Butterfly debut

Penny and I and a friend saw our first butterfly of the year yesterday, a very early Brimstone flying happily round in the sunshine which has been making the last week extremely delightful The nights are still frosty and by evening the garden gets really chilly. But from midday until teatime, the sun has actually been uninterrupted and hot.

We all agreed that seeing a Brimstone so early (last year's first wasn't until mid-March) meant good luck for at least a year and probably five. We'd just been to a seminar on mediaeval women at Wolfson College (yes, Oxford is good for the ageing brain) and our superstition seemed perfectly reasonable alongside many of theirs.

Actually, Googling such things suggests that if your first butterfly of the year is white, that means good luck, while a yellow one such as the Brimstone portends lots of sunny weather. I am happy with either belief, or consequence, but in my lifetime, the first butterfly I've seen has almost invariably been a Brimstone and indeed this is often said to be the source of the word 'butterfly' - the butter-coloured fly which is so closely associated with the coming of Spring.

One perhaps more interesting story which pops up when you research Brimsones is the famous fake example, shown above. This was brought to the English butterfly expert James Petiver in 1702 by one of his usually reliable contacts, a William Charlton who sadly died later that year. It was declared to be a new species by Linnaeus himself and named Papilio ecclipsis on account of the two sickle moons and recorded in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae in 1767.

The fake - a watercolour by another 18th century butterfly expert, William Jones

Nearly 30 years later, however, the great man's disciple Fabricius looked at the specimen and realised that it was a fake, a standard Brimstone with the black blotches, moons and other delicate markings painted on. It was clearly done very skilfully but the evidence does not survive; the keeper of Natural Curiosities at the British Museum where the insect was by now stored was so angry that he stamped the poor, flimsy little hoax into pieces.  

Two replicas were later created (one in my first pic) and may still be seen at the Linnaean Society in London, a nice acknowledgment that even the greatest of natural history classifiers could go wrong. Otherwise we have to be content with the normal Brimstone, which is very common but still exquisite butterfly, or the lovely Continental species Cleopatra which has vivid orange colouring on its forewings.

This butterfly excitement hasn't diverted me from moths; rather, it prompted me to put out the trap last night for the first time in weeks.  The frost came but so did a solitary visitor and an appropriate one: the March Moth shown here. My first moth of the year on the same day as my first butterfly! What has fate in store?

Proving a negative

Happy New Year belatedly and I hope that you had a lovely Christmas, quiet or fun-filled according to your preference. We've had a happy time with the grandchildren and plenty of peace and quiet in between. Lots of good long Winter walks and bike rides too.

We even managed to stir ourselves in the current very cold weather and were rewarded today by sights such as this display of 'Puddle Icicles', a beautiful little micro landscape caused by cars splashing water on to the verge from a puddle, on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of road.

The fields immediately around our house meanwhile look like this, below, cold as cold can be, very still and quiet and misty too. Not the ideal circumstances for moths nor indeed moth trappers. However, driving back from Worcester two nights ago, when the dashboard said that the temperature outside the car was -3.5 degrees, we saw a moth flutter in the headlights.

Ever the optimist, I was persuaded by this to light the lamp when we got home, keeping my fingers crossed that the intense cold wouldn't do something nasty to the mercury vapour lightbulb.  Here's the trap awaiting visitors. Did they arrive?

No, they did not. In the morning, the bulb was fine but the cowl had a thick rime of frost and the lawn all around was crunchy with thick ice.

The eggboxes were empty of all forms of life, not even the tiny flies which appear on almost every other day of the year.  I will have another go in a couple of days' time when the weather may have crept back up to nine or ten degrees during the day and well above freezing at night. Meanwhile, I am having a look back at the year and hoping to compare my rather unscientific results with the much better-organised ones of Dave Wilton and the other ever-helpful contributors to my rod and staff, the Upper Thames Moths blog.