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The silver-washed fritillary |
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Thursday, 20 September 2007 |
Tabac d’Espagne (Latin: Argynnis paphia)
In an instant, the sight
of this butterfly
concentrates for me the
pleasing balance
between man and
nature. The history of
man in the landscape
and the story of natural
life is encapsulated by
the sight of the tawnygolden
wings of this
spectacular insect gliding
along wayside banks.
The silver-washed
fritillary butterfly could not exist without a
landscape of fields and woods. The edges of
fields are garlanded with the flowers of
brambles, thistles and, as in the photo, hemp
agrimony. Woods have oak trees with
crevassed bark and woodland violets on the
floor which flower in spring. If some trees
are felled, the violets will be more plentiful.
All this benefits the butterfly which could not
exist otherwise.
The eggs are laid in August in a tree bark
crevasse as high as two metres from the
ground. In a week or two, the caterpillars
hatch. After eating its own eggshell, each one
spins a little web and hides beneath it for the
next seven months. Then the tiny larva, less
than three millimetres long, crawls down the
bark and finds a violet
plant. For three months
it eats the leaves, finally
growing to nearly four
centimetres. It then
pupates and waits for
two weeks to convert into
a butterfly. The butterfly
must eat sugary nectar
from brambles and other
flowers found in sunny
hedgerows.
Astonishing this is,
but all the necessary
factors must be there for the survival of the
species, and it is largely the unconscious hand
of man in the past that has created this
complexity. Because of that, I enjoy seeing
several of these in flight together at the edge
of a mown hay field.
It is a glorious insect, with wings
spreading to over seven centimetres. The
underside of the hind wings are suffused with
a silvery-green wash of colour (so its name).
The males have four dark stripes on the top
wing, containing scent glands to attract females.
The name ‘fritillary’ refers to all similar
butterflies with a chequer-board patterning,
the original Latin word being fritillus. The
common French name, meaning Spanish
tobacco is a peculiar oddity.
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Downtime 
