Francis Hickenbottom’s Nature Notes.
It is always amazing to think that some species of butterfly take part in long-distance
annual migrations, travelling to the U.K. from as far away as Africa. Each year,
I wait for the arrival of the first painted ladies. Even though they turn up every
summer, having travelled up through Europe, they still give surprises.
Some years ago, I was walking in the hills to the north of Glen Tilt, near Blair
Atholl. It was early in the year - May, I think - when there was still snow on the
tops of the hills and the vegetation was still brown. I was about 2000 feet above
sea-level and a strong breeze was blowing along the glen. I spotted a single butterfly
being blown along and I could see that it was a painted lady. The painted lady looked
completely out of place in such a bleak moorland setting.
Last summer, during the May half-term holiday, I was at Llandigige, in Pembrokeshire,
when there was the most amazing influx of painted ladies that I have ever seen. In
the farmyard, I watched as painted ladies were carried through the yard by a strong
breeze, looking like falling leaves. When I sat in a field to do some watercolour
painting, hundreds of painted ladies could be seen drifting across the surrounding
fields without a break, for over an hour. There must have been hundreds of thousands
of painted ladies moving across Pembrokeshire as a whole.
In the following days the general movement of butterflies was less pronounced but
whenever I cycled along the narrow lanes near Llandigige, painted ladies flew up
from where they were sunning themselves on the roads, in the shelter of the hedge-banks.
