Slugs, Butterflies, and Guns
Nature. It takes many forms, or ‘endless forms most beautiful’ as Darwin so succinctly puts it. As I write this, at somewhat after 11 on a school-night, it appears in the forms of two slugs. They deliberate, with the usual gastropod diligence, one over a wall, and one across the laminate floor of the living room. They move at a pace we should probably all aspire to. Detecting light from dark, two pairs of ‘eye-spots’ pivot at the end of antennae-like stalks with a slow graceful elegance, helping guide the slugs’ onward paths. And they are, perhaps; beautiful - in their own ways. There’s something about the simplicity of slug morphology. There is a single ‘foot’ on the underside which it uses for propulsion of the whole structure which is basically one sinuous muscle. A slug can squeeze itself, octopus-like, through an opening many times smaller than it’s own girth.
As unhurried as any creature with poor eyesight and such a limited method of locomotion probably should be, slugs exude an impression of confident leisureliness which seems somehow reassuring in this age of speed and endless change. And yet, despite this, I’d rather they weren’t keeping me company right now. Upstairs, my husband sleeps quietly. My daughter fidgets, fitful; casting off covers in the heat of the night. The cat snoozes - illegally - under a chair in our bedroom. But I haven’t the heart to throw her, or the slugs, out just yet. Tomorrow will do. Then I’ll also clean up the unfortunate frostings, the silvery, serpentine trails. In the garden, rain and chlorophyll-drenched, the slugs may do service as food for other animals. Hedgehogs eat them. Some birds eat the eggs slugs lay in the ground. Slugs themselves further assist the garden’s -eco-system by eating, and thus recycling, it’s waste organic materials. They are detrivores, whom, along with worms and woodlice and a host of others are some of nature’s most essential animals. Gardeners may disagree. A slug is what it is but means different things to different people. In the end, before bed, I decide to repatriate the slugs from whence they had earlier come. The garden will be cool and damp. The slugs should be happy, though the butterflies, as I’m guessing from their conspicuous absence during this interminably wet, cold summer; may not be.
Some days later – I forget to record a date – we enjoy a brief, heady, comparative heat-wave. I’m taking a walk along the lane where I live. The roadside vegetation, without closer inspection, appears to be an almost undifferentiated mass of grasses, nettles and cow parsley now going to seed. Better scrutiny reveals a more colourful and varied plant-community than at first meets the eye. I notice suddenly a tiny flame. It moves amongst the grasses. It flickers. Ah, it has wings, which it uses to impersonate a moth-like flight and then settle on a plant. But it is a butterfly. Orange, luminous, it appears in my peripheral vision like some winged messenger sent to deliver hope to a seemingly hopeless summer. It is, I realise, as I peer closely at it’s markings, a Small Skipper. As opposed to a Large – Skipper, that is. Or it could perhaps be an Essex, almost identical in appearance but for slight differences in the ‘scent brand’ markings and the undersides of the antennae. The Small Skipper’s are orange. The Essex Skipper’s are black. Whichever it is, this one rests with it’s forewings held crisply aloft over it’s hind-wings, like two stiffened book pages. The faint chequered pattern on the wings that identifies the Large Skipper is absent on the Small. Of the other British skipper-species, none am I very likely to see in this perfectly acceptable but non-specialist habitat. One – the Lulworth Skipper – is restricted to a particular area of South Dorset and the others – the Silver-spotted, and the wonderfully named Grizzled and Dingy Skippers – tend to be butterflies of chalk grasslands, heaths or woodlands where their larval food-plants (such as wild strawberry) are more likely to occur. Walking on, I begin to see echoes of that first flame in the paler flushes of orange on the upper wings of meadow brown butterflies, about a dozen or so of whom I spot fluttering up from the vegetation at various points along the lane. Hardly biblical numbers but I nonetheless return home experiencing an almost religious happiness. The sight of butterflies, at last in more than single, chance occurrences seems, as the poet Ted Hughes once said of the swifts return to Britain each summer, ‘Proof…that the globe’s still working’.
It landed on my leg. Casually, just like that. I had cast a squinting gaze upwards towards the sky as the morning’s first sure rays fell over the edge of Oakley Forest, and then I stared down again in disbelief. The Purple Emporer must have mistaken blood-warmth and mushroom-coloured cord for sun-warmed earth or tree. Really, I had no idea. This was my – and my husband and my daughter’s – first encounter with this particular butterfly. It rested awhile, brilliantly. That soft, velvety royal blue of the upper wings – which perhaps appears purple in the right light – was so crisp and fresh and bright it seemed almost unreal. I’d had a chance, before it landed, to notice briefly the underwings, which were marked with grey, ginger, amber, black and white in a rather splashy random patterning of hot spice shades and monochrome, somehow African savannah, somehow house-sparrow, but either way striking. It was a big butterfly with an unmistakeable presence. After seconds, which felt like minutes, ‘His Majesty’ was off as suddenly as he’d landed, abandoning my leg to disappear into a sunlit clearing. I took a breath, relaxed my temporary statue pose, and asked the others if that had really just happened? Usually elusive, Purple Emporers are butterflies of the canopy. Their caterpillars feed on the leaves of goat and grey willow (and sometimes crack willow). The adults eat aphid honeydew and tree sap. They occur only in the wooded belts of Central-Southern England. Sometimes, in the right conditions the males will descend to take mineral salts from paths or dung. Or, er other things. Carrion, for example. However unappealing an image that seems (though of course function is really all that matters in nature) we had been lucky to experience the encounter. My husband and I stopped staring, smiled at each other, and beckoned our daughter on, to continue the walk we’d just begun at this fragment of the ancient hunting forest on the Bucks-Oxon border. Later, our luck changed a bit.
The old car we’d had to buy to quickly replace one that had just catastrophically failed it’s MOT showed up something that the test-drive hadn’t. Two miles or so into our five-mile journey home, water from the engine rose in a perfect, hissing arc to hit the windscreen, like a joke from a water-pistol. Luckily, we still made it back OK. The problem turned out to be caused by a pipe which had come loose, although it was maybe more complicated than that and we couldn’t, and still haven’t, entirely ruled out the gloomy prognosis delivered by that ‘death-sentence’ for a car. “It’s the head gasket”. The car, happily and who knows for how long, survives, though then the incident had made me reflect negatively on another not-so enjoyable aspect of our Sunday morning. As we’d continued walking, gunshots had reverberated throughout the forest with a hard incongruous acoustic which had grated upon the whole experience of walking in a life-filled woodland. I noticed that few birds sang. This could have been co-incidence. Perhaps not. But we assumed, from the explosive report of the shots and their rapidity that the shoot must have been clay-pigeon and not the ‘real’ thing. The dates for ‘open’ and ‘closed’ seasons for game and waterfowl shooting do however vary, and there is no closed season for rabbits, pigeons and corvids. Even though all I could imagine falling lifeless from the sky were brittle grey discs of clay, it took all the concentration I had to focus on the good part of the walk. And that was butterflies. Ringlets and meadow browns by the dozen rising from verges of meadow grasses and thistles and nettles and yarrow where orchids and vetches hid. More skippers, though I could not say if they were ‘small’ or ‘large’ as none lingered long enough for a close inspection. Dragonflies, too. And then the pair of big, golden Silver-Washed Fritilliaries flirting with the air currents, or each other, leading us out of the forest toward the glade of the car park where the old silver car waited silently for us, before delivering it’s news.
