ANOTHER LIFE:EVEN BEFORE it cleared the ridge the other morning, the sun conjured a full arch of a rainbow from what was left of the drizzle, setting an artistic frame the full length of the strand, writes Michael Viney
In this odd, mellow light, the wet colours along the boreen took on an inner glow: smouldering siennas in the bracken; tufts of moorgrass like chunks of a lion's mane. Autumn is the time to view the west - a steady refrain of mine all these years.
What is it in our species that so strongly responds to colour? It can't all be the ripeness of fruit for hunter-gatherers, and, unlike birds or lizards, we get on quite well for sex on the strength of rather feebly-coloured skin and hair. But we do love colour, the brighter the better, almost from the day we are born.
Some of life's most glorious shades fill a new publication I'm especially pleased to see. Butterflies came late in Ireland's reawakening to nature. Birds found their popular champions a whole generation ahead, but butterfly-watching had to bide its time (try www.butterflyireland.com). And now comes a book that does so much more than just help us to put names on Ireland's 35 resident and migrant species. To read, for example, that when the caterpillar of the silver-washed fritillary finishes a bout of voracious feeding on the leaves of violets, "it rests, often in a sleepy posture, with the head slightly to one side", is to start getting up close and personal.
Jesmond Harding, The author of Discovering Irish Butterflies and their Habitats, (€12 from deniseharding@eircom.net) is a 48-year-old secondary school teacher in Co Kildare, who has spent 12 years watching and photographing butterflies and making copious notes. But ask him what interested him originally and one finds him at the age of four, walking in a park with his father, and carrying the box from a new pair of shoes.
Suddenly, a holly blue fluttered past, its blue wings flashing in the sunshine. Urged to catch it, his staid and besuited father seized the shoe-box, then chased, dived and missed. This sight "absolutely thrilled" the infant Harding, and he was hooked from then on.
Much of his adult study has been of captive butterflies, their caterpillars and pupae, but his book also gives a great feel for observing them in the wild. Some behaviours can be dazzling and literally in your face. The growth of trees on our acre has brought a burgeoning of speckled wood butterflies and I have sometimes had to step back from their rapt territorial contests. "These fights," as Harding writes, "consist of spiralling in close circles, battles that often see the butterflies drifting across a glade or road [where they] can be struck by traffic or snatched by spotted flycatchers or dragonflies." I watch red admirals spiralling in much the same way.
But other habits need a voyeur's close attention. To watch the mating foreplay of Real's wood white, Ireland's newly-identified butterfly, for example, may be to see the male alight on a flower opposite the virgin female, where he "uncoils his proboscis and sways his head from side to side, literally with his tongue hanging out". Next to courtship, sheer survival drives the butterflies' dramatics. A bunch of hibernating peacocks not only flash their eye-spots at, say, a menacing wren, but join in making "a snake-like hissing" by rubbing their wings together. An orange-tip caterpillar hatching on the tip of its food-plant destroys any other unhatched eggs and later threatens any rivals it meets "with violent head-jerks" and bites on the back.
There are especially good places for finding butterflies, and Harding profiles 28 of them, from Donegal to Co Dublin's Portrane.
Everywhere, it is the mix of particular plants, along with the time of year, that decides which species are on the wing. Some depend more than others on the density of just one kind of foodplant on which to lay eggs. For colonies of the increasingly rare marsh fritillary (pictured), for example, it is the devil's-bit scabious of damp and tussocky grassland, and Harding's special study of the butterfly is shot through with concern for protecting its breeding sites.
Now, indeed, is the time to make gardens more supportive and enticing for butterflies by planting native trees and shrubs, and the book gives good advice on which to choose, and how to make a wildflower meadow.
It also urges the planting of buckthorns in parks and along motorways - this to increase the range of the lovely yellow brimstone. When, a century ago, a British army captain imported buckthorn bushes and brimstone caterpillars into Co Tipperary, the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger railed against "forging nature's signature" by creating such artificial habitats. But in these changed times for butterfly survival, fading signatures may need fresh ink.