Williamson's Weekly Notes - Oct 24 2009

I really do mean the last. Because the brown hairstreak is the last to hatch out of all our 56 species.

I do hope that you too have spotted this odd little insect as it whizzes about some yards above your head like some sort of dervish.

The remarkable photograph by Chichester photographer Brian Henham enlarges the tiny butterfly to elephantine size. In fact it is, like all the hairstreaks, small. So if you're not in the know you're going to dismiss it as a moth, even a brown fly.

As you wander about the countryside in Sussex you will have noticed the occasional clumps of blackthorn. Either by their white blossom in early April or by their sloes in autumn.

Well, that is where the brown hairstreak lives. Its caterpillars feed on the leaves and buds.

The odd thing about it, is that the generations are hooked on the same old blackthorn bush year after year. What was good for great-great grandmother and beyond is good enough for my children, each mother seems to be saying.

So obviously I have blackthorn bushes in my garden. A great big clump of bushes in fact in front of the house, around what used in Victorian times to be the old horse pond for the incumbents of this house when gamekeepers lived here. Autumn just wouldn't be autumn without the flight of the brown hairstreak.

Their flight is dazzling, the males revolving like catherine wheels at terrific speed as they show off to females.

She, by-the-way, used at one time perhaps two centuries ago, to be called the golden hairstreak. She is just a wee bit more colourful than husband, having a most delicious pink suffusion across the trailing underwing.

If ever you have the luck to see her topside you will be impressed by the large scarlet blob in the centre.

The hairstreak name is fairly obvious I should think as shown in

Brian's photograph, this being the same sort of swage line employed by car coach-buildres of the old school, or the pinstripe down a guardsman's uniform.

Other British hairstreaks have it: these are the purple, the green, the white letter and the black hairstreaks.

Some of these are very rare now but at least the brown is still quite common.