Butterfly week

Its butterfly week, apparently....  not that your likely to see many in this part of England.  Years of wet weather has given the native species a big hit lately, but the ultimate cause is changing land use patterns that have reduced the available habitat and eliminated many of the host plants our native butterflies use.  The problem, of course, is its a gradual process that has been going on for the last 30 years, so many people today don't really realize what they are missing.  Coming from North America, its painfully obvious how few insects remain in England, but even just picking up an old UK field guide or nature book published in the 50's or 60's and flipping through the pages reveals insect after insect that is either locally extinct or rarely seen.

Anyway, some photos of a species that is still common here: a larval Vapourer moth (Orgyia antiqua) munching on my roses.

Silent Night II

By coincidence I came across an advertisement for this new book out Silent Summer which goes into detail what I've been noticing in the past few years - how the various insect and other invertebrate species are dying out in this country.  Sixteen years ago I visited the UK as a budding young entomologist and returned home with several specimens of what were at the time unprotected species, but which are now on the endangered list, if not actually extinct in this country.  Sixteen years is not a long time... barely a generation... yet in this time 5 species of butterfly have gone extinct here, and the majority of the remaining species are endangered. 

I'll need to get myself a copy of that book... I don't think it will make happy reading.

Silent Night

I miss cicadas. 

I don't think most people in this country realize how noisy the countryside should be, or would think something is wrong when walking through a silent field at night.  There is only one species of cicada in England and its restricted to the New Forest in the south.  There are several species of crickets and grasshoppers as well, but I have only rarely seen them (again in the south) and never heard one calling.  To someone who grew up in the colonies, its horribly unnatural to hear so little of the night chorus and highlights the degree to which this country has extirpated its local fauna.  One of the saddest aspects is that thanks to Victorian and Edwardian collectors and enthusiasts, there is no country with a better record of the species of insects and other invertebrates that live here, and yet this record makes it painfully clear just how much the native species  have been extinguished from this island with so many species either locally extinct, pushed into patches of marginal territory, or in the case of the once common freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera) and several of the oak species, only ancient individuals remain with no young having been recruited for decades.  Changing climates (and a run of bad summers) is expected to put several of the rarer butterfly species here at risk of extinction from these islands, but as these species have become so restricted in their locations, I'm not sure anyone but a handful of experts will notice that they are gone.

...and that of course is the problem.  Its been a slow and gradual process of loss, such that the scale has not been apparent to the average resident.  Most Englanders my age think that what they run across (or more, what they don't run across) when out in the countryside is "normal".  Their parents may remember there being more butterflies or more of some flowers (perhaps they once saw a lady slipper orchid in the woods - now these flowers are so rare they need police protection) but its been such a gradual process that even they have largely accepted it.  Its only once you look back at the old records - descriptions of clouds of moths surrounding gas lamps, or boxes containing hundreds of faded moth specimens - that you appreciate the scale of the loss.

The picture, by the way, is a cicada molt skin photographed in a small Myrtle Beech forest in south Australia. I've still never had the luck to find one here in England.