Red Admiral

Image from the web

Sunday morning at midday and I'm sitting in the car with drizzle spotting the windows when what should land on the wipers but a red admiral. It's possibly the last 'on the wing' butterfly I'll see this year - there will be some that hibernate in my shed and of course there will be chrysalises too, but neither of these are quite the same.

The red admiral is for me one of the quintessential English butterflies. It's arrival in Northumbria, where I lived as a boy, marked the start of summer holidays. Along with peacocks, tortoiseshells and painted lady they would feed on the buddleia bushes in our avenue and we'd try to catch them with nets made from bamboo poles and old lace curtains. They're a butterfly that makes you stop and admire (it was for a long period erroneously named the red admirable), even allotment gardeners don't chase them away.

In fact, the species is not really English at all - it's a migrant that rarely survives even our milder winters - after last year's cold snap it's doubtful the one I saw came from anywhere other than the continent. I suppose it could be a second brood - some of the early arrivals breed in spring, their larvae forming web nests on stinging nettles. But the emergent adults then have to face the winter, a few choose to fly south.

I read the other day that in Welsh their common name is y fachtell, which I think means the cloak. With its black and red forewings, I've often thought the butterfly has a vampire look - so perhaps the day before Halloween was an appropriate time to see one. In the event, it drank only from my windscreen!

This year has been poor for butterflies and moths, but the warmer autumn has given a late surge and as always there are exceptions - the hummingbird hawk moth had a bumper year. A migrant too, over 11,000 were recorded this summer. The other week on the coast path I saw dozens of small coppers, a delight of colour in the September sun. And I saw a painted lady on our anniversary, the only one this year.

Next time you see a red admiral, consider its journey and think again about how robust these deceptively delicate creatures are. Alternatively, you could smile at the answer a pal once gave in our secondary school quiz. What's a red admiral? was the question. To which he replied, It's an Indian Sailor, sir.  Given that some of them come from almost as far, he wasn't entirely wrong.

Encounters with butterflies

The story below is an edited and adapted extract from a longer essay. It was my winning submission to the National Trust's Butterflty Isles Competition, for which you had to describe an encounter with butterflies.

Painted Lady

I know precisely when I saw my first Painted Lady: the 19th of August 1974, in the garden of my Aunt Marjorie’s house.

Marjorie wasn’t my real aunt. She was our primary school nurse and friend of my mother. Her husband had died in India, serving as the batman to Lord Hunt who led the first successful Everest expedition. She was a redoubtable lady whose house was stuffed with eastern artefacts and Catholic icons; she drove a red Ford Capri, had a casual disregard of the Highway Code and seldom bothered to change gear.

Looking back, I realise that Marjorie’s was a place of escape for my mother. At the depths of my father’s depression we would go there from school. And I’d be sent to the garden, my mother explaining they had ‘things to talk about.’ Marjorie would give me a jam jar and tell me to hunt for caterpillars. ‘Don’t get lost,’ she would joke, ‘it’s a wilderness you know.’

And she wasn’t exaggerating.

Her garden ran down to the railway, the lawn as tall as meadow grass, the borders overgrown with foxgloves, convolvulus, and climbing nasturtiums. There were patches of stinging nettles and thistles, a forgotten bed of lavender and sedums growing between torch lilies that we called Red Hot Pokers. And most impressive of all, by the railway fence, were three towering buddleias, large enough for a small boy to hide in. Two of them bloomed purple madder; the other was pure white.

The wilderness was Marjorie’s delight, her decadent secret in contrast to the clipped roses and crazy paving out front. It was also, though I didn’t know at the time, a perfect butterfly garden. And it was there, sitting beneath the buddleias with the Observers’ Book of Butterflies that I learned to recognise my first species; red admirals, tortoiseshells, brimstones, large whites and peacocks.

After I left primary school we stopped going to Marjorie’s. She retired the year I left for the Grammar, by which time my mother had learned to drive and found new freedoms. I was making my own escapes too and might well have forgotten about my mother’s elderly friend.

Except occasionally, especially when the sun was out, I would cycle by her house and pretend to be passing. We’d stroll down the garden, inspect the nasturtiums and observe what was feeding on the Buddleias. I kept records in a little pocket book that I still have. And I remember her excitement at the Painted Lady. ‘They come from Morocco,’ she said. ‘My husband used to say they were pilgrims. How lucky one should come on your birthday.’