LOVE WILDLIFE
Patrick Barkham is a natural
history writer for The Guardian and author of The Butterfl y Isles
Butterflies
With luck, you’ll see a lot of butterfl ies visiting gardens this summer. But the story of how some species get there is incredible
wifts, cuckoos, wildebeest and basking sharks – we admire these creatures for their epic seasonal migrations. But there is another, far bigger group of species who undertake even more audacious journeys: insects.
During the Second World War, military observers reported a golden ball drifting over the Channel. What they feared was a cloud of poison gas was actually a huge mass of migrating clouded yellow butterfl ies. In 1846, the Canterbury Journal reported a “cloud” of small whites so dense that it obscured the sun as it passed over a Channel steamer. These mass migrations are not ancient history. In 2009, 11 million
36 Spring 2019
painted lady butterfl ies arrived in Britain from southern Europe. These strong-fl ying migrants were spotted everywhere from the Highlands to central London, and produced millions more off spring. Two fi elds in Cornwall contained 500,000 painted lady caterpillars.
Each autumn, given favourable winds, moth traps fi ll with exciting continental arrivals such as the enormous convolvulus and death’s
The painted lady is our best-known migratory insect but there are many others, including moths, dragonfl ies, ladybirds, hoverfl ies and even aphids. Climate change will bring more to our shores. It seems far-fetched that insects can cross continents, but we now know they do. Satellite tags are still too large, but other technologies are shedding new light on the marvels of insect migration.
Clouded yellows migrate to the UK from North Africa and the Med
without borders S
MARGARET HOLLAND
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