Ham Lands Butterflies Guided Walk

One of the organisations that I am most pleased to be associated with is Friends of Ham Lands and one of the reasons for that is the guided walks on Ham Lands that explain what can be found there.

My role in this is modest, I do the computer stuff (Eventrbite, website, Facebook, Mailchimp, Twitter,/X, ...) and the naturalists do all the hard work.

These walks are mostly about the plants, which makes sense given their obvious beauty, but this month Paul Cook was our guide and the subject was butterflies.

I have bit of a history with butterflies. I collected them as a boy and I also collected the butterfly cards given out with packets of tea in 1963. I still have the book. 

And several years ago I did a picture round on butterflies which I still get mocked for because the highest score was something like 2 out of 20.

Undaunted by that minor setback I went on the walk with eagerness.

Paul Cook was a fantastic guide, not only knowledgeable but also very good at explaining things, like the subtle differences between the various whites.

He was also very well prepared and he caught several butterflies gently in a soft net and passed them around in a display jar before releasing them unharmed.

I learned a lot about butterflies and in particular what to find in which parts of Ham Lands and why.

I also learned that my iPhone can recognise butterflies and it told me that this is a Comma, which Paul had already confirmed.

Paul counts butterflies on Ham Lands every week, and has done so for years, and he was able to explain how the numbers of each species had varied over those years. 2013 hd been a good year for butterflies but their numbers changed a lot from year to year, according to the weather, and so there was no cause to be complacent.

It was an excellent walk and we are already looking to repeat it next year, possibly in a different month to see different species.