The tangled bank

Last week I spent a few days in a rural part of south-western France. The weather wasn't great, but for a couple of days the sun shone and I went out hunting for wildlife. Not that much hunting was required. Grasshoppers exploded from every tussock of grass, bees swarmed round every flower and best of all the air was thick with butterflies and moths.

In the 5 months I've been doing the garden moth challenge in my garden in Potton, I've managed to scrape together around 60 species of butterfly and moth. In two days here my total rapidly grew to 45, if the weather had stayed good I might well have overtaken my English tally.

Netted Pug

Glanville Fritillary

Broad-bordered Bee Hawkmoth

Yellow Shell

So why the contrast? Certainly the warmer conditions will have played their part, but perhaps a greater factor was the profusion of wild flowers growing in every field, and the gloriously unkempt and scruffy hedgerows. In the origin of species Darwin makes reference to the tangled bank:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us"

and here it was in all it's splendour. On one leaf a strangely shaped treehopper, on the next a bizarrely camouflaged assassin bug. Two feet further down a female Andrena florea had somehow discovered a tiny vine of white bryony to feed upon, watched by an audience of orange and black bugs which wouldn't have looked out of place in a tropical rainforest.

A strange looking Treehopper

The Assassin Bug Phymata crassipes

The brightly marked Capsodes flavomarginatus

Andrena florea

So what's my point? Well nothing particularly profound, it's pretty well established fact that a rich and varied flora will lead to a rich and varied fauna, and a campaign to restore wild flower meadows has recently been in the news. To be honest it was just nice to experience, especially after the bleakest of winters back in the UK depleting yet further our impoverished hedgerows and wild flower free meadows. Perhaps some day more of the UK will resemble that sunny corner of France, I certainly hope so!