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.

 

Butterfly corner

The silver-washed fritillary is one of our largest and most colourful butterflies and a strong flyer. My partner photographed this one on the edge of a woodland ride on a local common. We had stumbled on "butterfly corner": a crossroads in the woods with a small patch of grassy scrub at its centre, dancing with butterflies.


Common blue, male

This little patch was like a cloud of fluttering colours, constantly in motion. We spotted fritillaries, male and female common blues, a small copper and a handful of brown argos. Then we watched the entrancing courtship flight of silver-washed fritillaries, the female steaming straight ahead, chased by the male flying loops around her.


Why do we find butterflies so magical? Is it the colours, the delicate fluttering flight, or their ephemeral summer quality? Maybe all of these things. If only they could sing...

Speckled wood

Brown argos

conservation grazing

Not everybody wants to leap out of bed at 6.30 on a Saturday morning but it's the best time of day to be out in the meadow if you have cattle to check. There's hardly anyone about - just the odd roe deer browsing and a few sleepy butterflies waking up in the early morning sunshine.

This morning I startled a fox and watched it bound over tall tussocks of grass to the edge of the wood. I wasn't quite speedy enough to catch it on camera but it was a beautiful beast with deep brown fur and a black tip to its tail.

In our main paddock, 19 Fresian steers and one jersey cross (affectionately known as "cadbury) came bounding to meet me at the fence. Dairy breeds are not the normal choice for conservation grazing but they seem to do well on our site. They were given extra feed yesterday as the grass is so dry and were clearly hoping for another delivery this morning. Their loud chorus of mooing made a happy greeting. Empty-handed, I had to send them back to work to eat the scrub and keep the meadow, well, meadow-like.

After the ice age and before humans swarmed in large numbers across the British Isles, most of the land was covered with forest. Grassland and heath were created by clearances for agriculture and remained open landscapes thanks to constant human management - largely by grazing. When extensive sheep and cattle rearing disappeared from lowland Britain after the Second World War, these open spaces quickly scrubbed over and reverted to woodland. With them went the natural flora and fauna adapted over millennia to these habitats.

So grazing is back in conservation and it's big news. One wildlife trust even maintains its own grazing herd; other organisations borrow animals from farmers, offering free food in return for a living mower. The thing is: animals do a much better job than mechanical mowers from a conservation perspective. They graze the sward to a variety of different heights, creating mini-habitats for lots of different flowers and invertebrates.

Since grazing was reintroduced on our site some 15 years ago, the main paddock has been sprinkled with a carpet of violets every spring and attracted the spectacular silver-washed fritillary whose caterpillars feed on them. A rare plant, the wonderfully named corky-fruited water dropwort (above right), was once restricted to a single clump. Since the cows arrived, they seem to have spread it across a huge swathe by carrying the seeds on their feed. Yellowhammers with their distinctive song: "A little bit of bread and butter and a piece of cheese" have also recolonised the meadow.