Blue Sunday
As a former beekeeper I’m regularly tipped off by friends about the latest bee peril doing the media rounds. Whether it’s a case of sudden colony collapse or the arrival of the bee-destroying Asian Hornet making the news, it doesn’t take long for people to let me know.
Since that Albert Einstein quote: “If bees disappear from the planet then mankind has only four years left to live” came into prominence, anything that affects bees is seized upon like Private Fraser in Dad’s Army. I don’t want to get into a pollination fight with one of the world’s great scientists, but there are other pollinators around, one of which is the butterfly.
Butterflies have disappeared at a phenomenal rate, but their loss doesn’t get anything like the coverage that bees get. They need to change agencies.
On Sunday I photographed a butterfly I’d never seen in the garden before. We have cabbage whites, the odd yellow butterfly which I think is a sulphur, and today this one. Research leads me to believe it might be a common blue, although not so common in our garden. It was a wonderful sight and I was lucky to have my camera with me, because without doubt had I sprinted back to the house to fetch it, there would have been no common blue on my return.
That is one of the big differences between where we live and rural France. In Brittany there are a whole variety of butterflies that pass through the garden. We have buddleia in both, but as you can see from the photo (left), the French buddleia has two different species on the same flower spike and just off camera a bee trying its best to get a proboscis down one of the florets.
I have no certain idea what they are, although I think the light orange one is a common leopard (obviously I have the common touch) and the black stripy one in the shape of a Vulcan bomber is not a zebra swallowtail. Putting the description ‘black and white stripy butterfly in the shape of a Vulcan bomber’ into google isn’t very rewarding, it just brings up pictures of Vulcan bombers.
I know for absolute certain, though, that the one to the right, resting on my daughter’s forefinger is a Red Admiral. It wasn’t a killer flesh-eating Red Admiral, she just loves pulling faces. The photo at the bottom was of a butterfly resting on cow parsley (I think the difference between a butterfy and a moth is that butterflies can fold their wings up and moths can't).
Now, having seen the common blue in the garden I’m tempted to buy the new breed of 3-in-1 patio buddleias, which are compact and have tricolour flower spikes of pink, purple and white. That will be my contribution to what should be a national drive to grow more butterfly-friendly plants.
We can’t leave it all up to Network Rail.
