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Brighton College
 
 
Thursday, 2nd September 2010

 
Nature Trails
A bashful beauty

Is a reader in Cocking the only one? I would love to know. I certainly have not, but you may have been a lucky winner. Trouble is, you would not necessarily know.

I refer, as any entomologist will already have twigged, to that most fine, glamorous and elusive butterfly of any that can be seen in Britain, the Camberwell beauty. A very few visit us most years in late summer from their home in Scandinavia, but I myself have never seen one, and few people have.

As with rare birds, you have to be on your marks the whole of August and September and be able to drop everything when one is reported. Usually the insect appears on a clover field on the east or south east coast.

It is enormous, as far as British butterflies go, only a shade smaller than a purple emperor, and larger than a peacock or red admiral, so it would surely catch your eye in size alone.

What attracted Dr Paul Callaway’s attention, as the recent Sussex immigrant crossed his view at the top of Kingley Vale, near the Bronze Age tumuli, was first the Camberwell beauty’s size, “a large dark peacock”, but then “the very noticeable creamy yellow broad border to both fore and hind wings”.

It flew strongly eastwards, and disappeared over the tree tops towards Lavant.

“So astonished that I checked the field guide which I was carrying in case there were any confusion species,” reported Dr Callaway. But of course there is none.

Although this is a member of Nymphalidae, with Europe’s top aristocrats like the two-tailed pasha, purple emperor, white admiral, Hungarian glider, the cardinal, painted lady, and Spanish fritillary (to name but one of that noble family) nothing is quite like Nymphalis antiopa.

The nearest is the purple emperor, but that finishes its life much earlier, at the beginning of August.

First named in August 1748 in Cool Arbour Lane, Camberwell, the insect achieved wider fame in about 1770 when an invasion took place in such prodigious numbers that entomologists of the day gave it the name ‘grand surprise’.

Again it was common in 1789, 1846, 1872 and 1880. But it was not again until just 1945-8 that it again gave everybody a grand surprise, with 52 being recorded in 1947 alone.

It seems to me that these four years just after the last world war were prolific simply because at the close of hostilities, Scandinavian timber was again being imported into Yarmouth and Harwich and London in great quantity, and it is well known that the Camberwell beauty hitches a lift on such boats from the forests surrounding the Baltic.

Dressed in purple, the butterfly is known in America as the mourning cloak. But a prettier English name of long ago was willow beauty or white petticoat.

The caterpillar feeds on willow, sallow, birch or elm. Unlike its close relatives it does not like nettle, but the mass of caterpillars do make the same sort of silken tent under which they may freely roam and be protected from the elements and the unwanted attention of predators like cuckoos and hornets.

It is the quarter inch-wide cream border that really impresses one, apparently. It runs around the whole of the outer wings. There is a line of seven or eight sky-blue dots inside of the cream, but on some specimens these may even have been swamped by the cream.

Now, back in 1873, Camberwell beauties were found in the new year in Britain, and they had milk-white wing borders, and there was great excitement then because everybody thought that they had bred here and just emerged as a new subspecies which could be identified by the whiter wing borders. Not so. They were merely old immigrants gone to ground for the winter and emerged a little the worse for wear.

The butterfly does not breed in this country, so any seen here is doomed to an unrequited existence and could happily be collected and put behind glass without any damage to the species. The chances of catching one however are very unlikely.

However, they can be caught at night on sugar strips, for a favourite tipple is the fermenting sap emerging from damaged trees, usually oaks.

There was such a tree, a Turkey oak, at Hylters Down in Chilgrove, where in 1977 hundreds of red admirals became paralytic and quite incapable after drinking the drugged juice when they should have been migrating south, many dying an early death on the roadside either hit by cars or eaten by spotted flycatchers and willow warblers.

My grandfather Leopold Williamson, whom I never met since my father was not really on speaking terms with him and kept him hidden away in Bournemouth, was in his day an avid entomologist and collector of butterflies, sweeping the Kentish fields of Sydenham and Ladywell at the end of the Victorian era.

In one marvellous scene in my father’s book ‘The Dark Lantern’ which was the first of his saga of family life throughout the last century (very much in the Forsyte Saga tradition as written by his distant relative John Galsworthy) my grandfather is described catching a Camberwell beauty at night, though the butterfly escapes as he is set upon by two ruffians who mistakenly imagine that he is spying on them and their new-found female companions.

A fight ensues, grandfather sees the villains off, is importuned by the women whose advances he declines much to their contempt.

Exciting stuff – but that’s the Camberwell beauty for you, every time. View older pages
 
 

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