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It began with a discussion between old friends before one of them, unknown to me, sent me an email.
Eighty-five-year-old Rex, a retired English headmaster since 1992, living half time in the south of France from 1988-2017, was chatting to his friend about Crab Spiders.
His friend had photographed one, highly camouflaged, and ready to pounce on a butterfly. The friends talked about the multitude of dangers that butterflies face in the world as they grow from eggs to larvae to pupae and emerge as beautiful flying insects.
One of the dangers is being eaten by Crab Spiders. Rex recalled that he had photographs of butterflies being eaten by Crab Spiders. Specifically, a Spanish Gatekeeper butterfly (Pyronia bathseba) in the Nymphalidae family of brush-footed butterflies. It is native to the Iberian Peninsula, France, Morocco, and Algeria, and seen from May to July. It’s life is short – only 2-5 weeks.
And Rex did some online searching – and found one of my butterfly photographs. Alas, it was not the Spanish Gatekeeper. It’s a pity, he thought. Perhaps she would like a photograph of a real Spanish Gatekeeper butterfly. That’s when I received his email yesterday.
He said he knew the Spanish Gatekeeper well. It flies into his garden each year. Not in December, of course, because butterflies don’t like the icy cold winter temperatures of England. Not even in his south of France home, ‘looking out to the Mediterranean from the top of a lovely hill village.’
He described his days as a natural history recorder when butterflies and moths were a ‘huge part’ of his leisure life. He was once the main County Recorder for a county in the East Midland of England, and an international recorder of butterflies – a butterfly counter.
Rex signed the email with: ‘Notification finished – over to you if you want any follow-up.’ But, of course I wanted follow-up on the wonderful world of butterflies in Rex’s garden.
Rex sent me these magnificent photographs that he found in his archives. He wrote, ‘I share pictures to share happiness and memories.’
Two of the photographs show a Crab Spider about to eat a Spanish Gatekeeper. The others show the distinctive creamy band on the hindwings and the diagnostic spotting on the butterfly wings.
Like many of the butterflies in Rex’s French garden, the Spanish Gatekeeper ‘was so common that I rarely photographed it,’ he wrote. He added, ‘the diversity compared to England was staggering. I have some wonderful images, and live off the memories.’
Rex and his wife decided that if they reach the age of 80, they would cease driving between England and the south of France, and so they sold their French villa in 2017.
His wife, yesterday morning, looked out of their conservatory window in England at the frost and ice, and said to Rex, ‘I wish I could see some butterflies.’ He thought to himself: No way in December I’m afraid.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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