JUNE BUTTERFLIES.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 11 August 1924, Page 8

JUNE BUTTERFLIES.

WET AND DRY YEARS. (From a, Home Exchange.) Many .moths fly by day in June, and the day-flying moths are brighter than many butterflies. As the .storm rolls away from the .wood, leaving the overblown hawthorns more dingy, and the grass beneath them whiter, crimson cinanbar moths flap across the rides in the steamy sunshine, and .the speckled yellow moth flutters with a livelier motion among the mealy-scented bracken stems. Both are far more gaily painted than the small heath butterfly, with wings of the colour of a Barcelona nut, and the dingy skipper, which, in spite of the equivocal tips to its feelers, is an authentic butterfly. That is how the line between a moth and a butterfly has to be drawn at last —knobbed tips to its feelers make it a butterfly, and the skippers’ feeiers just scrape through. They are swollen like some primitive hockey-stick, while the antennae of moths are thread-like, or crisped like a fern, but never clubbed. But when moths and butterflies were first named this distinction had- upt been elaborated ; butterflies were bright and flew in sunshine, while all dusky, repellent .buzzers which wait for night to flap out candles, and dart in frightened eyes, were moths. Tried by the final test, the emperors racing on the heaths and the bordered whites that dance about the fir-boughs are palpably nioths; but they are butterflies in their delight in sunshine, and .we wish them their fill of it.

Few butterflies can prosper without the sun, though some of the “browns” or satyrs .flit in. shadowy glades and about the wind-whipped haylield in the coldest and dampest summers. Yet their nature is so finely balanced that drought harms them too. In thirsty seasons blue butterflies, and even the fiery little copper, leave baked pastures for watered gardens, and white butterflies will suck the drippings of a watprca.rt, or sip shrunk edges of streams. In a withering drought moths and butterflies suffer a deeper injury from the parching of the herbage which should feed their hungry young. Starvation overtook many caterpillars in the great drought three years ago; since then there have been two wet, dark summers, and a third ushered in with flood. These extremes of weather have helped to bring our butterflies to a very low ebb; for many species seem never to have become perfectly acclimatised under our fickle'skies,'and'come dangerously near extinction after a few bad seasons. Farther south they are surer of sunshine, while where every’ summer is sunny they adapt thenchanges to the year’s routine. With us they are never quite safe. Not only does a flaming midsummer destroy their children’s food, but a long fine autumn tempts them to multiply once too often, then drowns or freezes them. Moths and butterflies pass the winter in every stage from the egg. but each species has evolved its own habit. When winter falls, it should find it in the appropriate: phase for rest. The peacock butterfly hangs with folded wings from August or September until spring; but a full-fed peacock caterpillar has. been seen crawling in the dust of a sunny October. This creature was abroad nine months too early, or else three months too late. There is only time- for one generation of peacock butterflies in an English summer, though the small copper, by adapting its time-table more cleverly, may fit in as many as three.’ Butterflies, feed on any sugary blossom ; but their caterpillars, are more dainty, or more bound by habit, and are often confined to plants of a single group, pr even to one kind. Brimstone caterpillars feed on buckthorn, the purple emperors on sallow, the caterpillars of many fritillaries love violet leaves. If the buckthorn were grown in gardens, brimstone butterflies would be pests like the two cabbage .whites. But it chances that the larvae of no other British butterflies feed on cultivated plants. Many moths are mischievous, but 'even in gardens, not ail. The red-striped cinnabar moths which on., wastes and warrens fret the golden ragwort are sometimes drawn into neglected gardens by groundsel, which is a kind of ragwort too. It then becomes piarasitic on a parasite. Oaks feed more caterpillars than any other tree ; and violent rain since the bud first broke has again not saved their first foliage. Fewer oaks are stripped brown than in drier years, hut many are almost leafless. Often a hare tree stands next to ope almost untouched; for though the devourers are not all of one kind, they belong to sedentary species. One common caterpillar, among the scores that dangle in the wind, is that of the mottled umber motli, the female of which cannot fly; and the commonest grub of all—-the green oak-roller or tortrix—is seldom seen, far from the parent tree when it becomes a dancing green motli. Pests are usually produced by artificial conditions, and probably the vast numbers of parasites of the oak in southern woodlands are clue to the cultivation for many years of oaks spaced to get the benefit of free sunshine, and cut before they reach cold altitudes. The leaves are so soon renewed that the trees suffer little.