The prolonged dry spell has been of immense benefit to our early breeding birds and mammals, likewise pollination-seeking wildflowers, shrubs and trees.
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• A holly blue butterfly
resting on bluebell |
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• A North Devon location f
or pyrenean lilies |
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| • Crow garlic in flower. |
Also taking full advantage of the conditions, the insect legions have appeared early and in force - bees having secured a bumper harvest of pollen and nectar.
There are macro and micro moths aplenty and the orange tip and holly blue, two of springtime's emblem butterflies, are also to be seen in numbers. It is difficult to obtain a photograph of the holly blue showing its wings opened to reveal those violet-blue colours but, be that as it may, the diagnostic white, black-dotted underwings have a quality that is a treat to the eye.
Various white butterflies are on the wing, including the female orange tip - without the orange tip borne by the males - green-veined white, the female brimstone and, to many gardeners' chagrin, more than usual numbers of the large and small white - the cabbage whites! Speckled woods are also now on the wing.
St Mark's Day saw the coming of a certain species of diptera, the St Mark's Fly. These easily recognisable wholly black insects - in flight their legs are held a-droop - gather in looseish swarms over hedgerows and grassland. This year I registered two swarms on consecutive days, April 28 and 29, close to the day dedicated to said Saint.
With a little foreknowledge it is easy to separate the sexes of bibio marci, the females being slightly longer than the males, but with markedly smaller heads than the latter whose compound eyes give a distinctly bulbous appearance. Within a fortnight, epitomising the transience of life, these insects, albeit relatively sluggish in their movements, will have mated, deposited eggs beneath the soil and disappeared from the countryside scene. Until the same time next year.
Sitting in my garden on April 29 I was spectator to a hypnotic rebounding flight display by the proverbial transient life-form. Through the glare of the sun I suddenly caught sight of a little winged marvel climbing vertically about a metre into the air and, without a pause, dropping down and rising again.
Four minutes this went on before the atom of energy broke away from its "dance" and pitched on the nearest fencing panel. Half-suspecting it to be a day-flying moth I moved in to get a closer view. However, the little fellow had only forewings - clear yet gloriously prismatic forewings - and it was then I realised I had been watching a May fly, Cloeon dipterum.
Recently, in two new sites within the parish boundaries, I espied crow garlic, allium vineale, in flower - both places being roadside verges, rank with herbage and, to date, unmown by the Highways team! Allium vineale is an unusal plant regarding its inflorescent configuration when the pleasing pinkish, six petalled flowers (similar, I think, to bog pimpernel) are held on in excess of a dozen slender, inch or longer stalks rising out of a cluster of bulbils atop the plantstalk.
Crow garlic was introduced into north America and Australia where it became an invasive "weed". The alliums do have a propensity for blanket growth, thinking now of (the white flowering) ramsons, or wild garlic, and three-cornered leek! These plants are members of the lily family Liliaceae which include bluebell, spring squill, common Star of Bethlehem and Solomon's Seal, all of which are in flower.
On Sunday, May 20, I took a slight gamble and went to the parish straddling the southern boundary of Exmoor to photograph Lillium pyrenaicum, the Pyrenean Lily, or Yellow Turk's Cap Lily. I believe it was recorded hereabouts in 1849 by the botanist G Maw: does any reader know if this was so? I knew it was a little early to find any of these exotic plants in flower, but this year particularly everything seems to be appearing a week or two earlier.
I wasn't to be disappointed. I found a colony of a score and more of the unmissable plants
atop a high broad hedgebank - and three were already beginning to bloom!
In Christina Rosetti's famous poem, the lilies say: "Behold how we Preach without words of purity". Beautiful blooms they most certainly are, the yellow, dark-spotted pendent, recurved petals making the pinkish stamens a feature. My mind's eye transported me to their native Pyrenees, home of spectacular scenery and spectacular wildlife.
Here in "the land of bare hills", as the Celts labelled the village/parish, the plant of foreign lineage shares its new range with red deer, not chamois, with buzzard, not lammergeier!
"Why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." St Matthew. Ch6. V28-29.
Contact Stewart Beer at: stewart.naturalist@btinternet.com
• Stewart’s anthology An Exaltation of Skylarks, now with four colour plates added, is published by SMH Books ISBN 978-0-9512619-7-2. It can be ordered from all good bookshops, or directly from www.smh-books.co.uk