Everybody loves butterflies. It's just that some of us haven't quite realised it yet.
And we need butterflies. They are immensely strong symbols to us,
symbolising beauty and freedom of the soul; and through metamorphosis
they offer immense hope as well. They are the souls of summer hours.
In Greek mythology Psyche the goddess of the soul was often depicted as a butterfly.
So they are incredibly important things to us and they are, of course,
a part of the garden experience, and very much part of the British summer.
Many of us are content just to experience butterflies in the garden,
and there are a great many plants we can grow which butterflies will like to feed from.
Seeking nectar such as wild native plants like purple loosestrife here,
and of course the great range of garden cultivated plants which produce a lot of nectar.
Of which of course the best is the butterfly bush, Buddleja davidii
which there are a great many cultivars and colour forms, but all of which butterflies like.
Moths on the other hand are largely creatures of the night, of dark and darkness.
And we have to trap them, lure them; and most modern moth traps are really fantastic for moths.
We only have 59 species of butterfly in this country.
There are 59 day flying moths and about another 2,000 moths big and small.
And here are some of them from last night's catch. Of which the most significant is this,
which is the Dark Arches which is quite a scarce species.
And the difference between butterflies and moths is really rather academic.
It all lies in the antennae of feelers which in moths are either feathery or thin,
and in butterflies are either clubbed or hooked.
Butterflying is a fantastic hobby and this little book will help you start up.
It aims to cover the principles of field craft, looking for butterflies,
and the principles of butterfly ecology. Our scarcer butterflies take you to the
most wonderful of places when those habitats are at their very zenith
in terms of specialness. They take you to mountain tops, to peat bogs, to lowland heathland,
to sea cliffs, sand dunes, sea combs, forests, and best butterfly habitat of all
in terms of number of species is chalk and limestone grassland
like here at Rodborough Common which the National Trust owns in the Cotswolds.
This really is butterfly heaven.
So this is a freshly emerged male Adonis Blue.
The undersides of this is browny-grey with those orange dots, and those black spots.
The upper side is an electric iridescent bright blue.
An incredible thing about this butterfly is that it died out in the Cotswolds
where we are now in 1963, and then 40 years on reappeared mysteriously and spectacularly.
Since 2003 when it started to reappear it's exploded in the Cotswolds, and there are over 30 colonies.
A pair of Common Blues mating. Now in very basic terms
being a butterfly is all about sex because the butterfly is the mature
reproductive state of a complex metamorphosis.
Obviously once mated the female's job then is to go off and lay eggs
and secure the future of the species. The male is then somewhat redundant.
We don't really know how many times butterflies mate. Basically virginity
does not last long in the female of the species. This is a biological advantage
for the ladies to get mated as soon as possible, often before they're really ready to fly.
The very old male Chalk Hill Blue. Difficult to identify because
there's not much of him left. The average butterfly this size
lives for about a week but individuals may live for much longer.
He may be two or three weeks old but certainly he hasn't got much longer left in him.
Now separating the females of the Chalk Hill and the Adonis Blue is extremely difficult,
but the tip is: Chalk Hill Blue females are old and ragged
when the second brood Adonis Blue females are flying, because the Adonis
flies little bit later. And that's the tip.
So this book should appeal to the absolute beginner because it covers the areas which
the visually orientated identification guides don't. It should also appeal
to the more experienced butterfly watcher who needs his or her focus sharpening.
In particular this book tries to convey the real ecological principles which govern butterflies.
Enjoy it.