Butterfly Hotspots

Butterfly Hotspots. Number Three: Rushmere Common.

by Richard Stewart

This is an important ‘ green lung ’ on the edge of Ipswich and although it includes a golf course there is easy public access. The main part is within tetrad TM 2044, but at its western edge it includes TM 1944. Access on two sides, north and east, is restricted by lack of car parking, and my own preference is to enter from Heath Road, near the hospital. Here a left turn takes you along a sheltered lane passing right through to the golf club building. Here on a sunny spring day, with the strong coconut smell of flowering gorse, you can quickly record many species, including the three whites, Peacock, Comma and Small Tortoiseshell, Orangetip, Speckled Wood in the shady copse, Small Copper and Green Hairstreak. The last two mentioned have strong colonies across the Common. Some central parts have extensive red carpets of sorrel and the Green Hairstreak uses the plentiful gorse and occasional broom for egg laying. On May 12th 1998 a combination of sunshine, peak of emergence and enough recorders, the Common produced very high totals of 369 Small Copper and 345 Green Hairstreak, the latter also seen nectaring on flowers or honeydew of oak, sycamore, hawthorn, elm and rowan. 32 Green Hairstreak were noted on the flowers of just one sunlit rowan. Further across the Common the large pond is good for dragonflies and the hedge of flowering hawthorn also attracts nectaring Small Copper and Green Hairstreak. The central part of the Common also has abundant Small Heath but the Grayling, now a national priority species, is harder to find. I haven ’t seen one at Rushmere for the past two years, but Steve Goddard had a ‘B’ total on July 27th 2008. Moving over towards the tall water tower you enter a lane with oaks and elms. This hedge has management specifically designed to help White-letter Hairstreak. With the ‘ secret garden ’ now disappearing beneath new housing the main problem in hairstreak spotting is finding somewhere more convenient than the acute angle along the lane. The view from the children ’ s play area is easier and offers more extensive views, but personally never feel very comfortable there holding binoculars. Along the lane Holly Blues can usually be seen and at its end the lane joins Bixley Drive, probably the most used access to the Common.

Purple Hairstreaks can be seen around many oaks in July and it is also worth

Green Hairstreak by Douglas Hammersley

exploring a hedge parallel to the one by the water tower, about three hundred yards to the west. Here in 2008 I watched a White-letter Hairstreak nectaring on bramble flowers, very close and at eye level.

Following the water tower lane north and then turning right near a hollow eventually leads to the remnant of what was once an extensive field, full of ragwort and also full of hundreds of summer butterflies. This remnant has cowslips in spring and a rich abundance of summer flowers, many of them good nectar sources. Below a bank of tall buddleias there is wild carrot, ox-eyed daisy, scabious, tufted vetch, yellow hawkweed, clovers, flowering thistle, many clumps of kidney vetch and the pale sky blue of meadow cranesbill. Tall hedges with elm and oak partly surround the sunlit field, and look out for the nightjar sculpture on the ground, as this is at the far end of the extensive Sandlings series of footpaths. Here some butterflies can include the three skippers, Meadow Brown, Ringlet and Gatekeeper, Common Blue, Brown Argus, Red Admiral and Painted Lady.

The Wall now appears to have gone from the Common and I have never seen a Brimstone there, probably because no buckthorn is present. Of the resident breeding Suffolk species only three have not been genuinely recorded here in recent years. These are the Dingy Skipper, White Admiral and Silver-studded Blue. The last mentioned has appeared in small numbers around the football pitch area, but is obviously an unlicenced introduction. With this abundance of species it was still a good achievement for Steve Goddard to record twenty species on the Common in just two hours. The date was July 28th 1999, as reported in the Suffolk Argus, Volume 19, pages 16-17. He had low views of both White-letter and purple hairstreak, nectaring respectively on bramble and ragwort.

No doubt several readers will have read of changes in the management of the Common, proposed by the

Commoners ’ committee. These have currently been postponed but the Suffolk Wildlife Trust is being consulted and hopefully the Greenways Project will be involved. On a very wet day in December 2008 Neil Sherman from Purdis Golf Club, Rob Parker and myself met Don Ayre, chairman of the Commoners ’ trustees, first at his home for a briefing and perusal of aerial maps, then on a soggy walk around the main central area under review. Rob Parker subsequently produced a detailed response from our Branch of Butterfly Conservation, stressing the importance of leaving ample amounts of oak, gorse and bramble in place, adding that ‘the plan to restore the present solid gorse areas to heather and acid grassland is a worth while objective, and we would support a compromise which retains selected elements of scrub around the fairways, but opens up the maximum area to a mosaic of heather with a varied age structure ’ . The proposed plans relate mainly to the central part of the Common with many of the areas mentioned in this article not being affected.