This winter I’m getting a lot of people asking why there are so many butterflies still around. Well, the answer is, it’s not unusual in a warm place like South Africa. In the Lowveld and on the east coast people often say there are two summers – a hot one and a cool one.

  There may be a few reasons why there seems to be more of them around this year. Climate change? Maybe it makes sense that if the warm weather lasts for longer, the flight periods are extended. But it’s not as simple as that. Changes in rainfall patterns are probably a more likely cause. Southern Africa has had several wetter years now – part of the ‘La Nina’ cycle of wet and dry decades thought to be driven by oscillations of warm water sloshing about side to side in the Pacific Ocean.

  In wet years plants get a boost. And plants being the primary producers in our ecosystem, it makes sense that more plants equals more primary consumers. Butterfly larvae (their caterpillars, as well as moths’) are major small herbivores. More rainfall equals more butterflies, particularly if a wet year is followed by a slightly drier one when the adults are more likely to be visible to us humans. And that’s what’s happening now.

  In the subtropical areas of Africa there are two main peaks of butterfly (and moth) activity – (together they are known as Lepidoptera – the difference is a matter of opinion, but that’s a story for another day). Each peak occurs towards the end of a rainy season and extends into the dry season. Here in the southern hemisphere the May to September dry season is longer and cooler than the December to February one. Vegetation becomes dry and sere (withered and sparse), and the colour palette moves from the green to the brown. Butterflies that have multiple broods in a year can adapt to that. Down here on the edges of the subtropical zone it can get decidedly wintery on high ground. Some species adapt to that as well. Let’s look at some examples.

  There are many examples of ‘dry season forms’ in the bushveld and they can pose a real challenge to butterfly watchers!

  Orange tips

  Africa has many of these; they can be very conspicuous when ‘nectaring’ on the low growing flowers that often grow along roadsides. Although they are brightly coloured, they can be as difficult as the ‘LBJ’s’ that give birders such a hard time. The wet season forms are usually darker with more extensive markings than the dry season forms; there is an infinite variety of forms between the two extremes. Fortunately, the butterfly experts were very OCD and tried to give each form its own name! Unfortunately, they’re all in latin…

  Southern small orange tip

  An example of a typical ‘orange tip’, this is a dry country butterfly with a huge range, from the eastern Cape right up into north Africa, Arabia, and Spain. The black spot in the male’s orange tip makes him easy to tell apart from the numerous other ‘orange tips’. The females however can be much more variable.