The Butterfly Isles by Patrick Barkham

Author:Patrick Barkham [Barkham, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847082404
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2010-10-06T22:00:00+00:00

I had persuaded Oates to help me find the Heath Fritillary – another butterfly I knew very little about – and I got the impression he was only too happy to avoid the office for another day. This time, the weather was not on our side. The day was dark and cool and wet, as if nature had grown tired of all this hot weather and flicked a switch. He picked me up from Taunton railway station and we drove through lanes thickly lined with beech hedges which met in the middle, creating perfect dark green tunnels. When we stopped at an old-fashioned service station to get lunch supplies, the air inside the shop was a fug of pasties.

On the flat rainswept top of Exmoor close to Dunkery Beacon, we pulled over by a lonely hawthorn, still in bloom, above Bin Combe, historically the best Heath Fritillary site on Exmoor. This small valley sprang up from nothing, steep and short. Walking down it, the combe quickly closed in and swallowed us up. Once inside it, all we could hear was water from its tiny stream, which quickly gathered momentum and slipped down as a diminutive waterfall at times. Through a gap in the hills, we could see the Bristol Channel topped by the faded grey line of Wales beyond. ‘If we’d had the weather the Met Office had forecast we would have seen a hundred Heath Fritillaries by now,’ said Oates. Instead, we saw one bright-yellow frog, several brilliant salmon-coloured grasshoppers with arresting green Mohicans and dozens of treacly black slugs, tasting the cool drizzle. I ate a rainwater-flavoured bilberry. It was June and my hands were almost numb.

Below us, a large red deer kicked up in alarm and bounced beyond a ridge on the horizon, over what looked like an enormous precipice. I approached the ridge more sedately, half expecting to see the deer on the ground clutching its ankle and gazing up at me beseechingly. Of course it had landed perfectly, found its feet and was long gone.

We drove a short distance to Halse Combe, another, broader valley nearby. Bracken was forcing its way up the slope. The offspring of trees from the ancient woodland below were marching up the hill too. Left alone, ungrazed, this landscape would become a thick forest (fatal for a Heath Fritillary, which needs coppiced woodland) in a couple of decades. The National Trust were managing this area, and beating back the bracken so that the Fritillary’s food plant, common cow wheat, could prosper. In places, however, the cleared bracken had become a carpet of brambles. ‘So often when you control bracken you get brambles,’ said Oates. ‘Nature conservation is like that. You swap one set of problems for another. Quite often you don’t know which ones you are going to get instead.’

The miraculous discovery of Heath Fritillaries on Exmoor was followed by disaster, for which well-meaning conservation strategies were largely to blame. During the 1990s a new conservation-minded farming plan was introduced on Exmoor.

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