36.2055 years in science communication
I could waffle on about the materials used in modern tennis rackets, the balls, the clothes the players wear, the compounds they used to weed and feed the grass courts, but I won’t here, just for the sake of it, are a few snaps from a trip to Wimbledon myself and Mrs Sciencebase made this week. All shot on my relatively old Panasonic DMC-TZ35 Lumix with the Leica lens and the 20x optical zoom.
UPDATE: Reading Oates, I realise now that the June Gap is more widely appreciated, particularly by beekeepers rather than butterfliers. Indeed, the gap isn’t really about the invertebrates at all, it’s about the flowers. The spring flowers come and go and there is commonly a gap between their final blooms and the emergence of summer flowers.
It is this period that beekeepers think of as The June Gap, a period when there is far less nectar available for their apian charges. This, of course, means there is less food for other nectaring species, such as butterflies, and so they have adapted to cope with this in terms of their flight periods and reproductive cycles, hence the hibernators, the spring emergers, and the summer species.
However, climate change and change ecosystems now mean that much is altered from when the notion of a June Gap was first discussed and indeed, the very notions of the immutable four seasons in the temperate zones are being disturbed by global effects driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
There always seems to have been some overlap between what we might call the spring butterflies (Orange Tips, Brimstone, Peacocks etc) and the emergence of the summer species, like this Ringlet, the Heaths, the Blues, and the Meadow Browns, Skippers etc. But some of those Spring species keep going well into the summer and some of them have a second brood too.
So, while there may have been a June Gap in flowers (that too is changing), insects and plant life don’t tend to obey our qualitative rules. Indeed, many years there are commonly more butterflies and more butterfly species on the wing in June than in the earlier spring months or later in the summer.
For more of my butterfly photos, check out the Lepidoptera galleries on my Imaging Storm website.
UPDATE: The huge numbers of very worn, migrant Painted Lady butterflies that we and many other people saw at the end of June and into July. It was an irruption and is a good indicator of a coming long, hot summer.
Apparently, this species which migrates into Europe from North Africa never gets its weather forecast wrong. They only turn up in such large numbers here when the weather is going to be good. Their larvae feed mainly on thistles, including the notorious creeping thistle, the bane of the allotmenteer with a bad back. #AllotmentLife.
The second generation will hatch from eggs laid on those thistles and will be much more richly coloured than their migrant parents who lose so many of their wing scales on their journey to these shores.
However, we need to talk about Vanessa. Vanessa cardui is the Painted Lady in Cynthia’s group. No, not the backing singer in an all-girl 1960s Northern soul outfit, she’s a butterfly. On our hike from the campsite in Stiffkey to the pine-backed beach huts at Wells, a ~16km round trip along the coastal footpath, we saw dozens of V cardui and very few other butterfly species. There were a few Small Tortoiseshell and lots of Meadow Brown, and the occasional Speckled Wood.
I don’t recall ever seeing so many Painted Ladies at one time. They migrate to Britain and Europe from North African and the Mediterranean region in Spring. For whatever reason, there seems that a large number has arrived on these shores.
On the return journey from Wells, as dusk ultimately fell we also saw plenty of grass moths of different species and dozens of feeding and pollinating wildflowers Silver Y (Autographa gamma) and one Yellow Shell (Camptogramma bilineata), and a Cinnabar (Tyria jacobaeae).
