Butterfly Month

August is the month when the meadow that has served us with vibrant wildflowers since May, looks ragged and exhausted. Now is the time to cut and leave the seeds to fall before removing every last windrow of cuttings, taking the fertility with them, leaving the soil leaner and poorer and better suited to the wildflowers that will grow next year.

August belongs to the butterflies. This is season for the Big Butterfly Count. The idea is simple: find a patch of flowers in  the sun, spend fifteen minutes, and count every butterfly species you see. Nothing more technical than that. There is a smartphone app which makes it easy to identify and count the butterflies and upload the results to a national database. The data builds, year on year, into one of the most important citizen science records in British natural history. If you haven’t taken part before, this is the year to start — and the 4Bs parishes offer some fine counting ground: the chalk grassland above Betchworth, the thistle patches along the Greensand Way, the buddleia and amy number of flower species in village gardens.

                    Some of the more colourful butterflies found in the 4Bs
1 Silver washed fritillary, 2  Painted Lady  3 Peacock  4 Red Admiral 5 Chalkhill Blue and 6) Comma

​What might you see? On warm afternoons along the scrubby North Downs, look for the Chalkhill Blue — the male a pale, luminous silver-blue quite unlike any other butterfly on the wing, the female a more subtle brown, often overlooked. Gatekeepers are still busy in the bramble edges, the male’s orange-and-brown wings carrying a distinctive double white-pupilled eye-spot. Small Tortoiseshells and Commas are visitors to garden nectar sources, fuelling up for hibernation. And if you’re very fortunate, a Silver-washed Fritillary may still be crossing a sunny woodland ride — a large, fast, glittering orange sail, gone almost before you’ve registered it.
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Elsewhere this month: watch out for dragonflies like common darters resting on warm stone and bare earth, or the large beautiful southern hawker laying eggs on a pond. Listen in the evenings for the churring of any late nightjars on the heath. In the hedgerows, young birds of the year are now largely indistinguishable from adults and August birdsong has a different, quieter quality to May’s chorus. Something is ending, and something is resting before the next act.