Day 71 - A flutter in the data

I read recently that butterfly numbers in the UK are in serious trouble. Data gathered over fifty years — more than 44 million records from hundreds of thousands of volunteer surveys — tells a story that is, at best, complicated, and at worst, deeply troubling.

Of 59 native species monitored, 33 are in decline. The white-letter hairstreak, whose caterpillars apparently glow under ultraviolet light, has fallen in number by 80%. The pearl-bordered fritillary — a striking orange-and-black butterfly whose caterpillars feed only on violets — has declined by 70%. Even the small tortoiseshell, once a common sight in British gardens, has dropped by 87%.

There are some brighter notes. The Large Blue, declared extinct in 1979, has recovered thanks to conservation effort. The orange tip is up more than 40%. Some species are adapting, expanding northward as temperatures rise. But the picture is, as one scientist put it, a growing divide between those who can adapt and those who cannot.

I found myself sitting with that phrase.

A growing divide between those who can adapt and those who cannot.

Isn't that so often the shape of crisis? The flexible survive; the specialists — those whose lives are woven tightly into a particular place, a particular relationship, a particular ecosystem — are the ones who fall. You could say it about churches, pubs and clubs, shops on the high street: we've lost variety and diversity in communities that once belonged to a richer, more intricate world.

Creation, I am reminded, is not a backdrop. It is not scenery against which the human story plays out. It is, as the opening pages of Genesis insist, declared good — not useful, not decorative, but good in itself, before we arrive to name it. The pearl-bordered fritillary does not need to justify its existence to us. The white-letter hairstreak, with its ultraviolet caterpillars, is a small marvel no committee approved and no market created.

We are in the season between Easter and Pentecost — a season of waiting, of noticing, of attending to what is emerging and what is fragile. The disciples, in those weeks after the resurrection, were learning to see differently. Mary in the garden, mistaking the risen Christ for a gardener, perhaps wasn't as wrong as she thought. There is something about tending, about caring for living things, that keeps us close to the holy.

In Psalm 104, the writer marvels at a world teeming with creatures — each one sustained, each one dependent on the breath of God: When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust; when you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground (Psalm 104:29-30).

The butterflies are asking us something. Not in words, but in numbers — in presence and absence, in what still flickers through a summer meadow and what no longer does.

Are we paying attention?

Lord of all life, forgive us when we have been careless with the world you declared good. Give us eyes to see what is disappearing, courage to act while there is time, and the grace to tend this earth as those who know themselves to be guests within it. Amen.

Neil Chappell

Image: White-letter Hairstreak | Satyrium w-album | Bob Eade | butterfly-conservation.org/butterflies/white-letter-hairstreak