Incy Wincy

I was so intoxicated by the beauty of the Adonis Blues in my last post that I missed the most interesting detail in my photos. By contrast, it was spotted at once by a nurse in intensive care which I was visiting this week.

Here it is, above. Among the butterflies which I photographed was this inert one on a stem of grass which at first I took to be dead. When I examined it more carefully (but not carefully enough!), this turned out not to be the case. In my relief, I carefully removed it and placed it on the leaves of a scrubby bit of hawthorn, out of sight.

What I failed to notice was that it had been entangled by a spider, a small creamy-white crab spider which the ICU nurse saw straight away. Here it is in more detail from my main photo with apologies for the blurring:

Eek! A reminder both to be more careful and of the unsentimental and dangerous world in which the small clouds of Adonis Blues live at Yoesden nature reserve, a little paradise in the Chilterns. A paradise with a serpent, or at least a spider.

I need to remember such lessons in patience to pass on to the family, friends and neighbours who have been sending me pictures recently of the current crop of caterpillars searching for somewhere to pupate. Here are, respectively, an Elephant Hawk moth larva (initially mistaken for animal poo), a spectacular Pale Tussock cattie and one of the 'woolly bear' family spotted zooming across a shingly beach by great-nieces and a great-nephew in the Western Isles:

My sister and family on holiday in Sweden have meanwhile been enjoying a butterfly paradise, with Camberwell Beauties (my most revered UK species), High Brown Fritillaries, which I once caught as a schoolboy on the British Camp in Herefordshire, and that fascinating species, the Map Butterfly. This has two startlingly different seasonal forms, the July one shown here by an artist, Helen Kejser Højlund, whose studio my sister discovered on a long bike ride in Denmark; and the earlier May generation, shown in a photo from Wikipedia. 

I initially mistook Helene's picture for a Scandinavian White Admiral but then remembered the sad story of how this butterfly was successfully introduced to the Forest of Dean and Symond's Yat in 1912 but then ruthlessly hunted down by an eccentric collector, Albert Farn, who bore grudges against several contemporary entomologists and believed that no foreign butterfly or moth should be introduced to the UK.

As the great Professor Edmund Ford says in his masterful book Butterflies in the Collins New Naturalist Series: "His arbitrary action was an improper one; for he should at least have consulted a considerable body of entomologists, for example the Royal Entomological Society, before taking a step which was by no means his personal business alone."   Ford adds how interesting the Map is and what a welcome addition it would be to the UK's very limited number of butterflies and concludes: "I would not object to a further attempt being made to naturalise it in this country."  Perhaps someone might heed that clarion call.