A strange summer of weather again. First a long, cold spring so plants and insects didn’t get going, then hot drought all of June – very good for butterflies like the holly blue, whose larvae were feeding up then – but followed by continuous cool, overcast and rain for July and August, with the odd sunny day here and there.
Every year, the butterflies of late summer in my pastures tend to be the brown family: gatekeeper, meadow brown, speckled wood, ringlet, large and small skipper. Their larvae have to feed on, and then overwinter in, the dead stems of the old-fashioned meadow grasses like couch, cock’s-foot, Yorkshire fog, foxtail, fescues, soft brome, timothy, uncle Tom Cobley and all. About 98% of such meadows have disappeared since 1945, but we are lucky to own eight acres that have not been a working farm since before the second world war, so have never been reseeded with modern foreign species. And I only graze every second year on rotation.
