Kaleidoscope fritillaries

Marsh Fritillary - male

Finglandrigg Wood sounds like a setting from Lord of the Rings or one of the Icelandic sagas, but the reality is even more magical. It is among four sites chosen in Cumbria to re-introduce the marsh fritillary butterfly after it reached the brink of extinction in the county around the millenium. I made a round trip of 100 miles to reach it from our Lakeland cottage.

“Kaleidoscope” is one of several collective nouns for butterflies but it suits the marsh fritillary perfectly. Its latin name, Euphydryas aurinia, roughly translates as “golden floating checkerspot”.

The site, managed by Natural England, has a magic of its own. In the lay-by where I parked, I bumped into another butterfly enthusiast from Norfolk (again!), who explained in detail the mile-long trail I needed to follow to find the butterflies and assured me they were flying in dozens and much easier to photograph than the elusive mountain ringlets. With my hopeless sense of direction, I might easily have missed them altogether without his instructions, despite the helpful butterfly waymarks.

With rising anticipation, like a child on Christmas Eve, I walked first through dappled woodland, across a stream humming with damsels and dragons, through a gate into boggy heathland dotted with grazing cattle. There was a sign warning of adders and I thought to myself, “Can it get any better?” but sadly it was already too warm for basking reptiles. Then I came to a buttercup meadow, a splash of gleaming yellow in the sun, possibly the most splendid buttercup meadow I’ve ever seen.

Beyond that another field, damp grassland and suddenly the kaleidoscope started spinning. The word “fritillary” comes from the latin “fritillus” – dice box. Romans kept their dice in boxes with an inlaid chequered pattern, just like the wings of the butterflies named after them.

The Marsh fritillaries flitted from one clump of damp grass to another, undefeated by a strong gusting breeze in their mission to find a mate. The foodplant of their larvae is devil’s bit scabious, not yet in flower when I visited in late May.  In summer the black caterpillars live gregariously on webs spun across it. When I stopped in nearby Kirkhampton to buy some lunch, the shopkeeper told me that local children had been planting devil’s bit scabious for the butterflies – “to help them come back”.

After a few photographs, I sat down in the damp grass to marvel at the marsh fritillaries’ checkerboard orange, almost red and creamy yellow wings, separated by a fat furry body. A mating pair landed on a tussock beside me – the male larger with broadly open wings, the female fluttering her wings closed from time to time. The male walked them, oblivious, onto my hand.

The story of their reintroduction to Cumbria is worth retelling, though you can find it in more detail on the website of Butterfly Conservation’s Cumbria Branch. At one time there were some 200 colonies of marsh fritillary in Cumbria but by the year 2000 they had dwindled to three and four years later were facing extinction in the county. The situation continued to worsen despite attempts to manage their habitats carefully to suit their needs. Conservationists found just one egg batch on the last site in 2004.

The Cumbria Marsh Fritillary Action Group brought together decision makers from Butterfly Conservation, Natural England and Defra, and thanks to a very supportive individual at Natural England gained a licence within a single day to take the last 150 larvae into captivity. Several reasons for the drastic decline were considered: loss of habitat as marginal land was brought into farming production, too much shading from trees on field edges, parasitic wasps which attack the caterpillars in waxing and waning cycles, and genetic weakness in the isolated and tiny colony.

One of the all-important grazers

Three batches of larvae were raised in captivity, one pure Cumbrian, one from colonies in Argyll and one a mixture of the two. The results suggested that genetic weakness was the problem as none of the pure Cumbrian stock successfully emerged as adults. By 2007 45,000 caterpillars of mixed Scottish and Cumbrian heritage had been reared and four sites were prepared for their release. Butterfly conservationists learnt a great deal from the process.

Finglandrigg, 13 km west of Carlisle on the Solway plain, is the only site open to the public, and what a site it is – not just for the fritillaries. It also counts red squirrels, brown hares, badgers, otters, roe deer, many species of dragon and damselflies and warblers among its residents.

Needless to say, the marsh fritillary is one of the UK’s fastest declining butterflies, though it is also found in Argyll, the west coast of Ireland and Wales and the English Westcountry. But the success of the Cumbrian reintroduction shows just how much a handful of dedicated naturalists can achieve. I owe them a debt of thanks: they made my heart soar.

 

Mountain ringlet

Mountain ringlet

<sup>Why do we love butterflies and dragonflies above all other insects? I think it has something to do with the way they embody the fleeting nature of extreme beauty.

A few weeks ago I visited the Lake District, in what must have been it’s annual week of warmth and sunshine. To me this was an invitation to seek out two rare species of butterfly which don’t exist on my home patch in the South East. Partly inspired by Patrick Barkham’s The Butterfly Isles, I decided to set out on a lepidoterous quest (lepidoptera, "scaly-winged insects", hardly does justice to these creatures.)

Mountain ringlet, the first species in my sights, seemed easy enough. The Cumbrian branch of Butterfly Conservation identifies a super-colony on Irton Pike, just up the road from where we were staying. We were a few days early for its annual emergence, but the weather had been warm and sunny for a few days. Sure enough, as we reached the top of the hill we started to see little dark brown butterflies dancing across the Fell and a few settled just long enough for us to see the red spots on their wings.</sup>



My partner chasing butterflies on Irton Pike

<sup>We met another butterfly enthusiast from Norfolk, also on their trail, who pointed us to the best areas to see them among the mat grass, the foodplant of their caterpillars. Soon we were seeing dozens, but they were far too flighty and fast to photograph clearly. My partner and I must have looked pretty mad chasing them up and down the fell, stumbling over tussocks and into boggy pockets.

Small heaths and green hairstreaks – something of a rarity in Surrey – were everywhere, but we had little time to stop and photograph them.</sup>



Mountain ringlet on my fingers

^{A couple of days later, I returned on a cooler overcast morning, on the hunt for torpid mountain ringlets hiding in the long grass. And my patience was rewarded. Having far less energy to fly, they posed for photographs from all angles and a couple even crawled onto my hand, as I sat in the grass, admiring them.}

^{“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quiety, may alight upon you.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, 19th century American writer.}

^{Since returning to Surrey, I’ve learnt just how lucky we were to enjoy this bountiful sighting. Many butterfly enthusiasts with decades of experience have never seen a mountain ringlet. By visiting a super-colony on a warm, sunny day we had obviously boosted our chances significantly.}

Mountain ringlet in mat grass

^{As the UK’s only alpine butterfly, the mountain ringlet lives at high altitudes on exposed sites, and emerges in small batches during its flight season – no doubt an evolutionary adaptation to increase the chances of at least one batch catching some fine weather. Individuals live for just a few days; it must be at least 15 degrees Celsius for them to fly and no hotter than 23.  The species is only found in the highlands of Scotland and a few pockets in the Lake District. As our climate warms, it is pushed further and further up the hillside, until eventually (scientists fear), it will run out of mountain to climb.}



The view from Irton Pike towards Wast Water

^{Butterfly Conservation predicts that the mountain ringlet will be extinct in Britain by the 2050s (largely due to global warming). In the words of Peter Marren, author of Bugs Britannica, “this modest brown butterfly has at last achieved a kind of melancholy fame as a victim of climate change and an icon of the fragility of life in a rapidly changing world.”}

^{Read about the second species, the marsh fritillary, in my next blog.}

^{With thanks to the Cumbrian branch of Butterfly Conservation for their help in finding these beauties during my visit and for looking after them and their habitats.}