Caterpillars in silken nests, and butterfly eggs in blackthorns

ANOTHER LIFE:THIS COULD BE A good point in the year at which to become an aurelian – it could change your life. Aurelian? There was a Roman emperor of the name, busy battling northern barbarians, but never mind him. Move to 18th-century Britain and the company of upmarket lepidopterists who fastened upon the golden chrysalis of a butterfly – the aureolus – as a perfect symbol for their passion, creating the Society of Aurelians.

The word cropped up again in last year’s enchanting chronicle The Butterfly Isles (Granta, £20), young Patrick Barkham’s marathon mission to spot all of Britain’s 59 butterfly species in a single summer. Barkham thought the term perhaps “rather foppish”, but how much more graceful than becoming, say, a “twitcher”, living for the next rare-bird summons on the mobile. And now there’s an Irish book that, although it doesn’t mention the word, could certainly set any would-be aurelian skipping on his or her way.

It has taken time in Ireland for lepidoptery to get organised after the collapse of the ascendancy, with its big-house cabinets of specimens with pins through their middles. The nativisation of our natural history, so vibrant now among birdwatchers and amateur botanists, was slow to find a focus in the Republic where butterflies were concerned.

While the North was quick to press on with its branch of Butterfly Conservation, it was left to the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club to engage in serious butterfly recording, to mount a national website ( butterflyireland.com) and now to publish a basic companion to the field.

"Literature and butterflies," as Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "are the two sweetest passions known to man." Modestly titled and remarkably handsome value, Ireland's Butterflies: A Review(€25) draws on expertise from both the North and the South.

One author was Trevor Boyd, founding chairman of Butterfly Conservation (Northern Ireland). He died in 2010, leaving co-author David Nash and his wife, Deirdre Hardiman, to complete the work. Éanna Ní Lamhna will launch the book at the National Botanic Gardens on Thursday evening.

It’s still a bit early to hope for many butterflies. Someone might, indeed, have seen one of our few overwintering red admirals, out from hibernation, but hardly the duo of my drawing, spiralling in summer’s territorial dance.

Many species are still in the egg stage, such as the tiny, creamy dots of the brown hairstreak glued tight to twigs of the blackthorn. Others are caterpillars, still shrouded in silken nests. Still more have overwintered as a tough-skinned pupa, or chrysalis, like those, perhaps, of holly blues, tucked deep among the ivy of Dublin’s back gardens.

Along with her memorable portraits of the butterflies, Hardiman’s great triumph was to track down and photograph these less well-recognised stages in life.

The book is also exceptional in a serious offering of butterfly biology, from the sensory skills of the insect’s antennae to those of its sensitive feet. Tuned by evolution to choose particular plants for laying her eggs, the female scratches at leaves to check for the right chemical cues.

Unlike Barkham (and I do also urge his book, for an easy transfusion of love), the Irish aurelian has only 34 species to pursue. Records gathered by the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club support good maps of their wherabouts, still in need of more sightings. It also offers good hot spots of butterfly habitat, several within easy reach from Dublin.

Butterflies vary in their flying times. First out of hibernation, in February or March, is the bright yellow brimstone. (Its colour prompted the very word “butterfly”.)

It breeds across the limestone midlands, though it wanders far beyond, and it needs the presence of a food plant for its caterpillars, the spiny bushes of buckthorn, not the most common of Ireland’s wild shrubs.

A British army captain, the gloriously named E Bagwell-Purefoy, once imported both buckthorn and brimstones into Co Tipperary, only to merit Robert Lloyd Praeger’s scorn for “forgers of nature’s signature”.

Concerned for conservation, and offering lists of wild and garden flowers to help butterfly populations along, the new book anticipates changes that global warming could bring – for example the embedding of red admiral, clouded yellow and comma as permanent residents.

A new addition to our gardens might also be the geranium bronze butterfly, Cacyreus marshalli,which has travelled with plants from South Africa and reached Britain by way of Spain. It's a little brown job with white-deckled wings, and its caterpillars are, so to speak, the "cabbage whites" of geraniums, with all the voracious offence that implies.

Even the adult doesn’t sound much aurelian fun. “It is easy to identify, even in flight,” says one online observer, “when it has a characteristically pathetic, pointless, jerky motion and nearly always ends up sitting back down where it flew up.”

Eye on nature

I came across a jellyfish stranded on the beach at Clogherhead on February 24th. I saw a similar one in March 2009, which you identified as a barrel jellyfish.

Florence Shields, Clogherhead, Co Louth

From looking at your photograph, it was a barrel jellyfish, Rhizostoma octopus.

I had the great pleasure of seeing two great crested grebes indulging in a beautiful courtship ceremony on Roundwood reservoir. I read that they are normally found in the north of the country.

Phaedra Keogh, Ashford, Co Wicklow

They are also found on the Wicklow reservoirs.

We have been planting around a large pond in a remote part of our eight acres and letting it go wild. When checking on it I found a series of holes, about six by nine inches deep, in and around which were deposited droppings. Was this an otter or a fox?

Paul Keogh, Fenit, Co Kerry

You came on a badgers’ latrine.

This year in my pond I witnessed three frogs clamped together. The one in the middle, fat with spawn, had one frog on her back with legs tightly wrapped around her, the other on her front with legs wrapped around both.

Brian Griffin, Knocklyon, Dublin

The males were competing.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or email viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address