Thursday, April 24, 2008
Butterflies Again
It would be sheer dereliction of duty on my part if I didn't note this sad story. Last year was truly a shocker for us butterfly lovers, having started in such glorious style with a warm and sunny April and lots of early sightings - and then declined into that horrendously wet, cool summer (though, for myself, I did twice see a dozen or so of these beauties). Butterflies are so dependent on the weather (not the climate) - and in Britain we just get too much weather. The hot dry summer of 1976, which scorched the grass from public parks and withered trees where they stood, was a revelation, producing clouds of contented butterflies everywhere and affording us a tantalising glimpse of what our countryside might be like if only we could count on proper summers. I shall make no mention here of global warming. D'Oh!
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I don't know much about this, but I'm surprised you can't simply buy butterflies in garden centres. Or perhaps you can? I mean, buy some feed plants with caterpillars already on them that you stick into a flowerbed. Even if only a tiny number of these caterpillars became butterflies - probably the case in the wild, anyway - that would still mean more butterflies.
ReplyDeleteYou're onto something there Mark - it would definitely work with some species, and look, you can get these, though oddly the caterpillars don't seem to have plants to eat but some kind of cake...
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