Heading south

Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,
My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest,
My Admirable butterfly!

I had an email this morning from a friend who asked if I'd seen any migrating Red Admiral butterflies and when I was out on the coast a few hours later there was this beauty filling up on ivy nectar. Vanessa atalanta migrates north in the spring from the Mediterranean area. It's a large strong-flying butterfly and a good reason not to get rid of your nettles because that is the larval food plant. In the autumn they return to warmer climes.This one must have sheltered from yesterday's stormy weather on its way south to join the throng of migrants crossing the Channel. In the other hand, it could be one of the increasing numbers that, due to the rising temperatures, overwinter in the UK: some have even been seen on the wing among snowdrops.

The great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, best known for Lolita, was a noted lepidopterist. He said of this butterfly "Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to Northern Russia, where it was called 'The Butterfly of Doom' because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the underside of its two hind wings seem to read 1881." (I gather that the 18 on the left and the 81 on the right.)

The Red Admirable (its original name) features in Nabokov's unconventional novel Pale Fire (1962) whence come the quotations above and below.

A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white,
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.