Large Blue Butterfly

The life cycle of the Large Blue reveals a devious side to this pretty little creature.

The female lays her eggs on thyme plants. Here it is discovered by the Myrmica Sabuleti ant, which, persuaded by a heady mixture of pheromones and sugars, adopts the caterpillar and takes it back to the nest.When the egg hatches the caterpillar feeds on the thyme for two weeks before falling to the ground.

The caterpillar then sets up camp in a quiet corner of the ants' nest where it spends the next ten months enjoying 'all you can eat' from a buffet of ant eggs and larvae. Eventually surfacing as a butterfly in all its splendour, it lives for just two to five days.

My children and I were out for a short walk when we happened to walk across a ridge by Street, and saw people staring intently at a gorse bush.  We approached and found that they were looking at a rather scruffy butterfly.  This was the incredibly rare Large Blue, which the others there were ready to tell us about.

As an aside, how easy it is to engage in conversation with strangers when you are out walking in the countryside, even if it is just a cheery good morning.  It must be something about urban life that crushes the spirit and turns people into grumpy individuals who scuttle about the streets avoiding eye contact with anyone, like rats.

Learning Humility

Had my son of thirteen years staying with me this weekend and took him fishing on Sutton Bingham.  It was a near perfect day; cloudy sky but settled with enough wind to provide a ripple on the water.  We elected to fish from a boat as my son does not have that much experience with casting and I find that this aspect of fly  fishing really demoralises youngsters who are trying to learn.  If you spend half your time with your line hitting the grass banks behind or getting tangled in trees it is not much fun, neither is was your line collapse in a heap 10 yards of shore where few fish hold.


From a boat the only thing you will hit behind id the water and you do not need the greatest casting in the world.  Most fly fisherman can tell the story of dropping the leader and fly over the edge of the boat while sorting out something else in the craft to find a fish has come right by the boat and taken the fly.


We started to fish along the south side of the lake into a nice bay, my first fish came quickly to an orange blob.  Having forgot the net I had to play him out completely until I could hand him into the boat.  A few minutes later my son was into a fish and seemed to be making a meal of it, but when he finally got the fish to the surface we could see it was a good but bigger than the two pounder I had caught.


As well as being large it was also a strong fighting fish and took my son 15 minutes to bring to the side of the boat.  I had of course forgotten the net so he had to play it out; we had a few heart stopping moments when he got it to the edge of the boat and I reached down only to find the fish had considerable more energy and would take a dive for the bottom again.


As you can see from the photograph he is a very happy fisherman.  His fish weighed four and a half pounds; better than the two I caught put together.