September 2025 Ramsbury Nature Notes by Peter Marren

Wall brown butterfly

By the second week in August the landscape was looking autumnal; the pale, parched grass contrasting with the deep green foliage of late summer. This is an outstanding season for berries (basically the more sunshine, the better the juice). I ate my first ripe blackberry as early as mid-July. Hawthorns in full sun are glistening with their blood-red haws, cherry plums and wild apples are falling, and the clematis has already reached its seeding 'old man's beard' phase. Sloes were ripening fast, and so were the larger wild plums or damsons, plump and tasty with that delicious bloom on their deep purple skin. Another example of nature's bounty is honeycomb. I've seen several places where badgers have dug up a bumblebee's nest to luxuriate in the dripping honey.

The oaks are having another fine mast year, at least on the sunny side, with acorns swelling in their stalked, pipe-like cups. Some oaks will be smothered with galls made by tiny wasps. Commonest are the crinkly 'knopper' galls which develop on the budding acorns, and the masses of little 'spangle' galls on the underside of the leaves. I've also noticed lots of the fuzzy-red 'robin's pincushion' galls on wild roses.

You won't need me to tell you there are a lot more butterflies this year! One normally quite rare one, the wall butterfly (its wings do look a little like bricks) has visited gardens, including mine. Brimstones and peacocks are feeding up and will soon go into hibernation. One very special visitor as pretty as any butterfly is the Jersey tiger-moth which was also visiting gardens in August. Unlike the other tiger-moths, which are spotted, this one really does have tiger stripes on its forewings. In hot weather it's likely to go to sleep for a while, a habit shared by several moths and known as aestivation. Another exciting species found in a garden recently is the lesser stag-beetle, whose larva spends several years inside a trunk, eating heartwood. It likes dead ash trees, so is likely to be doing well! You can tell it from the better-known stag beetle in being smaller, less shiny and without those monstrous 'horns'.