Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

Amazing to find this once-common insect vanishing from our countryside.

Everybody has noticed this. But wait: not so fast. This gorgeous cottage garden denizen, of those long warm summers and autumns of our youth, is actually up to its usual tricks again.

I spy with my little eye a graph in a Defra report. It bounces up and down like a golf ball on concrete. It belongs to the small tortoiseshell.

It starts in 1976 and bounces along for 31 years. It is the weekly count for three decades by 3,200 recorders, mostly volunteers, of just one of the UK's 56 species of butterflies. I have been one of them for 31 years; my wife, Anne, another for 28 years.

Each week in the season of 26 weeks we record what we see over exactly the same walk on the finest day of the week. My walk is five miles; hers is a mile and a half.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette October 1