She’s here, the gorgeous Painted Lady

ON some mornings last week the slight chill in the air and the golden sunlight would make one believe autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, had already arrived.

In the garden, the tips of the verbena was like a tapestry woven on a purple background, so many were the tortoiseshell butterflies feeding there and so bright their colours. Last week, also, I saw the first Painted Lady of the year, a gorgeous creature, as bright and fresh as if it had just emerged from the cocoon. Yet it must have flown, at least, from France, presumably in the first brood hatched from eggs laid by parents that had come from North Africa.

Last year there were almost no Small Tortoiseshells flying but thousands of Painted Ladys from south of the Atlas Mountains arrived the end of May. This year, the tortoiseshells are in abundance but not a single Painted Lady showed up hereabouts until August 20.

Red Admirals, also migrants from Europe and North Africa, were flying in numbers since July. They are usually seen at the same time as the Painted Ladys – appropriately, I suppose, given that wandering sailors and gaudy women are mutually attracted. One notable sailor, however, the voyager, Ulysses, avoided the seductive charms of Sirens’ by having his sailors fill his ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast as they passed the island where they were singing. He returned to Ithaca and his ‘aged wife’ – but was then so restless that he took ship again with his old friends, declaring: “my purpose holds/ To sail beyond the sunset the baths/ Of all the western stars before I die”.

In the siren episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom cannot so easily escape the spell of the beautiful Miss Douce, the flirtatious barmaid whom he watches as she pulls pints in the Ormond Hotel.

But back to this lovely August 2010 and its stunning lepidoptera. Last weekend, on the Seven Heads, on patches of bare rock between Irish gorse and purple heater, Wall Brown butterflies basked in the sun. Not unlike Silverwashed Fritillaries, but smaller, their wings are also orange-red with black mosaic patterns. Silverwashed Fritillaries are the largest butterfly we see here, but their season seems to have come to an end. The single individual I saw last week was a pale shadow of its former self, its wings faded and tattered as it clung to the verbena amongst the gaudy tortoiseshells and admirals. Its eggs, laid on tree bark, will overwinter and the caterpillars will feed on wood violets before pupating and flying as butterflies next July.

On the lanes and roadsides of west Cork, the early yellow sun highlights the vivid orange of the montbretia and the gorgeous reds and purples of the fuchsia now in bloom. When there is a breeze, the fuchsia ‘bells’ swing and shiver and their waxy surface mirrors the light. The ivy on the beech trunks is silvered in the sunlight, like a coat of shining armour, and the moss is bottle green.

Far out on the green swathe of the ebbed bay – all the shallow bays of west Cork are now green – gulls are white, gleaming specks while, closer in, black-tailed godwits, newly returned from Iceland, forage on the mud not yet colonised by sea lettuce. The mud is rich and shining and the birds step daintily across it on their long legs, or roost at the edges where the receding tide carves channels in its surface. The breasts of the godwit males still retain the brilliant brick-red plumage of the breeding season, and their backs are chequered brown and black.

Egrets and herons fish on the banks of the Argideen opposite Timoleague House and can be clearly seen from the bridge, the pure white egrets reflected perfectly on the slow-moving, brown water. Yesterday, I watched an egret dash out and steal a fish from under the beak of a stately grey heron that was about to seize it. Opportunistic interloper Johnny-Come-Lately pre-empting old Johnny-the-Bog! On that sunny morning, a line of 40 or more students of local history followed the ex-headmaster of Barryroe Primary School, Séan Barry, down the bay-side path toward Courtmacsherry, pausing while he told them the story of the ruined 12th century Cistercian monastery at Abbeymahon as they went.