'Crickets – Crows – and Retrospects'

 Ever since the turn of the month I've been meaning to post a September poem – and now, thanks to an American friend who's an Emily Dickinson maven, I have one. Here it is...

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets—Crows—and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming—
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

I think those few eloquent lines perfectly catch the elusive, melancholy feel of September, of summer quietly moving into autumn.  

Talking of which, the summer being over, we now have Butterfly Conservation's report on the findings of their Big Butterfly Survey, that annual exercise in citizen science, in which this year 125,000 people took part – and sure enough, as predicted here, they've managed to turn it into a bad news story. Everyone with eyes to see knows that 2025 was the best butterfly year we've had in a long time – but that goes against the approved narrative of relentless decline, so obviously a good deal of spin was called for. You can't blame Butterfly Conservation, whose fund-raising is always going to go better in a climate of urgency and crisis. Long-term decline in butterfly numbers is undeniably a fact, but things are far from simple. The Big Butterfly Count is never going to be anything more than a snapshot, and the most recent comprehensive survey, The State of the UK's Butterflies 2022, showed a mixed picture. Despite the background trend of overall decline, more than half of butterfly species showed increases in either abundance or distribution or both (and abundance was up by 35 per cent in Scotland). Also, it's worth bearing in mind that 1976, the year from which all these surveys start, was a hot dry summer of extraordinary butterfly abundance, followed by an immediate decline (the result of drought shrivelling so many food plants).  
Anyway, enough of butterflies – for now.