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 famous 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 12 edition of Systema Naturae in 1767.
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 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 an 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?
