My quest to find all 59 British butterflies (and how I made my girlfriend take flight)

By PATRICK BARKHAM

Abundant: There are 59 types of British butterfly including this Swallowtail variety


Small brown jobs. That’s what my mum called them. The common plodders of the butterfly world that would scarcely divert your gaze as they bimbled past: Meadow Browns or Hedge Browns or Wall Browns. Mostly brown, and fairly dull.

This particular brown job was different: the Brown Argus. When I was eight years old, on our annual summer holiday at Holme Dunes Nature Reserve in North Norfolk, this small brown job twitched some obsessive passionate cell in my brain that has shaped my life ever since.

My Dad and I had set out one hot afternoon on our first butterfly mission. He’d had a hunch that this would be the perfect habitat for the rarely seen Brown Argus.

After several false alarms, we suddenly saw a silver shape flying over a thorny patch of brambles before dropping onto a tiny flower of thyme. There, in the sunshine, it opened its wings. A deep chocolate colour spread from the orange studs bordering the wings right into the soft brown hairs of its delicate body.

Brilliant brown, with one little black dot in the middle of each upper wing. Here, unmistakably, was a Brown Argus. It was thrilling.

That was the first of our annual expeditions, and over the years my father and I travelled the country attempting to see all 58 species of British butterfly (it’s 59 since the discovery of Réal’s Wood White, in Northern Ireland in 2001).

But we ran out of summers, or steam, and my personal tally got stuck at 54. I had never seen the Duke of Burgundy, the Chequered Skipper, the Glanville Fritillary, the Mountain Ringlet or Réal’s Wood White.

But last year, despite having a full-time job and a girlfriend, I had decided I must see all 59 in the course of one summer.

As the countryside has shrunk, species have become confined to isolated fragments of land. The Swallowtail, our largest and most spectacular butterfly, lives in glorious isolation in the Norfolk Broads, and the Duke of Burgundy and the Wood White are on the brink of extinction. One of my species could slip away before I saw them.

The year started well thanks to Matthew Oates, the National Trust’s butterfly expert. He took me to see ‘His Grace’, as he puts it, the Duke of Burgundy, which Oates believed was now Britain’s most vulnerable butterfly.

In 2000, there were thought to be 200 colonies; by 2009, this number had shrunk to just 80. And all except five of these were tiny, and therefore fragile, so that one or two bad summers could destroy them altogether.

Seeing the Duke of Burgundy in a cowslip-filled combe in the Cotswolds on a perfect April morning, I felt a buzz of pleasure I had not felt since a child.

The next on my never-seen list was the Glanville Fritillary, a spring butterfly found only on the Isle of Wight. It’s the only British butterfly named after a real person.

Eleanor Glanville was a wealthy widow who had the misfortune to marry a cheating second husband called Richard. When he took a mistress, Eleanor took refuge in entomology. She became the first person to describe the early life stages of the High Brown Fritillary, winning the respect of fellow (all-male) entomologists.

On her death, her husband contested her decision to leave her estate in trust for her children, rather than giving it to him, arguing — successfully — that her passion for butterflies was a sign of insanity.

The last weekend of May brought a heatwave, so at 6am on the Sunday, promising my girlfriend Lisa a day by the seaside, we set off. I was anxious — I had little knowledge of the fritillary’s habits. Was it an early riser, did it fly in the wind, could it could be seen at rest?

Arriving on the island, I, the alleged expert, decided we should search along the clifftop. But just ten paces from the car park, Lisa asked: ‘Is that one?’
Thinking how unlikely this would be, I followed her pointed finger and there, on the scrubby grass between the footpath and the old military road, was a faded, windblown Glanville Fritillary — one of the most geographically restricted, rare butterflies in Britain, next to hundreds of oblivious day-trippers.

It was so simple and lovely, and a bit of an anticlimax. While its top side was a characteristic fritillary chequerboard of golden brown and black, its beauty lay in its striking and unique underside of white and orange bands decorated with black and brown dots and borders.

After all my anxiety, it turned out I could have ticked off the Glanville Fritillary simply by going sunbathing.

Where once there were swarms of butterflies in our skies — Victorian collectors would rave about clouds of them in the New Forest or South Downs — those days have changed. Certainly, I had never seen a swarm of butterflies.


Butterfly varieties: The left of each images shows the upper wings, the right the underside, visible when the wings are closed. Scroll down for more...


But one sultry day in late June, in a small clearing in the heart of Blean Woods in Kent, a swarm began to build. I learned about it when I got a call from Nigel Bourn, one of the Butterfly Conservation charity’s scientists.

He whispered that he was witnessing ‘the event of the century’ — a mass gathering of another rare butterfly, called the Heath Fritillary.

I drove as fast as I could to Blean Woods, and two miles into the forest there was a small clearing where, at first, I saw only one or two.

Then I saw another pair, then dozens, then scores, then hundreds. It was a dizzying, disorientating spectacle: like a music festival for insects.

There were at least 1,300 of them. Half the entire British population of one of our rarest butterflies was in this quarter of a hectare. Every blade of grass, every bramble leaf and flower was taken.

Two-thirds of this swarm were estimated to be male. The females looked tired and harassed, subject to constant gropings and probings. One female had a broken wing from fending off so many advances.



Witnessing such an extraordinary gathering of rare butterflies was a stunning event, but it did not fill me with rapture. I found it stressful to watch their urge to mate and lay eggs in such a competitive environment. I found one fresh-looking couple dead together, as if they had undertaken a gruesome pact to escape this world.

After this experience, I continued with my summer mission, ticking off butterflies on schedule. One butterfly, in particular, held me in its power.

Although, technically, I had seen a Purple Emperor years before, it was a two-second glance, and I would do anything to see one again.

Which is why I found myself in a glade of the ancient royal hunting forest of Rockingham, looking at five tables laid for breakfast, a different dollop of food on each of 20 paper plates.

On one, two king prawns sweated in the sunshine. On another sprawled dozens of tiny pickled mudfish. There were crushed grapes, a rotten banana, honey water, horse manure, fox scat and plenty of servings of stinking shrimp: shrimp curry, sautéed shrimp fry, and shrimp paste.

This elegantly presented but utterly rancid repast, organised by Matthew Oates, was for the Purple Emperor.

No other butterfly in Britain can compete with the charisma of His Imperial Majesty. The Purple Emperor has bewitched butterfly lovers for centuries. It is a muscular, swooping, soaring, gliding black beauty.

Despite its size and power, it is rarely seen because it lives in the tops of trees, haughtily refusing to descend from its kingdom to feed, like an ordinary butterfly, on mere flowers.

But it turns out that Purple Emperors have a taste for the exotic, and enjoy nothing more than dipping their proboscis into shrimpy Far Eastern dishes — which explained the fetid feast.

After a few minutes’ waiting, a Purple Emperor swooped high overhead and sailed back into the oak and ash. I could not believe how easy it had been to see one.
A second male flew in, lower this time, and looped around the broad crown of a squat sallow bush. Others soon followed; lightning forays and lordly retreats.

They were, explained Matthew, searching for a mate. ‘They behave like testosterone-laden young men let out for an evening to go clubbing,’ he told me. ‘If they flush a girl out, all hell breaks loose.

‘They are looking for freshly emerged, virgin females. Female virginity doesn’t last too long in the Purple Emperor world.’


One roared down low and confronted me, dancing around me. Its wings made an audible clicking as it batted around me. It was my first real encounter with an Emperor. And, like every object of unrequited love, it treated the lovelorn with something like contempt.

Over the next couple of days, I would come to realise that it wasn’t just the Emperor who would treat my passion with disdain. Butterflies are traditionally symbols of freedom and happiness, sunshine and summer days; tokens of romance, not heartache. But could a butterfly stand for love and loss?

I had my answer sooner than I thought. After getting drunk on Purple Emperors, I drove north to the Lake District, hunting the butterfly that was the most difficult of all 59 species to see.

The Mountain Ringlet is very dark and very small. It is a smudge of an insect which inhabits mountainsides and boggy gullies in the harsh climate of Scotland and parts of the Lake District. People often spend weeks looking, yet never find one.

I woke up uneasy. It was PST (pre-sighting tension), and it welled up strongly when I was on my own, at the mercy of the weather, in a place where I had never seen this species before.

There was something else, too. Lisa had seemed distant when I departed for this latest two-week stretch away. Perhaps I needed to spend more time with her? She’d gone away that weekend with friends.

When I arrived in the Lake District, I found one very flat text message in my inbox, in reply to my two enthusiastic ones. She was tired, she was going to bed. She did not call for a chat.



The next morning was grey, and I drove impatiently up Honister Pass. The isolation suited my mood. I walked onto Fleetwith saddle, where there was said to be a Mountain Ringlet colony.

Grass and rocks; bleak and cold. I phoned Lisa. She was on a train home, exhausted, and did not want to talk. She didn’t want to have this conversation now, she said. The signal disappeared.

I sat on Grey Knotts and looked out blankly over a sheltered boggy spot between two crags for another hour. There was no sign of the Mountain Ringlet. I did not really care any more.


Then the sun poked out from behind a barrage of grey cloud. Was that another bee I could see? I was hallucinating butterflies now. It was tiny and brown. Much smaller than I imagined. It had to be. Was it? I hurtled down the slope.

Silky brown and busying around very close to the tufty ground, with a curious crab-like flight, sidling left and then right, tacking against the breeze, was a Mountain Ringlet. And there was another. Their wings were faded, more beige than brown, and frayed at the edges.

I had, on my own, on the first day of looking, found the Mountain Ringlet — the final one of the species I had never seen before.

I knew that my relationship with Lisa was over, but I could take heart from my modest achievement. Butterflies, said the French naturalist Marcel Roland, give us ‘solace for the pain of living’.

Although I saw all 59 British butterflies that summer (plus a rare visitor, the Queen of Spain Fritillary), from now on, for me, the Mountain Ringlet would always be my break-up butterfly.

Adapted from The Butterfly Isles by Patrick Barkham, published by Granta on October 14 at £20. © Patrick Barkham 2010. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.


source: dailymail