking through the clouds
With a circus mind that’s running wild
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That’s all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind”
– ‘Little Wing’, The Corrs
It’s really odd, but the things I see when I’m out and about seem to come in waves. Some days recently, I seem to have seen a million ladybugs but very little else. Other days, it’s caterpillars (or things that look like caterpillars but turn out to be something else … not that I’m bitter or anything!), or orchids, or vetches, or …. the list is endless. But it’s almost always one thing at a time.
Today turned out to be a butterfly day. Lots of butterflies. Clouds of butterflies. Shifting ribbons of butterflies, dancing from leaf to leaf, settling, rising, swirling, and settling again. Drifts of butterflies resting on the warm sandy soil with their wings wide open. Tiny scraps of colour gracefully taking wing at the slightest hint of movement around them.
I went for a wander around Weeting. It’s a walk that includes the closest thing to a hill that I can find round here. At best, it’s a gentle slope, but at least it’s not completely flat! The first stretch is along a gravel track, which at this time of year (if I’m completely honest) is a little bit dull. Once you get past the house and horse farm at the top, though, you turn off down a narrow grassy path, and things get a whole lot better.
All of a sudden, every time I put my foot down, grasshoppers scatter in all directions. Not that I can see them clearly, given that they’re all beige and brown, and blend in perfectly with the grass seedheads. It’s more a sense of furtive movement.
The butterflies move more gracefully, floating around the bracken leaves, resting on the sandy ground, swirling and dancing around the flower spikes when they meet up with another butterfly or two. It feels like a conversation, conducted entirely in tiny movements. There are Small Coppers flashing the upper surface of their wings, which glow like banked embers against the pale gold of the sand. Their wings are velvety soft with a dense coat of hairs that fade to white along their outermost edge.
The dark wings of Ringlets move like frantic shadows through the bracken, the depth of their colour standing witness to their age. The newer adults have a deeper, almost chocolatey tone where the older ones have faded to a paler, softer colour. They’re joined by Gatekeepers, with a more tawny colouring on their upper wings and a constellation of dark ringed white stars floating in a pale yellow galaxy below.
On a low growing bramble, a small chocolate shadow edged with fiery orange embers perches for a couple of seconds before flitting off to another flower. I peer at it in confusion. What is it? It would be a blue butterfly if it weren’t completely the wrong colour. Is this another one of the non-blue blue butterflies? I do a quick consult with Google and am told it’s a Brown Argus. Good enough for me.
Along the path, I see a small patch of tawny orange. It doesn’t matter how many Skippers I’ve seen, they always look crumpled and dishevelled. Like a slightly disreputable character, hanging around the cool kids in the hope of fitting in. I think this one is a Small Skipper, but I’m basing this purely on the fact that it seemed small. Irritatingly, it isn’t accompanied by a Large Skipper against which I can measure its relative size.
I spend a happy ten minutes standing at a low growing branch of a Sweet Chestnut tree. Its flowers are freshly out and are currently the hottest place to be for the local invertebrates. Longhorn Beetles, hoverflies, and various unknown flies jostle for position along the flower spikes. But the queen of the tree is a beautifully coral moth with a deeper salmon coloured border to its wings and delicate dark brown tracery. It’s a moth, not a butterfly, and it goes by the evocative name of Rosy Footman.
Further along, I reach a grassy track where the butterfly quotation reaches its max. Hundreds of Peacocks are flattened against the warmth of the soil, the vivid colours of their wings shining brightly in the sunlight. As I walk along the path, there’s a bow wave of colour rising and falling ahead of me. Occasionally, there’s the more sombre flash of a Red Admiral, but they’re not interested in offering me the chance to take a photo.
I return to the car, my thoughts full of colour and movement. A butterfly day is a good day.
absolutelynotnormal 