Early sightings hold promise for butterfly spotters

Last summer was the fourth worst since scientific monitoring began in 1976, but let's be delighted and count these small blessings

I don't want to jinx it so I'm only whispering but, shhh, we may be blessed with a half-decent butterfly summer. Last week, I saw a purple emperor, tipsy on sap from an old oak, lurching around a meadow on a deeply overcast day that normally only brings out the ringlets and meadow browns.

Like most of our 59 native butterflies, the midsummer-loving purple emperor has emerged ten days earlier than usual. On the exuberant rewilded farmland of Knepp Castle, West Sussex, there are more emperors flying than anywhere else in the country. This iridescent beauty inspires great obsession and its leading devotees, Matthew Oates of the National Trust and Butterfly Conservation's Neil Hulme, spotted 148 emperors in one day last week. That's extreme butterflying.