Meditations in an Emergency

 With the sun shining again (for one day only, by the look of the forecast), the garden has been alive with butterflies today – gatekeepers, speckled woods, holly blues, commas, peacocks, red admirals, tortoiseshells, all the whites, etc. This is what happens when we have a proper warm sunny summer, following a decent spring – all in stark contrast to last year's relentlessly cool, wet and windy weather. Anecdotal reports have come in from around the country of 'clouds of  butterflies' – a thing not seen in years – and prodigious numbers from the transect walkers who provide the most reliable figures for butterfly populations. So, the question uppermost in every cynic's mind is: How will Butterfly Conservation – that estimable but increasingly activist and alarmist organisation – spin 2025 into a bad news story, and thereby justify its declaration last year of a 'butterfly emergency'? Well, they might manage it yet, because the Big Butterfly Count, that media-friendly exercise in citizen science, got under way just as the warm sunny weather began to break down – and after the butterfly season had peaked, the good weather having made things happen earlier than usual. So a bad news story might yet emerge from the Big Butterfly Count, but that will not alter the fact that this has been a seriously good butterfly season – and all because we have had a seriously good summer and spring. Maybe the weather gods were listening when Butterfly Conservation declared that emergency.
[By the way, I've taken the not altogether appropriate title of this piece from a collection of poems by Frank O'Hara, which includes his best poem, 'To the Harbormaster'.]