The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (31 page)

It was May Day. When I opened my eyes the bedroom window had shone brilliant blue and I was elated, but as the downs began to loom in the car windscreen on my approach I saw to my dismay that freezing sea fog had rolled in from the
coast ten miles away and the hill-top was lost in misty swirls like a Lake District peak. Nonetheless, we proceeded to the summit. The fog slowly thinned, and on the very stroke of noon the sun burst through and began to warm up the local insect fauna, the odd bee, the odd hoverfly, and after a couple of minutes Dan called me over, and there it was, on a cowslip leaf amidst the hawthorn scrub – a miniature animal so bright in the lattice-work of orange and black on its wings that I had the impression of a glossy, freshly minted postage stamp. I was enthralled, and I said to my mother

Look.

The Duke of Burgundy.

This is for you

By then I had already seen about a dozen species, the commoner sights of the springtime, led by the peacock’s three close relatives which also overwinter and also look like dead leaves with their wings closed: the red admiral, the comma, and the small tortoiseshell. I had found the two other lovely markers of early spring, the brimstone and the orange tip, and the first of the blues, the holly blue, and the first of the browns, the speckled wood, and the three common whites, the large, the small, and the green-veined, coming upon most of them in Kew Gardens near my home. But as the commoner species were ticked off, expeditions began to be necessary for the rarer and more difficult ones, and bigger expeditions than to Butser Hill. The biggest was to Scotland, to find the chequered skipper, the prettiest of the skipper family which went extinct in England in the mid 1970s but which survives and still flourishes in the hills of coastal Argyllshire. Thither I went in the company of BC’s Scotland man, Tom Prescott, and he took me to Glasdrum Wood, rising steeply from the shore of Loch Creran, in the stunning landscape north of Oban. We were lucky with the weather, for there was just enough warmth and sunshine to bring the butterflies out – with the temperature a couple of
degrees lower, we might not have seen them at all, and it was a very long way to go for nothing – although conditions were also ideal for the great affliction of anybody promenading in the Highlands, the Scottish midge, and so Tom produced his principal midge defence, an Avon bath oil called Skin So Soft, which the locals swear by. Generous applications of it became necessary as we climbed up through the wood and into a long open glade made for power lines, known as a wayleave, which is ideal habitat for the butterfly, as the midges swarmed about our faces, biting us like billy-o, but eventually we found it, a small brown creature exquisitely chequered with gold spots, and I said to my mother

Look at us.

Coated in Skin So Soft.

Bitten to bits by the midges.

But here’s the chequered skipper.

It’s for you

Argyll was the farthest trip, but it wasn’t the highest: that was to find the mountain ringlet, our one true montane or Alpine butterfly, restricted to mountainsides in the Lake District and Scottish Highlands, usually at an altitude of between 1,500 and 2,500 feet, and this time I enlisted the help of two northern England representatives of BC, Dave Wainwright and Martin Wain, and the area they took me to was in the Lakes, starting from the Wrynose Pass which leads from Langdale over the mountains into Eskdale. We climbed steadily for an hour and a half, and we saw various butterflies, meadow browns or small heaths or painted ladies, but nothing resembling a mountain ringlet, even as the air got cooler and we began to glimpse the Lakeland peaks, with Skiddaw in the far distance; and the sweat ran down my brow and I began to feel we would be out of luck, until there was a sudden shout from both men, and I spotted a little whirring ball of black with an orange halo around it. It was a mountain ringlet, buzzing over the grass, and then
there was another, and another, and when we sat down to take a breather, we found there was one resting in the grass stems just behind us and we were able to look closely at its brown wings, each with an orange band containing eyespots which give the illusion of an orange glow when it flies, and eventually I persuaded it to crawl on to my fingertip and we photographed it there and I asked Dave Wainwright how high we were, and the reading on his GPS was 614 metres, which is 2,014 feet, and I said to my mother

See it on my fingertip?

At 2,014 feet up!

The mountain ringlet.

This is for you

To see every British butterfly species in a single summer was a significant undertaking, I began to realise, and even though I have met people who have done it unaided, in the strictly limited time I had available I would not have managed without Butterfly Conservation’s expertise: for example, I had just half a day set aside to see the swallowtail, and BC’s Mandy Gluth and Bernard Watts found it for me at How Hill Nature Reserve in the Norfolk Broads, several swallowtails in fact, feeding on the purple marsh thistles, so sensationally exquisite that I was every bit as animated as when I caught sight of my first one in Rimini forty years earlier, and I said to my mother

Look, look!

Swallowtails!

Nectaring on the marsh thistles!

Too beautiful to be true!

These are for you

There were many such pleasures, like the purple emperor, and the Glanville fritillary and the white admiral and the silver-spotted skipper and especially the large blue, which had gone extinct in Britain in 1979 and which Professor Jeremy Thomas, Britain’s leading Lepidoptera scientist, had managed to
reintroduce, with great success; I saw it with Jeremy at Green Down in Somerset, murmuring

Look.

The large blue.

Back from the dead!

It’s for you

But perhaps the most memorable moment of all was the dance of the heath fritillaries.
Melitaea athalia
, another take on orange and black, was one of our rarest species, but it had a stronghold in Blean Woods in Kent, a wide expanse of ancient forest near Canterbury and an RSPB reserve, part of which the warden, Michael Walter, managed specially for the butterfly. I had been there before and seen it with him, in moderate numbers, but that year his management – coppicing the woodland to get the right succession of vegetation to allow the larval food plant to flourish – paid off with spectacular results. Michael took me deep into the woodlands, about two miles down a track, then branched off along a narrow path which eventually opened out into a glade, a glade I thought you would never find by yourself in a million years: and there we came upon heath fritillaries in their hundreds, perhaps even in their thousands, fluttering everywhere a foot or so above the vegetation – they seemed to be dancing in the dappled light, thronging the sunbeams in a teeming minuet, in a silence broken only by birdsong, and I gasped at the sight and I said to my mother

See the dance?

It’s a miracle.

The silent dance, in the secret glade.

This is for you

All summer I sought them out, week after week, and every sighting I wrote about in the
Independent
but first I dedicated to her; and then it was the end of August, and I had seen fifty-six species and only two remained. They were the brown hair-streak and the clouded yellow, and a delay in encountering the
first was to be expected, as it is our last butterfly of the year to emerge, but the clouded yellow was a problem. Sulphur-golden blotched with black, it is an annual immigrant from the Continent, not at all uncommon, and I had seen many, but this summer I simply could not find it, and as August wore on I made half a dozen special trips into Surrey, Sussex, and Dorset without any luck; more than once I was told, you should have been here yesterday, and at length 31 August arrived, August Bank Holiday Monday, the final day of the summer and of The Great British Butterfly Hunt: the day of our reader’s prize, which was to be a Butterfly Conservation-led safari to find the brown hairstreak (plus lunch).

The winner, out of many readers who had taken part, was an amiable, newly retired biology teacher from Friern Barnet in north London, Andy King, who had chalked up fifty-seven species, documenting and photographing them all, including the brown hairstreak already – a remarkable achievement – but who could not complete the set, as although he too had gone to Argyll for the chequered skipper, it had eluded him. Martin Warren and I took him to Steyning in Sussex where we met Neil Hulme of BC’s Sussex branch, and in hazy warm sunshine Neil led us up into the downland to a strip of ash wood fringed with an understorey of blackthorn, where almost immediately we found a female brown hairstreak laying her eggs on the blackthorn stems, and I was stunned at the loveliness of this new species for me, chocolate-brown with broad orange-golden bands across her forewings, and I drank deeply of her beauty; and I made my dedication.

It was nearly noon. There was half a day left and I was still a clouded yellow short of the set, so we walked further up into the downs, the chalk grassland bright with pink wild marjoram and blue field scabious flowers, and over the next half-hour we saw various whites and small heaths and painted ladies especially – it was the year of a great painted lady invasion from the
Continent, and millions had arrived – and I was beginning to think it was simply one of those things and I would not do it when I heard a commotion and I turned to see Martin Warren waving his arms and he was shouting: ‘Mike! Mike! Mike!’

‘What?’

‘Look!’

Bowling through the air was a flame, an intense sulphur flame, and there it was, the fifty-eighth and final species, on the last day of my butterfly summer, and I cried to my mother

See? See?

There it is!

The clouded yellow!

The last one!

It’s for you

And somewhere inside me Norah laughed and said:
Yes, son, there it is!

It was my gift to her.

It was my commemoration of who she was and how special she was; it was my tribute to the feelings which had been lost and found again, my tribute to their mended completeness; it was my final coming to peace. I gave her something which at last seemed appropriate to mark my love for her, my love which had gone astray in the time of turmoil all those years before, and so strangely, swerved off into butterflies.

I gave her all the butterflies of my country.

I gave her every one.

•

That the natural world can bring us peace; that the natural world can give us joy: these are the confirmations of what many people may instinctively feel but have not been able to articulate; that nature is not an extra, a luxury, but on the contrary
is indispensable, part of our essence. And now that knowledge needs to be brought to nature’s defence.

As we plough forward into the twenty-first century, like a ship heading into a gale, the threat which hangs over the natural world is without precedent: it points to a culminating moment in the history of humankind, this one life-form out of the earth’s millions which, it may well be possible to write soon enough, rose from all the others to possess language and consciousness, to create art and law and medicine, even to voyage into space, but which ended up destroying its own home. No, we will not split the planet apart: the rocks and the seas will remain. But the natural life of the biosphere is now well on course to be devastated, in the Sixth Great Extinction of which we are the authors, just as it was in the previous five. Loss of habitat will see off countless species, as the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea, for example, despite supporting 50 million migrating shorebirds, disappear under concrete, as the rainforests continue to tumble under the chainsaws, as what’s left of the mangrove swamps makes way for shrimp farms, and as all the remaining big rivers are dammed for hydroelectricity and their ecosystems permanently disrupted, while pollution on an ever-increasing scale, especially in the developing world, will be almost as potent a force for destruction as habitat loss. Over-exploitation of resources, over-hunting, and poaching will take a more and more critical toll of fish stocks and of larger animals such as elephants, rhinos, and tigers (a report from an international group of scientists in 2013 revealed that the African forest elephant, considered since 2010 as a species on its own, had lost two- thirds of its numbers to ivory poachers
just in the previous decade
and was firmly set on the path to extinction); and the menace of invasive species, fuelled by the ever-growing globalisation of world trade, will continue to wreak unexpected havoc (the Asian brown tree snake, accidentally introduced to the Pacific island of Guam after the Second World War, has wiped out nearly
two-thirds of the island’s native birds). Over everything hangs the spectre of global climate change, the greatest menace of all, now threatening to wreck the very stability of the atmosphere which, for hundreds of millions of years, has allowed life to arise and to flourish.

It has been difficult to be clear-sighted about the essence of what faces us, because the liberal secular humanism which has been our dominant creed for two generations, admirable though it is, has shied away from looking squarely at the issue: the fundamental, mushrooming clash between the earth and its species man,
Homo sapiens
– its problem child. In our current belief system, man is good, and so, as they used to say of General Motors and America, what’s good for man is necessarily good for the planet; except, of course, that it isn’t, and it may destroy the planet. The reluctance to see things as they are, while having to acknowledge nonetheless that the natural world is under assault – it can hardly be denied – invites a sort of displacement behaviour: it is tempting to locate the problem in particular political systems. But capitalism and the command economy share the blame for the despoliation of nature over the last century, and the natural world can be done down equally both by those after fast bucks for themselves or for shareholders and by those seeking the broader benefit of the commonwealth. Nature is not being destroyed just by a particular political or economic creed; it is being destroyed by the runaway scale of the human enterprise.