A Beginner's Guide to Butterfly Watching

"It's a Small Skipper I Marvellous position ! This will be a terrific photograph 1 Oh ! Missed !" "Come on Smokey. He's missed again. Let's not wait any longer". So Smokey (the dog) and I would meander along the path, hoping Michael wouldn't take too long over his pursuit of the Small Hopper or whatever it was called. Frankly, we were bored stiff, waiting for a photographer whose subjects took flight at the final moment. But one day when Michael caught up with us he said, "Look ! That's a G~tekeeper". I followed his pointing finger and there in front ofme was sheer beauty, wide open-winged. Bright orange, deeply fringed with brown; a black oval on each upper wing, with two tiny white dots on each black patch.I just gazed.I had no idea li~le butterflies could be so beautiful. For the rest of that walk I looked for flickering wmgs to show where a butterfly had alighted. The Gatekeepers were a joy. Skippers defeated me. They lived up to their name and were gone before I could focus on them. Blues also tended to move too quickly, though I could catch a glimpse of their colour. But then a Red Admiral settled on a Bramble flower immediately ahead of us - and I joined Michael in his hobby of butterfly watching.

During the Spring following our retirement, I saw Small Tortoiseshells for the first time. Pic~es in books do not do justice to the bright mixture of orange background, mottled with black, yellow and a touch of white, fringed with tiny blue :1alf-moons inside barred grey and yellow (words don't do justice to the colour either!). That same Spring, we saw our first-ever Orange Tip - a white butterfly with orange tips to its upper wings. Unmistakeable. Why had I never noticed one before ? Then came the real excitement. In a patch of dead bracke~, new nettles and bluebells were two tiny c~pper-gold butterflies. They were too far away to look at them properly, but we had bmoculars.There they were-bright copper-coloured upper wings dotted and edged with black, and black lower wings fringed with copper. Flying jewels.

That Spring and Summer held excitement after excitement - Peacocks, Painted Ladies, Wall Browns, Small Heaths (which refuse to.open their wings except in flight), Speckled Woods in Kent, Meadow Browns, Ringlets, Commas, Graylings and Common Blues. We took a couple of little books with us to identify what we saw. There is a tremendous thrill in seeing a butterfly for the first time, tracking it down from its picture and finally identifying it. We began to learn a little about the different butterflies. We even began to recognise one or two by their flight - Meadow Browns slow and flapping, Comma and Red Admiral gliding, Skippers with their high speed. Then we discovered that in some species the male and female differ. Female Blues are bro_wn! Very confosing for a beginner. In some species males have dark scent glands; white females have more spots than males; and so on. We began to realise that different flowers attract different butterflies, and to learn about the flowers too.We

learnt that some butterflies were absent from Suffolk, for example Adonis and Chalkhill Blue and all the Fritillaries.

When autumn came we could hardly wait for the 1989 butterfly season to begin. April 1989 gave us the joy of butterfly watching in Portugal, including our first-ever Swallowtail in a near-gale on the cliffs at Cape Vincent. Then back to England to begin recording what we saw, and to start building up a serious photographic record.

When Michael was a boy, his father told him that the only place in England where the Swallowtail existed was in part of the Norfolk Broads. So we took a day trip to the Nature Reserve at Hickling Broad and eventually saw our first English Swallowtails. How can one describe the thrill? They are much bigger than I had imagined, flying strongly against the wind, spiralling upwards in what seems to be courtship flight, and incredibly beautiful when they settle to nectar or rest. Michael took some good photographs of Swallowtails which obligingly basked in the sunshine. Three years later, not one settled long enough to be taken!

A month later we saw our first Holly Blue. I didn't even know there was such a butterfly! We were delighted when we tracked it down in the book and discovered its name. We first found it by its pale blue underside, lightly dotted with black spots. Ours was a female, upper wings deep mauvy-blue with broad browny-black edges. The following year we saw male Holly Blues and learnt that their upper wings don't have dark edges. As the years have gone by the excitement of seeing our "first ever" species have continued. Butterfly watching is an enthralling occupation and one learns so much. The more we learn the more we realise how inuch lies ahead. We are greatly enjoying the superb book by Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington about British butterflies which is packed with infonnation. If you haven't begtm watching already, do start! If you have been watching for years, take a beginner with you!

A few do's and don'ts for butterfly learners:

Do go with someone else. It's much more fun.

Do take a book-a little handguide is useful.

Don't take the dog - it will msh up and disturb your best butterfly just as you begin to identify it.

Do take binoculars. It's amazing how useful they can be.

Don't mind if you fail sometimes. We've got all the time there is for future attempts.

Do enjoy your butterfly watching.

Useful books: The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland. Jeremy Thomas & Richard Lewington. The Mitchell Beazley pocket guide to butterflies. Paul Whalley. A handgwde to the Butterflies and Moths o/Brilain and Europe. John Wilkinson and Michael Tweedie.

Privatisation

is one of those buzz-words from the eighties that means all The future of That's some condemnation, so let's look at the our woodlands facts: value the of book the

sorts of things to different people - and this is not a political column, and I don't want to alienate any of our members, whether they think that in general it's been a good thing for the country, or not.

It's a complicated matter, and can be looked at in a number of ways: for some it is the bolstering of the Exchequer through the sale of underinvested and inefficientlymanaged state assets, with the implication that private ownership and deregulation makes for market efficiency; for others it's the knockdown expropriation of public property for the benefit of sectional interests ..

Maybe there's a bit of truth in both. This article merely wants to explore what may be the benefits and disadvantages of the proposed sellingoff of what used to be the Forestry Commission to private investors, and how this may affect the interests of British wildlife and the public at large.

So to kick off - no less than two former directors-general of the Forestry

Commission say that the sale of the country's publicly owned forests would , . . .. , produce little immediate cash and reduce State income with the likely lieed for greater public expenditure on forestry in the future. Forestry Commission's I. lm hectare estate is some £l.7bn. Actual receipts will probably total much less than half this amount. Some might wish to compare such a sum with the £55bn spent ammally on social security ( or over £ 1 bn per week). It is further suggested that increased state support to sustain the new private forestry interests will cost £40-50m per year by the millenniwn too. Hardly a case, it might seem, without some other rationale, for privatising the FC.

But does it do the job - and is it wellnm ? Well, the Forest Enterprise, as the timber production side is presently known, produces about 14 % of the nation's timber needs. Also the National Audit Office recently criticised the Forestry Authority (which governs the Enterprise) for early felling, which they said lost the Exchequer £ 11 m. So maybe we do need more forests and greater 'efficiency'.

More forests certainly - but it's curious how this word 'efficiency' keeps cropping up, (literally in the case of agriculture). What does it mean, and how is it measured and by whom ? As far as one can gather, it's measured by economists, statisticians and accountants, in tenns of a kind of 'ideal productivity', delimited in money terms. So in theory, the land, its managers and the capital invested in them can be

squeezed to the limit, I 00% output, all the time, rain or shine, hell or high water.

Strange, when it's put in such a way, most of us start to think that maybe the world doesn't work like that. Let me go further and suggest a hypothesis (we'll call it Phillips' Law if you like): 'When things are pushed to the limit there is less scope for flexibility, increased probability of breakdown and a reduction in quality' - of life in this case ( economists call it welfare). forestry production have a lot to answer for - but in recent years, enlightened (again literally) 'multi-purpose' forest management (ie which takes into consideration landscape, access and wildlife as well as timber production) has seen a remarkable improvement in the situation. Now, the state forests of Britain are a refuge to many threatened species of wildlife and a source of recreation for millions. In tenns of butterflies and moths, it is estimated that perhaps a third of the most valuable sites for lepidoptera in the country are sited in these woodlands.

Thus in terms of forestry, stands of fast-growth timber 'crowd out' light, and hence other plants and associated wildlife, while machinery breaks down, huge lorries charge down our roads and any human pleasure in walking the forest rides or even in the forester's job is lessened, disappears or even turns to displeasure. Further

Why not make all the FC lands into National Parks and beef up the conservation and leisure interests?

afield, fuel-producing nations ~----------' The risk of privatisation, for those of us who care about such things, is therefore that these priceless wildlife assets, the last re1m1,mts of a heritage that has been all but a1mihilated in the twentieth century, will fall prey _ to modern accounting. As maintaining a diversity of

become politically unstable and tropical forests are plundered wholesale.

You may think this goes too far, but if anything it is an w1derstatement. However, for the sake of discussion let's concentrate on the issues for wildlife conservationists.

Maybe past govenunents and the Forestry Commission that was didn't get everything right. From tax havens for the wealthy encouraging block planting of both lowlands and highlands, to the coniferisation of ancient woodland, the old ideas of trees, wide rides and coppice clearings is 'uneconomic', private foresters will be encouraged to neglect or destroy habitats in which butterflies, moths and all sorts of other plants and animals have survived until now.

So what's the answer ? Well, as long as this govenunent continues in power, privatisation is more likely. I said this article would not get political, so what other means are there to safeguard the wildlife of our state forests ?

Let's take it in stages: First, the privatisation of our state forests cannot