Wenlock Edge: Although so intimately hitched in the air, the butterflies seem to draw the world around them into their dance
Two small tortoiseshell butterflies fly together on a spring morning. Their wings look stiff and tawny – not much more than postage stamps, but they are powerful and rapid. At first the butterflies appear random in their fluttering around each other, and then, suddenly synchronised, they circle and spin, forming knot patterns in the air. As if magnetised or tied together by invisible threads, the butterflies dance. They are in visual contact and able to read the flashing colours and insignia on each other's wings, their eye facets creating compound images like a hundred 3D plasma screens.
But these strobing abstract pictures of orange, black, white and blue are only part of what binds these animals in flight. There are equally complex chemicals, pheromones which are undetectable to us, which draw them together. Once found, the wellspring of these pheromones induces this beautiful madness which is only fulfilled, and yet ultimately broken, by sex. Although so intimately hitched in the air, the butterflies seem to draw the world around them into their dance.
Their movements echo the peal of bells from the church tower as clappers strike metal to vibrate the air over the town and these fields. Their twin flights mirror the first chiffchaff, whose song is of two notes separated by a tiny silence. The small tortoiseshell butterflies rest on the ground, absorbing energy from what sunlight there is and watched by a ladybird. The nettles around them have been poisoned with herbicides and may not sustain the next generation of butterflies. However uncertain their future, the butterflies bask in the wonders of now.