04-07-2025
Grace takes flight in the return of white storks
It is remarkable how introduced species seem so utterly at home here. The befittingness is instant. We learnt this from the reintroduction and subsequent spread of the spectacular red kite. We are learning it afresh from the return of the white stork, below, to the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. The storks themselves act as if they had never been away — for several centuries.
Airborne, white storks are grace personified. On still, azure days, groups of these large, streamlined white and black birds spiral in vortexes, up and away into the ether, out of sight but not out of mind. They also have a charming and calming contact call, which we belittlingly term 'beak rattling'. Heard distantly, it seems to emanate from somewhere beyond the here and now. It is an integral part of Knepp's immense depth of spirit of place, its genius loci.
Knepp's breeding storks have produced 45 youngsters this year, making a total population of 90. Come August, many of these birds will migrate south.
But Knepp is no one-trick wonder. It is renowned for its spring nightingales, now fallen silent, and a burgeoning turtle dove population. It also holds our largest population of purple emperor butterflies. The emperors are having one of their periodic years of abundance, perhaps even my lifetime's best.
Emperor males are fearless and absurdly territorial. At high population level they become so over-zealous that they will chase anything larger than a bee out of their treetop airspace. Last year, I saw one chase off a little egret; the year before, a cormorant. This year, they have already assaulted four low-flying storks.
They meet their nemesis when, armed only with a dazzling iridescence and a humongous ego, they attack insect-hunting hobbies, and get crunched.
This time 50 years ago, the hot summer of 1975 was beginning to flame, albeit after a harsh late frost at May's end and snow in early June as far south as London (snow famously stopped play in the Derbyshire v Lancashire cricket match at Buxton on June 2). June dragged on in sullen heat. July wavered awhile, but then the sun broke through and ruled supreme. This was the precursor to the long hot summer of 1976. But weather, like history, scarcely repeats itself, making lessons hard to learn.
Dutch elm disease rampaged that summer. Alison Ross, writing from Sussex in The Times described how the elm-dependent white-letter hairstreak butterfly 'fluttered over the dying wych elms in profusion' (August 25, 1975). I remember that abundance well. We lost virtually all our giant sentinel English elms during two sunstruck years, transforming the character of huge tracts of landscape and causing populations of elm-associated insects to crash, near-catastrophically. Some of those insects have recovered, somewhat, including this diminutive butterfly. Others have faded almost from memory, notably a handsome moth called the white-spotted pinion, which breeds on young shoots growing out of the trunks of tall elms (epicormic growth).
Until that era, rookeries were strongly associated with stands of sentinel English elms. Ironically, the tree most favoured by rooks in recent years has been the ash, now being destroyed by dieback disease. Perhaps history does repeat itself but it would be naive to think that we're coping better with ash dieback than we did with Dutch elm disease.
This year continues to rush forward. It is almost as if it wants to become next year. Down south, the vegetation on Midsummer Day spoke of mid-July: hawthorn berries were reddening, oaks were adorned with tiny stalked acorns, beech trees laden with swollen nuts, and many bramble flowers ending. Unless serious drought kicks in, we are going to see a bumper crop of fruits, nuts and berries come autumn, but that's another story.
Insects have been appearing unusually if not unprecedentedly early. Butterflies are emerging so early that new county and even national appearance records are being set. On June's final day, I saw a brown hairstreak — a month early. Some species may squeeze in extra broods. They are weather-driven opportunists and many of them have recovered impressively from last year's bad-summer decline.
Numbers of the two 'cabbage whites' are unusually high, and should increase further. They breed on a wide variety of plants allied to the cabbage family, wild and cultivated. Additionally, we receive immigrations from continental Europe. Come mid-August, we may be seeing mini blizzards of them. On the debit side, watch the wasps, they're coming too. Nature is ever a blend of nice and nasty.
