Not just about the butterflies

Common cow-wheat

Common cow-wheat (Melampyrum pratense) is a reasonably common plant in the woods near where I live, with its small, creamy-yellow trumpets and delicate foliage, in places, carpeting patches of the woodland floor. It is, in its own right, an attractive and welcome part of any woodland scene, but as with any component of a habitat or ecosystem its significance extends further than the confines of its own life cycle.

In the case of common cow-wheat this significance lies within its role as the foodplant for the caterpillars of the rare heath fritillary. This is a butterfly that seems historically to have never been especially common in the UK and which persist with us on the brink. It has always hung on in parts of the South West and in Kent, and was reintroduced to a handfull of Essex woods in the 1990s to help it edge a little further from the precipice of extinction. I am fortunate to have a couple of these woods on, as it were, my doorstep.

A Pound Wood Heath Fritillary (Melitaea athalia)

I have spent a great deal of time in one of these, the Essex Wildlife Trust’s Pound Wood nature reserve (the subject, as it happens, of my modest, inaugural literary endeavour). The butterflies here have had their ups and downs over the years, but are doing fine; their June flight is one of the delights of early-summer. Yet, with some irony, it is their rarity and unobtrusive beauty that perhaps masks the presence of the wider-reaching ecology of their all important foodplant and even, at times, other rarity.

For instance, in Pound Wood another, decidedly more understated Lepidopteran patron of cow-wheat abounds. Anania fuscalis – sometimes afforded the English name of the cinerous pearl – is one of the larger so-called micro-moths. Compared to the more obvious ones of their butterfly cousins, the charms of these small, greyish moths require closer examination, but are nevertheless there to be found within the fine detail of their more sombre tones. They are fairly common and widespread in places where cow-wheat (and related yellow-rattle – Rhinanthus minor) are similarly numerous.

Anania fuscalis

I few days ago I discovered another cow-wheat devotee in the wood. The cow-wheat shieldbug (Adomerus biguttatus) is also something of a rarity in the UK, suffering a similar fate (although not quite as drastically) as the butterfly. Some shieldbugs are chunky, fairly easily observed creatures. Not so this species, a fact proved by my only recent discovery having spent many, many hours in the wood. Despite a modestly striking appearance, at around half a centimetre in length it is not easily found, something further exacerbated by a tendency of the adults to live on the ground around the foodplant and to burrow into the leaf litter at any disturbance.

I am happy to admit that eventually finding this little bug in the wood was on a par with the continued presence of that rare butterfly, something which I am sure would have drawn a few curious looks to some passers by as I squatted among the swathe of little yellow flowers, striving to get a shot of it.

Cow-wheat Shieldbug (Adomerus biguttatus)

Cow-wheat can be an abundant coppice plant in Pound Wood