Up, on the Downs

Emerging from the shady wood I felt the change in atmosphere almost instantly. The path snaked down through long grass and a hotter, more humid atmosphere, one where you can feel the warmer air radiating up from the grass and the sun through the layer of high cloud. The cool of the wood allowed sweat free walking: this wouldn’t. A Dark-green Fritillary flew strongly past the path and over the fescue covered hillside. Early August is when their season starts winding down, after their plant and sun powered prime; its tiger-striped wings faded from sun, wind and ceaseless flying over its own patch of the hill. It clipped the edge of the wood and headed downslope, over a pair – male and female – of Brimstone butterflies, as bright as the first leaves of spring. These are signs of gradual change. It might still be summer but the single-brooded butterflies (univoltine), like the Marbled White lying in the long grass look faded, worn, exhausted. The double-brooded (bivoltine) butterflies are pristine, or, like the pair of Common Blues by the edge of the field, busying themselves with the creation a new generation to come. It’s spring for some, eliding with the autumn of others.

***

Downland is a new habitat for me. Chalk might be the material of southern England, these gently rolling grasslands what we as a nation think of when we think of the rural south. But it’s never been my England. A far removal from the fenland peat, the breckland sand and the gloopy winter mud of my village. The soils that I grew up with that remains familiar to the footfall.

The path underfoot is the white chalk of The Ridgeway. Not quite the ancient track but the modern end of the national trail that connects up to the equally ancient Icknield Way. It carves a muddy white line along this escarpment east of Tring and feels almost like the real thing. The footsteps feel fleeting, the trees look young and the arable farmland where the hillside slopes into the vale can’t be too old either, not compared with the bare bone appearance of the chalk through soil. The Red Kite skimming in slow motion the top of the wood is young too, from reintroduced stock. I doubt they’ve been here for more than ten years. A Roesel’s Bush-cricket stridulated from the weeds in the verge of the long fast road running through the vale. Stridulation – the rubbing of wing against leg – creates the evocative buzz of grasshoppers. It’s a sound I remember well from my childhood, but not so much over my teenage years. Not that I would’ve known it at the time but I wouldn’t have remembered Roesel’s Bush-cricket, a species that has undergone significant range expansion recently. I feel transitory. Not the youngest but the least rooted thing here. My search for a species of butterfly I hadn’t yet seen would keep me here only a few hours.

***

Past another woodland break and the land slips away to be replaced by the spectacle of distance – I can see Oxfordshire from here! – and weather. Across to the distant chalk escarpment on the horizon lies Aylesbury and villages stretch off north and south. The pale clouds of earlier had fallen towards earth, darker and heavier. Grey sheets of rain hung over Aylesbury, apparently immobile, but with the wind blowing into our faces it was impossible not to take a guess at the time it would hit us.

Directly ahead the downland kinked eastward; the kink hiding the path and the rest of the downs. Up slope was long grass thick with flowers gone to seed whose names I never properly learnt, have never been properly introduced to. Chalkhill Blue is the butterfly we had come to see. It is so inextricably tied to these chalk downs that it bears them as its name. As a caterpillar it only feeds on the Horseshoe Vetch that grows on slopes like this.

We didn’t have too long to wait.

Dad spotted it first, perched on a deep pink knapweed by the path. Embarrassingly I’d walked past it scanning the further ground. It had its wings shut tight to enable easy identification: much greyer underwings with large black spots and a lack of orange in comparison to the Common Blues downslope. It flew from the knapweed and onto the grass, opening its wings as the approaching rain chilled the air. A silvery blue, like a sunny winter’s sky yet an exotic touch on this darkening piece of England.

It’s not a species famed for its powers of flight and true to form it never lifts more than several inches from the ground. Instead it tolerates my close approach with the camera.

There was one last surprise as a pink and green Meadow Grasshopper leaps on to a grass head by me. It scurried round to put the bulk of the grass head between me and itself, and then carries on moving around as I try to angle myself in a position to photograph it. Eventually it stays still long enough for a photograph of its pink back to be obtained, before dropping down into the grass to better observe the shuffling, grunting creature peering down a noisy black object at it.

A few shots later I turn around. The sky is solid pewter. Heavy rain begins to drum into the hillside, washing the chalk slippy. We ran back to the trees.

'His Majesty'

‘Steve, we have this mad plan…’

Uh-huh.

‘Tomorrow – on the hottest day of the year – do you want to film Purple Emperors with us?’

It didn’t take long to think about and I didn’t stop to enquire where the madness lay in the plan. We’d all seen Matthew Oates’s tweets from Fermyn woods.

***

By 9am it was so hot that to stand still in shade felt deeply unpleasant. By 10am we were crawling up the A1. Heat haze over parched brown fields, seen from the backseat in a traffic jam. This was the Hertfordshire of my childhood and some things never seem to change. Purple Emperors are changing though. When I lived in Hertfordshire I wasn’t that interested in the specifics of nature, though a nascent interest in birds was growing. If I’d been into butterflies I would have struggled to see a Purple Emperor: as with too much of our native wildlife its numbers dwindled throughout the twentieth century and colonies outwith its southern English heartland disappeared. Its mystique was formed in its absence. Regal characteristics were projected on to it, as if it was an actual emperor of English woods. It earned the nickname ‘His majesty’, was to be tempted down with offerings and talked about in hushed, reverent tones. Its elusiveness was a thing of legend; as was its peak time, the hour before lunch, when the chances of it deigning to descend to the ground in search of minerals, were slightly higher.

We arrived at Fermyn at peak time; peak temperature edging over thirty degrees. I knelt down to get my work camera from its bag and I caught a glimpse (and felt) a butterfly skimming over my head. ‘Purple Emperor’, Fiona said. I span around and saw a large purple butterfly disappearing over the road and into the wood. Purple Emperors are changing. It’s hard to imagine a collective noun for them. A parade? A stately procession? An enthronement? A commonwealth? But in the thick of Fermyn woods there are currently, literally, hundreds of them.

We were a short distance down the path, hardly into the wood when we found our second and third of the day. His Majesty has a foible, an earthy one for a creature with its rarefied reputation. His Majesty licks dog crap for minerals and the more fragrant the better. It allows close approach while it does this: you can wave a macro lens less than a foot away from it, and it doesn’t bat an antenna, flick a wingtip and disappear in a purple blur. I prostrated myself and fiddled with an unfamiliar camera, trying to ignore the stones in my knees, the dust in my face and the pungent stench of the excrement it was busily licking. Their proboscis is an unexpected lemon yellow and restlessly flicks over the surface of the scat. The underwings are delicate, clean white and maroon stripes on a grey base, with a thick red and black eye, complete with a pale spot like light reflecting from a pupil. However, we had copious footage of a Purple Emperor’s gorgeous underwings: we were really waiting for them to open those extraordinary purple upperwings, but I took the opportunity for practice. Using a Nikon for seven years and then turning to Canon is a little like trying to write left-handed after a lifetime of using your right-hand. The content is still there, but everything is in the wrong place. It no longer comes naturally and the end results are a little messy for the amount of effort put in. Not quite sharp enough. Not quite well exposed enough. Not quite stable enough.

We’d been here twenty minutes and I’d seen more Purple Emperors than in my entire life before. I think this was part of the madness of the mad plan. The other part was the bag carrying: hacking off down tracks through the woods in pursuit of my bosses, carrying heavy spare lenses and large camera bags. In this heat I was feeling frazzled already, sweating like my pores had sprung a leak to stop my skin catching fire. I grabbed shade where I could, a mouthful of warm water, look up as another Emperor flies overhead, and hope I don’t get sunstroke. Of all the days to not own a hat, this might well have been one of the worst.

***

There are roughly two reasons why a butterfly lands like it does. It lands with open wings when its cold, to bask and warm up from sunlight. It lands with wings closed when it’s too hot, to minimise the area hit by the sun’s rays. This is reductive, naturally, but it holds true on a day like this day. All Emperors held their wings fast shut whenever they’d descend to the ground, no matter if they were on excrement, on the track; in the middle of the shady woods or by the hedgerow that links the two parts of the wood together. But with the frequency we were finding them, we were never short of moments for the tense wait, with cameras trained upon the insect, waiting for it to open up its wings.

It would - of course - not be this simple.

The Purple Emperor is not really, properly, purple. It is a dark brown, with a purple-blue sheen from where the light refracts at certain angles from its skin of minute scales*. It can be sat wings open looking ordinarily dark brown, like an oversized White Admiral, when a slight change in angle or light causes it to flare with colour. Some can be an intense blue, most a shade of Cadbury’s purple. We also don’t mention that the emperor bears a passing resemblance to a chocolate wrapper elegantly blown by the breeze.

With the sun beating down with an unEnglish intensity at this point, no butterfly would seriously consider opening its wings. That didn’t stop us waiting, cameras in hand around everyone we could come across. Or other people for that matter. Whilst five people were crouched around one on the track another one flew past at eye level, eventually landing on my camera bag, where, amazingly, it started to mineral from where it had rubbed against my sweaty body. That was unexpected. That got attention. At that moment through the camera’s viewfinder a spider ran across the bag and clipped the butterfly: a flick of the wing and the spider was sent flying: the butterfly held its wings open for less than one glorious purple second.

With the footage slowed down we could work out exactly what happened. This was not a collision, but instead the spider had reared up and clambered onto the underside of the butterfly’s open wing. The instinctive reaction slowed down shows the butterfly snapping shut its wings and flicking them open, with an action similar to taking off.

That wasn’t the only open-winged one we found. In the true fashion of clichéd endings, we’d spread out as we walked back to the car. Fiona first, then me, then Max. Max came back bearing a big grin and a camera with footage of slow motion Purple Emperor upperwings.

***

It was an extraordinary day. One I’ve never experienced before and one I don’t really expect to see again. Butterflies can have these incredible local explosions in population due to an extraordinary aligning of many variables. The hatch this year must’ve built on an extraordinary last year for the species. It’s so extraordinary it almost feels churlish to think that it might have been responsible for putting a dent in the mystique of this species. This hardest, most elusive, most rarefied of species that happens to flutter to the woodland floor in search of dog poo, no longer seems so difficult, so elusive, or quite so mysterious.

*I have no idea why it should be so for this and no other species of British butterfly. Anyone?

Something Changed

I can’t remember why I’d decided it would be a good idea, but four days after turning up in London, my birding instincts kicked in. A screech from the sky: I instinctively looked up and through the deep blue sky sailed a parakeet.

Four days. That was as long as I could not look up, as long as I could go without birds. Before I had disregarded the Ring-necked Parakeets of suburban London as much as I had the city itself: a ghastly, unnatural place, with very few redeeming features. I still feel the same way towards the city. It’s a hot and horrible place of seething streets and airless spaces and good jobs that pay well. For a country boy these things are particularly hard to adjust to.

But something changed. It wasn’t that exact parakeet, it merely teed up the one that did. Two stultifying days later, the atmosphere was dense and the scent of traffic fumes inescapable. That was when I found it. After a sweaty day of flat viewing across the city, it was perched in a tree outside the house I’m currently, gratefully, staying at. Sitting flush to the branch, the long tail made more sense than it does wobbling through the sky. But it was the turquoise sheen – a colour I didn’t expect and couldn’t place on prior parakeets – that took me by surprise. It was the colour of the sky and sycamore leaves painted on to the exotic bird sat above me. It was that what made me see it for the jewel like bird it is. One that could not be more strangely appropriate for London.

So why had I been ignoring it? I think birders, myself included, can be too hung up on the purity, the naturalness, of nature. That is its own small unquestioned absurdity. Nature in the pristine, untouched sense doesn’t really exist. Dig deep enough and you’ll find an artificial element in its history, in any history. Birds for me are the most visible, joyous example of nature as it now is. Free, yet altered in most possible ways by human influence. Kept in a cage they are just animals. When the cage blows over, and they flex their wings and fly as they would anywhere is when they become nature for me. The lingering sense of dislike – that category C sniffiness – does nothing any favours at all, not the bird or the person. So you might as well celebrate it; at the very least acknowledge it.

Locustella Overdrive

6AM. I couldn’t tell if the shiver that ran through me was from tiredness or chill. For the first of June, this was a pitifully grey morning. Through the murk Lakenheath Fen sang with a cacophony of Reed Warblers, Cetti’s Warblers and Cuckoo echoing through the stands of poplar trees. Colour was sapped from the scene but summer’s deep vegetation wafted through a fragrant reminder of the season. We walked west on the track that runs through the waist-high marsh before abruptly stopping at west wood. The song of a Locustella warbler filled the air.

I hadn’t done my research, I’ll admit that now. If I had I’d probably have recognised that this wasn’t the song of a Savi’s Warbler, our target, and that the real twitch was about 200 metres further down the track. But I was lazy last night, the car park was pretty empty and here was a small knot of people looking through scopes. There was a whisper of Savi’s and confused directions were in the air. I get offered a look through a scope ‘at the bird’: a dark Locustella warbler singing from a reed-head on a nearby bank. And now excitement was in the air.

Locustella warblers all sing with a variation upon a drily unmelodic, insect-like churr. They don’t sing in repeated phrases but two quick notes, repeated with mechanical speed and frequency, ceaselessly for minutes on end. It’s an uncanny dirge because they rotate their heads whilst they sing, thus ‘throwing’ the song and making it incredibly difficult to pick out which patch of reeds or bush the sound is coming from. In the poor light we could make out a dark Locustella, throwing a song that sounded wrong. I find it hard to recognise species by song but I can tell what’s different and this didn’t sound typical to me. The other birders were very happy by this point. As the light improved it flitted from bush to bush before stepping up for staggering views as it sung. Facing us, we could make out the dirty brown but plain underparts, and the wide open bill from which the torrent of noise flooded out. And then it flitted around and showed a dirty brown streaked back.

The crowd’s assumption was still Savi’s. No dissenting words, so I whisper to dad: ‘I thought they were unstreaked…’ and curse my lack of preparation, assuming I’m in the wrong. Other birders drift off, happy with their Savi’s. I resort to googling from my phone to have my suspicions confirmed: we’d been had. At the same time a photographer ambles down the track and tells us that the Savi’s is actually about two hundred metres further on…

It was half seven by the time we’d found the actual twitch. It was fully light by now but our early morning advantage was gone – from here I expected the bird to get less active, the light worse and the crowd to swell, but after about fifteen minutes of Reed Warbler false alarms, a different Locustella song emerges from the reeds. Not long after, shimmying up a reed-head was the singing warbler. The position was the same as the Grasshopper Warbler before but in large. The bill catches attention first for appearing to be drawn on in marker pen: big, thick and black. It’s a style that seems to influence the whole cartoon Reed Warbler appearance of the Savi’s Warbler: bigger, thicker, darker. It sang for a minute before descending back into the depths of the reedbed. It’s quite hard to imagine how anyone could confuse a Grasshopper Warbler for it, but it’s been proven many times how hard it is to look with an open mind after you’ve been told you’ve found what you were looking for.

We didn’t see the Savi’s again: we could only cope with fifteen minutes more in the company of the crowd, in which time we manage to see three Bitterns have a hormonally-charged chase high over the reedbed. We traipse around the rest of the quiet reserve. A Cuckoo flew over: all lanky limbs and elastic wingbeats, and a handful of Swifts hurtled low over the cold reserve. By the time we’d walked around the riverbank back to the beginning of the reserve trails, we’d still not seen a Barn Owl.

‘As if we’ve not seen a Barn Owl’, I said.

‘Where’s the Barn Owl?’ replied dad, furrowed brow.

‘We’ve not seen one’, I say.

‘Oh.’

I raise my binoculars. Quartering the other side of the river was a Barn Owl as white as the sky.

Strange day.

Swifts

They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come

(Swifts, Ted Hughes)

I’d heard these words so frequently repeated and unattributed that it was a jolt to finally put them to the poem they came from. Ted Hughes, naturally. Words as fast and details as hard-edged as the birds themselves. A controlled scream is precisely what a Swift is in sound and vision and essence, and I’ll brook no argument about this.

The scream is how they announce themselves, every year, around the second week of May. Pushed ahead of storm clouds, or shooting through a clear blue sky; low over an English lake or roof-height between Scottish tenements; they are the most evocative of the late arriving migrants. The comma between spring and summer. More than being just a sign of season transition, the physical bird is itself extraordinary. Reduced to the most basic elements of ‘bird’, it one of nature’s starkest examples of form following function. A thrilling, Spartan flying machine; all shapely curved wings and not much else. Not much of a voice either, their scream is certainly not a songbird, but it is the sound of lazy summer evenings. The call to look up, to look around you. I remember watching them screaming around the old streets of Bury St Edmunds – houses old enough to still have the nooks needed for nesting – as I walked across town to school. All I needed was a Swift screaming with anthropomorphic joy of life and flight, and I forgot the crowded pavements, the fumes from congested streets, the itchy starchy school uniform…

It was eight o’clock when I left the library into a pale, cool evening. Walking over the loch, I paused to acknowledge the swans drifting in pale-pink water, the gathering crows and the flocks of Hirundines flickering in the dwindling light. I looked back over to the library and see, silently slipping through the sky, a Swift. Just briefly, before it disappeared over the trees, into a worryingly insect free evening. The silence unsettled me.

They’re back again. The globe is still working, just about, and summer is still to come.

Sheriffmuir Stooshie

Time ran away with me for a few weeks. Being suddenly free and working my way through a backlog of post-dissertation tasks meant walking and birding took a frustrating back-seat again. On a rare sunny interval, I managed to fit the Sheriffmuir circuit in: ten miles up the moors, around the historic battle site and down the burn. Just down from the battle site - a bleak, dark place - I found a more modern, natural battle. Two karate-kicking crows having a stooshie with a buzzard that lazily wheeled over the track, as if unbothered by the bullies. Two wide circles overhead and then the buzzard was off and the crows dropped back down to the field having seen the larger bird off their territory. My friend, walking with me, found it surprising. A reminder that if you haven't grown up birding, ordinary behaviour can seem rather illogical.

I'm quite proud of these photos, though I'll confess they were rather lucky. That doesn't mean that the government has any ethical right to allow companies to use them without my permission, or without acknowledgement or payment. But this is what the government has planned, and you can read about it here. Practically, when this becomes law, it will force me to question how I present my images online. Already I compress them to a size where theft and reuse distorts the quality beyond the point of acceptability. Although I have no desire to add a gigantic copyright logo over the subject, and don't see the point in not posting my photos, these are the only options I can currently think of. Until the government shoots itself in the foot (and not with a camera) and signs this legislation into law, please sign Will Nicholls's petition asking them to reconsider.

Sheriffmuir

It was just a five mile stroll with friends up the moors to the inn at the end of the road. It might be just three miles east of Dunblane but it feels more remote: Sheriffmuir Wood hides the slope down to the upper reaches of the Forth valley sprawl; the horizon on north and south sides is moorland and to the east, Blairdenon Hill is the bare-backed lump hiding the rest of the Ochils. Its mood is usually bleak but it was a hot and hazy evening, the finest day of the year so far and the first of the cider days. Skylarks hung in the sky, singing; a sky faded to pale blue from the haze of the heat, and Curlew song rippled languidly from the moors. We took the quiet road that winds its way past rusting, crumbling shielings and conifer plantations, the Larch still brown after the long hard winter. Colt’s-foot lined the burn that runs under the quaint bridge sitting in a scar that seems to me too grand to be the burn’s own work. Two Sand Martins flit downstream into the slowly setting sun. Yellow, like the Colt’s-foot.

The evenings here are long. They start early and end late and normally catch me by surprise. Today it wasn’t so much the evening as its sepia brown accomplice that caught me out. As we strolled up the final slope to our waiting pints, the grass turns to heather and across the road swept a Short-eared Owl. With some fat, unfortunate rodent in its bill, it flew low and fast down the line between the heather and the grass. It dropped to the ground and stared, cross-eyed, back along the moor, before vanishing behind a veil of grass. My pint completely forgotten about.

Nature is best unexpected.