www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

I found my oldest bit of pottery at archaeology up on the South Downs three weeks ago, a chunky piece of Middle Bronze Age bowl. That's the Amex Stadium a little to the right of it.

You can't help but get a bit reflective when you find something like that. To me it's as if the intervening 3,400 (ish) years vanish down to an instant, one person hacked off because they've broken a bowl and another very happy to find some of it.

It also got me thinking about the lowland chalk grassland habitat the Neolithic ancestors of the pot's owner had helped create and the many subsequent generations of farmers and their livestock have helped maintain, right up to the sterling present day efforts of people like Neil Hulme (and others on this site I'm sure) who put in hard scrub-bashing graft for the benefit of the many flora and fauna species who make this habitat their home and the people who enjoy seeing them.

Apologies then if this is a really daft question, but sticking just with butterflies were our current lowland chalk grassland specialists exactly that at the dawn of the major Neolithic woodland clearances / onset of livestock farming i.e. with colonies already established in pre-existing strips of chalk grassland along the coast and possibly other naturally occurring tree-free areas, who just followed their larval food plants into the rapidly expanding man-made landscape ? Or was there nowhere naturally scrub-free/short-turfed enough to support a Silver-spotted Skipper colony (for example) and we can say with some certainty that this species decided to take advantage of this newly cleared/grazed/maintained expansive man-made vista by making significant changes to its (presumably) erstwhile woodland edge existence ?

An interesting question. I’m not scientist but, to my knowledge, chalk downland, like all the best butterfly habitats ( lowland Heath, woodland clearings, etc), is entirely man-made. This is why, if not intensively managed, chalk downland will quickly revert to scrub, then woodland. When this country was covered in the ancient wildwood, it must have been very species poor. It was not until man started to cut down the trees and create enclosed farmland, that a diversity of species of flora and fauna became established.

Long before we created the modern landscape, mega fauna, meandering rivers, wild fires and other forces of nature created a diverse landscape over huge areas that would have supported great diversity.

There are recent theories that speculate that the UK was not entirely wooded and that large wild herbivores, such as the aurochs, kept clearings open, moved through rides, and grazed on south-facing slopes from which habitats the habitat-specialist species evolved.

It also may be the case that habitat-specialists moved with humans from the continent within plants & plant litter such as hay and straw which is known to be a transporter of Essex Skipper, for instance.

We may not have had all the species we have now in ancient times. Some species may have come over during the history of man and how humanity has changed the landscape - the history of the changing landscape itself - which includes habitat development and the creation of new types of self-supporting ecosystems. They came to take advantage of these changes.

With the disappearance of large herds of aurochs and bison because of the over-hunting of man, the ecosystem service provided by large herbivores has had to be replaced by humans. Unfortunately, this means some of our habitat-specialist butterfly species are almost entirely dependent on humans to suspend ecological succession in their favour.

The change to intensive farming to support a growing population, and the habitat loss caused by new development, has not done that and so we see the loss of species and local extinction.

The way humanity manages the landscape including conservation work, the restoration and enhancement of habitats, and how the land is used, needs to change and change soon or all will be lost and this will be a crying shame. Unfortunately I will not see this in my lifetime and I will continue to be heartbroken

Thoughtful essay David.

Jack