The park caterpillars have started to pupate already. I knew they would, it’s never that long after they’ve dispersed. They seek out the perfect pupation spot like a dog sniffing out its next wee. I watch them crawl, with purpose, to the top of the tent, and stop. After a while they start to wriggle, uncomfortably, and then they hang down from the roof by a hooked tip known as a cremaster, a little silk pad holding them in place. Initially hanging in a straight pole, they seem to relax into the process and then curve up into the perfect, chunky comma. They might hang like this for a day or two before their skin splits for the last time and a chrysalis is born. Sometimes, despite much wriggling, the caterpillar skin stays whole, suspended from the bottom of the chrysalis. Other times just the gruesome remains of its old head are left.
Pupation is an interesting process; it’s when I start to see which caterpillars have been successful or not. First, there are those that don’t manage to pupate. Something happens during metamorphosis that stops them in their tracks. They hang and hang but never curl up into a comma, instead dying as a rigid, withered pole. Then there are the parasites. Sturmia bella is a parasitic fly that arrived here from continental Europe a few years ago (thanks, probably, to climate change), and is thought to have contributed to small tortoiseshell declines. It parasitises small tortoiseshells, peacocks and occasionally red admirals, the adult female flies laying eggs on nettle leaves and the unsuspecting caterpillars gobbling them up. The eggs hatch inside the caterpillar and the grub eats its host from the inside, eventually persuading it to pupate at the same time as its siblings. Then, while the others gradually turn into a butterfly, the Sturmia bella grub chews its way out of the chrysalis and drops down from a silken thread, hiding under leaf litter (or kitchen paper if you’re in Kate’s little mesh tent). There, they pupate into hard, wine-coloured pupal cases, and hatch out as adult flies a week or so later.
There are other parasites, too; tiny wasps that lay eggs in eggs and first instar caterpillars, their larvae bursting out of their unsuspecting host just before pupation – these caterpillars don’t pupate but wander around aimlessly until, eventually, they seem to explode, yielding their grubby secret.
Those that survive pupation then have other problems. In the wild parasites might lay eggs in the chrysalis or a park gardener might come along with a strimmer and squash them flat. When the butterfly is ready to emerge (eclose) from the pupa, it’s an extremely perilous time because it emerges with small, wet wings and it needs to hang upside down for a few hours to pump blood into them and dry them off. If conditions are windy or if the butterfly suffers a knock or it catches something while coming out of the chrysalis, it might get stuck or it might not be able to pump blood into its wings. This results in a crumpled butterfly, complete but deformed, which will survive for only a day or so. Men with strimmers are just one of so many dangers – can they not just stay at home?
These 41 from the park are lucky. If I hadn’t found the other batch, I wouldn’t have noticed these ones and I wouldn’t have been out gathering nettles into a plastic bag. The nettles would have had a bigger trim and the caterpillars would have been lost. I watch them crowd to the top of the tent and start to change, wishing they were doing so on the park nettles but grateful that they’re in my kitchen.
I’m very good at raising caterpillars because I have been very bad in the past. I took my first batch (from a clump of nettles that had been sprayed with weedkiller) nearly 10 years ago. I raised them in my bedroom, in an ice cream tub without a lid, from which, of course, they all escaped. I would gather nettles on the way home from work and then spend an hour searching for and then returning the adventurers to their ice-cream home. Then, one day, I came home to find a large number of them had pupated under my duvet, and I spent all night carefully teasing them off (remember they stick themselves in place with a silken pad), and it was long after I also wanted to be beneath the duvet that I had managed to prise them all off and reattach them to the kebab sticks I had arranged, like fishing rods, from my bookcase. They all turned out fine but, as well as pupating under the duvet, some pupated behind the wardrobe, another on the mirror. When they eclosed, which they tend to do together over a period of two to four days, they all flew around my bedroom and seemed reluctant to fly out of the window. I would then find surprise butterflies that had pupated in mystery places (the wardrobe, the mirror), which also had to be caught and released outside.
Another time, as I walked past men with strimmers attacking the communal paths of a local park, I gathered hundreds of caterpillars that were about to lose their homes, and transferred them to the nettle patch in my garden. Of course, every wasp in town was extremely grateful because I had essentially served them a very easy meal, all on one big plate. The whole lot had gone within a few days. Butterflies go about their business in the way they do for a reason. We are fools to ever forget that.
So it was with sadness that I realised that, if I was going to ‘save’ the caterpillars, I needed to do so at home, with the right kit. I searched online for some sort of mesh tent, only to learn there are such things designed exactly for the job in hand. I bought one designed for kids, a beginner tent if you like, and have been raising one or two batches a year in it ever since.
After a few hours, most of the Park 41 are hanging like chunky commas from the tent roof. I lose two of them to rigid withered pole syndrome (unofficial term). I keep an eye on them while cooking my tea, and watch a few wriggle themselves a new form. Looking after caterpillars is the easiest thing in the world. I wish more of us did it.
I see them as soon as I walk into the kitchen to make the day’s first cup of tea, four box-fresh small tortoiseshells hanging from their empty chrysalises in the little mesh tent, the blood-like spatters of meconium decorating its sides. Four of the 41 saved from the park, four little lives that otherwise wouldn’t have made it. My heart soars. ‘Hey, gorgeous things!’ I say, as the kettle boils. They’ve been there a while, all are dry with their wings perfectly expanded, ready for take-off. It’s 5.45 a.m. I open the kitchen blind and the day is dry and still but the sun hasn’t come around yet. I take tea back to bed, give them an hour.
Later, when the sun has moved round and I can be sure there’s no wind, I release my butterflies, one by one. I choose the front garden to release them, the hedge keeps everything protected and the sun is strongest here at this time of day. The tall stands of viper’s bugloss make the perfect release spot for them – each of the (now six) butterflies can have its own station on the same plant, and how marvellous they will look as they stick their tongues into the blooms for their first-ever sip of nectar.
I reach into the mesh tent and pop a finger in front of the legs of the one nearest the opening. It climbs aboard and then I transfer it to the other hand, which can take up to four butterflies at a time, for the short journey to the front door. I fish out three more, each one obligingly stepping on to my finger to be transferred to the other hand, to be carried to the door. Although their wings have fully dried, it’s still a vulnerable time for them, so I have to be careful. Outside I move my hand beneath the flower and let them climb on to it, where they settle themselves and open their wings a couple of times before moving into position to hang some more. The sun makes everything glisten. Today is going to be a good day.
I spend the next few hours popping my head out of the front door to see how they’re getting on. They move around, some visiting other flowers or other stations to hang from, before disappearing completely. I release another five butterflies from the little mesh tent, a total of nine that made it from caterpillar to adult, despite the efforts of the council.
It’s not rained for a month. Everything is struggling, and not just in my garden. In the park the playing field is yellow, the soil is sand. The tall poplar trees planted around the edge are shedding leaves but otherwise seem OK. The young trees are doing less well – three silver birches I planted in the copse have died, there’s a young hawthorn that’s seen better days and a couple of newly planted trees that desperately need water. At the edge of the playing field is a lone chestnut-leaved holly, its once-glossy leaves faded and brittle, the earth around its roots rock hard. Chestnut-leaved holly is a good tree for a changing climate because it does well in hot, dry conditions but doesn’t mind a lot of rain, as long as the soil doesn’t become waterlogged. Its leaves don’t hold much value for wildlife but its flowers attract bees and its berries feed birds. But it doesn’t become drought tolerant until it’s ‘established’, which means it’s too young to cope with this heat and lack of rain. It, too, could die.
I’ve been trying to keep these trees alive with grey water, which I decant into old 5-litre shampoo bottles that I bulk-buy my shampoo in, and take to the park when I walk Tos. Each day a different tree gets its 5 litres and when I’ve done them all I move back to the first one – that’s roughly 5 litres a week, per tree. It’s clearly not been enough, I’ve already lost my three silver birches and probably one of the newly planted trees near the edge. Now it looks like we’ll lose the chestnut-leaved holly. I can’t do this on my own, I can’t keep everything else alive as well as my garden. So, finally, I ask for help.
There’s a Facebook group for the park, plus my hedgehog group and another for the road next to mine. There’s also a huge network of dog walkers, connected by a WhatsApp group. I start with the dogs – we all take water to the park for our pups and most of us tip the bottles on to the grass as we leave. What if we tipped the leftover water on to the chestnut-leaved holly, instead? I text the group and some people respond positively while others suggest it’s the council’s job. It is, but the whole city is bone dry, they don’t have the resources to go around watering every tree on top of everything else they do on a skeleton budget, and what would they be watering with? Fresh drinking water? This is our community and our trees, we can look after them. I gently suggest they drop their leftover dog water on the chestnut-leaved holly as they leave the park, and post photos of the tube that takes water directly to its roots. Some of them will, some of them won’t. It’s a start.
I write much the same message in the Facebook groups and get much the same responses – some people deride the council for not doing enough, others fill watering cans and old pop bottles with water and take them to the park to douse the tree’s roots. I know this because they post about it on Facebook, and I feel happy. I am reminded, once again, that it’s the community that will save these trees, not me. I’m reminded that community is everything.
I spend four days releasing butterflies into the garden; some into the front, where the viper’s bugloss provides the perfect sanctuary, and others to the buddleia in the back. I release a total of 27. I write this figure down in my notebook, which reminds me that 12 were parasitised by Sturmia bella and two didn’t manage to pupate. That’s not a bad emergence rate, and probably better than if they had remained wild. Certainly better odds than they would have had if they’d been strimmed. It feels good. It feels good to do good things.
The original caterpillars, that first batch I collected from Wild Park, are not far behind. They started to pupate just a couple of days after this batch and it won’t be long before they, too, are set free in the garden. Meanwhile the patch of nettles that was completely destroyed two weeks ago is ripe with the freshest of new growth. I check them most days, when I walk with Tos around the park. Surely it’s only a matter of time before I find more caterpillars on them?
I wonder if the lack of rain is causing, or contributing to, all of these caterpillars? We are, apparently, not yet in drought but I can’t see how. The grass is yellow, the plants are withered and dying, the pond is disappearing before my eyes. And yet it will be faring better than wild areas because I’m keeping it hydrated (well, as hydrated as I can). I’m showering into a bucket and keeping washing-up water and the dog’s bath water, which I know only contain eco-detergents, and am reusing it in the garden. Are more butterflies coming to gardens and parks because they’re less parched than the food plants in the countryside? Maybe.
I buy a new mesh tent. It’s bigger than the child’s one I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s taller and wider and has a large door that takes up one side of it, which makes it easy to add plant material and clean. I could stand a vase of nettles in there if I wanted, to save me having to fetch new material from the park so often. It will be just my luck that I don’t need to use it, now that I’ve had my fill of caterpillars for this year. But something tells me there will be more.
Common backswimmer, Notonecta glauca
The backswimmer is so called because it swims on its back, using its oar-like legs to propel itself through the water, like a rowing boat. It’s also called a water boatman but so is another species, Corixa punctata, which is smaller, vegetarian and swims on its front. The backswimmer is a fierce predator that attacks prey like tadpoles and small fish, using its forelegs to grab its next victim and its ‘beak’ to stab it with poison, to kill it. Gruesome, yes, but a sign of a healthy pond environment – if yours can sustain backswimmers it means there’s plenty to eat.
Backswimmers have a large, silvery body covered in fine hairs, which they use to trap air when they come to the surface, so they can breathe below water. They are light brown with large, reddish eyes.
The backswimmer was one of the first species to colonise my new pond. One day I came home and found lots of tiny crab-like things bobbing in the water. These, I discovered later, were backswimmer nymphs, which grew through the season and eventually metamorphosed into the large adults that took a chance on my pond and laid their eggs. The second generation also laid eggs, and suddenly I had a family – large adults that would glisten as they swam to the surface for air, little nymphs that gradually shed their outer skin and grew into adults. One day I found a shed skin and kept it as treasure.
To garden for backswimmers is to have a pond where lots of species can live, so the backswimmers can eat them. It’s a backswimmer-eat-tadpole world, and I like it.
July
I work away for a week at the Hampton Court Flower Show, where I have a nature table and chat to children and adults about the amazing natural finds you can display in your home. I have skulls and shed snake skins, a hedgehog ‘pelt’, a bit of bumblebee nest, a couple of hatched birds’ eggs. All from home. Throughout the week I find other bits and pieces: a ladybird pupa that ecloses on the table, live caterpillars that eat nettles, tadpoles, green parakeet feathers. It’s a week of hanging out with my treasures and talking to people about how great my treasures are.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a COYPU skull! Isn’t it great? Look at its orange TEETH!’
It’s a busy week, in which I stay in a tiny bedsit and walk to work every day through the straw-like grassland of Bushy Park. I crave my home life, the garden, my girls, rain. But it’s worth it. On the last day, a young boy begs me for my fox skull and I give it to him but ask that, in return, he always looks out for the wild things. We strike a deal and he takes it home. Another child has the grass snake skin and many others take feathers. By the end of the week, everyone wants a nature table, wants treasures as precious as mine. It feels good.
I arrive home to a dried-up garden and an even drier pond. I should have known. The grass here is also straw, the plants are wilting, the flowers devoid of bees. I crouch down at the pond edge. Brooklime, curled pondweed and duck weed lie on the bottom like deflated balloons. The mud is still muddy and I hope things have tucked themselves in here, waiting out the drought. Maybe not: I also track hedgehog and bird footprints – what dying morsels have they been helping themselves to? Everything, by the looks of it. Tadpoles, certainly, there were hundreds a week ago. Backswimmers? Neither the adults nor the wingless nymphs are here, the adults will have flown elsewhere but the nymphs – which hatched from eggs laid in May – will be in the bellies of other beings. No dragonfly or damselfly larvae, no whirligig beetles, no pond skaters, no caddis flies. What have I done? I lie on my belly, my head and arms in the ‘hole’, and root around the deflated balloons. There’s not even dead tadpoles, no sign they were ever here. I turn leaves and stems to reveal the occasional pond snail, some leeches and water hoglice missed by truffling hedge pigs. But nothing else. Welp.
It’s not just hoggy footprints in the pond that gives them away but also the wet, muddy footprints I watch them leave on the trail camera at night. I catch up on a week of videos in which there has still been no rain, but suddenly moisture and mud as hedgehogs cross the patio with bellies full of dead pond. Some of them even have bits of plant material caught between their claws.
I’m pleased they and the birds have had a good meal, it’s not like things have been easy for them. But all of that work! Three years old, nothing special, but the beginnings of something, a solid ecosystem. Now we have to start again. Will the backswimmers return? They were some of the first colonisers of the pond and some have spent their whole lives in it; I’d catch their silvery bodies glinting in the light as they surfaced for air. Where are they? Will the common darter dragonflies return, the lone red male defending his territory from the stick I’ve wedged into mud by the side of the pond and romantically called a dragonfly perch? The damselflies, the little brown beetles that hung around the edges, the mosquito larvae, the non-biting midge larvae. Where did they go? If garden ponds are drying up, you can bet those in the wild are, too. So where did they go? Rivers, which are full of human excrement, nitrogen run-off and pesticides? What a choice.
