The amber flicker materialised in air so saturated that it steamed through the trees, sauna hot. The orange light became two, spinning around each other only a metre above the ride, knotting and unknotting in the air. These were small pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies, Boloria selene, males in a dogfight over territory.
After each skirmish they separated, flying low in opposite directions, occasionally stopping to feed on bugle flowers or resting for a brief moment. Only then was it possible to see the black patterns on their orange wings, like glimpsing a sunset through the leaded lights of stained glass. The undersides of the wings, when they flexed at rest, revealed pearly, futurist compositions of bright, reflective panels.
I wondered what other butterflies saw, or whether such displays of light and shade in flight distorted the insect’s profile in the eyes of birds to make them difficult to identify as a single creature, instead appearing as an indeterminate number of variously coloured, reflective flying particles.
Perhaps butterflies communicate with each other largely through chemistry. Our obsession with words and notions represents a tiny fraction of communication in Nature; we largely ignore what Aldous Huxley (in The Doors of Perception) called the nonverbal arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence. The male pearl-bordered fritillaries were directly aware of theirs; they were laying pheromone trails low along the ride in full sun. Butterflies can detect tiny amounts of sex-signalling molecules and females would find them, and plenty of flowers and food plants for their offspring.
This woodland ride had dark blue flowers of bugle, the brilliant blues of tiny milkwort and lilac-y green field speedwell, as well as the yellow of cinquefoil and the white of heath bedstraw. The small pearl-bordered fritillaries fly in June and July, usually a week or two later than the pearl-bordered fritillaries, B euphrosyne, from which they differ in slight, but to them crucial, differences in patterning. After mating the eggs will be laid on dog violets and there may be a second brood flying later in August.
