Small white

This Small White butterfly was feeding amongst the bumblebees and honeybees on Nancy's lavender bushes outside her front window in BW in Yorkshire. Look carefully and you can see its long proboscis about to probe for nectar.

Nancy has a particular fondness for butterflies. She has often told me of how abundant they were in and around the village when she was a little girl, butterflies of many species in profusion. But she doesn't see many now, and not for many years. If you know where to look, you can still find places nearby along the grassy, hedged lanes and on the chalk grasslands of the Wolds' scarp and dales where a few species fly in small numbers. The small white is still a common species, its Brassica food plants are commonly grown in gardens, and its caterpillars enjoy the easy feeding. But they are the exception.

The decline in butterflies is just a barometer of the decline of insect life in our countryside, and in turn the decline in insect eating birds. Each year there are fewer swallows gathering on the telegraph wires, and fewer swifts whose aerobatic formations scream above the village in the early Summer evenings. Nancy belongs to a generation that remembers the abundance of butterflies, Bernard her late husband remembered large numbers of curlews and peewits breeding in the fields where he worked as a farmer, first with horses and then tractors.

Their generation is the last to have experienced the abundance of wildlife. For their grandchildren growing up in the village today, there is a new reality, a landscape that is quieter of birdsong, less colourful with wild flowers, where bees are nearly confined to gardens, and butterflies are an occasional novelty. And so we forget what went before, we become familiar and accepting of the new reality, and our chances of ever recapturing that abundance and diversity are gone with the knowledge of how it used to be.

Butterflies are symbolic of our lives: beautiful, precious and so ephemeral. We should value them as we value our lives, for if we allow them to, they enrich our lives beyond all measure.

ps Nancy is my mother-in-law.