Last updated 10:41, Thursday, 14 August 2008

Nature with John Sears

Above: The Small Copper on Sea Holly and, right, the tiger moth. Both pictures by John Sears

AUGUST is a good month for seeing butterflies and also wild flowers of our coastal habitats, like sand dunes, salt marshes, cliff ledges and gullies and rocky shores. The final category – shingle beaches – are not well represented along our Cumbrian coastline but all the others are out there waiting to be botanically explored.

At Eskmeals Dunes Nature Reserve near Waberthwaite, I got a good sighting of a Tiger Moth. There are more than 2,200 kinds of moths in Britain making them quite a challenging group to identify and many of them are nocturnal. With its striking markings, the Tiger Moth is one of the easiest to identify being sometimes seen in gardens in the daytime. The furry caterpillars have long black hairs which are a reddish ginger at the sides.

Only about 70 kinds of butterflies are found regularly in Britain. They have a club-like swelling at the end of each antenna. Even butterflies with a superficially moth-like appearance, like the Skippers which I would see regularly at Clints Quarry, still possess the club-shaped antennae. In moths the females have gradually tapering pointed antennae and in the males they are somewhat feathery. I don’t propose to give here a list of the commoner butterflies you can see around West Cumbria. Use a good illustrated Field Guide to identify them when they settle. Handling them or using nets can be fatal to these delicate animals. List the flowers they visit to obtain nectar to fuel their flight. Record the less common ones, the date and where you saw them, like the Painted Lady or the Dark Green Fritillary I saw near the River Lisa at the far end of Ennerdale.

I was fortunate enough to see a Small Copper feeding on the nectar within the small blue flowers of Sea Holly. This amazing plant grows on the dunes at Eskmeals. To obtain fresh water its roots grow several feet down into the sand. This helps to stabilise the dune and minimise wind erosion of the sand, a property it shares with Marram Grass, the commonest of the dune binding plants. Sea Holly has now become all too scarce due to thoughtless picking as a decorative plant. Sea Holly has nothing to do with Holly Blue butterflies or Christmas holly. It is in the separate Cow Parsley family – the Umbelliferae.

One of our rarest mountain flowers the Red Alpine Catchfly, which grows on Hobcarton Crags is visited by small, day flying moths, something I observed when climbing to see the alpine rarity. I cannot be sure whether the moths play a role in its pollination. It appears that true alpine plants have a higher rate of photosynthesis than species found at lower elevations, absorbing more than twice as much C02 per unit leaf area, something which may delight those who cling doggedly to the conjecture of C02 driving global warming. Now a report is out which has the backing of more than 400 scientists from 24 countries. It maintains that present climate changes appear to be due to a natural cycle which has been happening for thousands of years, influenced by the changing activity of the sun. .

In these columns on May 15 I mentioned Desfontainea, a delightful shrub of old gardens. My thanks to readers who got in touch with various locations of this shrub. One reader wrote to tell me that it grows in the gardens of the Low Wood Hotel at Nether Wasdale. I now recall it also grows at Inverewe Tropical Gardens in the far north west of Scotland near Ullapool.

Begun by Osgood Mackenzie in 1862, using shelter belts from the Atlantic gales, he created an oasis of warm temperate plants. And not under glass like the lavishly public funded Eden Project in Cornwall, which achieves nothing more than what has been done for years at Kew and Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

If Cumbria Wildlife Trust and the other County Trusts had only received a fraction of this funding, for what is real wildlife conservation!

John Sears has produced a Botanical Guide to Eskmeals Dunes costing £1.95 (post free) from 01260 278616.