Filming Butterflies on The Isle of Wight
18 June 2009
I’d not been to the Isle of Wight since I was about seven, when my family regularly holidayed in Ventnor, but now I have been back twice in one month!
The reason for these visits is that I have written a novel about Eleanor Glanville and the butterfly that is named after her is only now found (in the UK) on the Isle of Wight. And….it is only to be found there during a few short weeks in early summer….when the sun shines, and if the colony does not decide to shift itself overnight, that is!
Both of my trips involved a BBC film crew.
One of the other writers looked after by my agent, Broo Doherty, is Stephen Moss, whose beautiful ‘Bumper Book of Nature’ was launched in the Spring, and it was Broo’s brilliant idea that I should come along to Stephen’s launch party at the Natural History Museum to meet him. He is also a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, works on The One Show, and was interested in taking me over to the Isle of Wight with a film crew to ‘meet’ Eleanor’s Glanville Fritillary for the first time.
I had a lovely time at the launch party, and when I went to Bristol to discuss the film with Stephen. There then followed various discussions with an Isle of Wight butterfly enthusiast, Ian Pratt , as to when the butterflies were likely to emerge and when would be a good time to film them.
A date was set and ferry tickets were booked. The Isle of Wight has more hours of sunshine per day than anywhere else in the UK, apparently, but we happened to have picked a couple of days when the weather forecast was dire – solid heavy rain. So the trip was postponed to the following week.
Fortunately, the sun then came out, gloriously, as did the butterflies. Given that they are one of the UK’s rarest species, I’d been expecting to see one or two, if we were lucky. I was totally unprepared to see swarms of them, mating, basing and generally flitting about as butterflies do. Nor did I expect them to be quite so pretty. I’d seen pictures, but they failed to convey their exquisite delicacy and the vibrancy of the colours – orange and black with an almost luminous rim of white, and a shimmery, silver underwing.
They performed beautifully for us, and I had the best time I’ve had in ages. As a writer, I don’t get out much, but I used to work for the BBC in a former life, so it was a particular treat to hang out by the sea at Wheeler’s Bay with the film crew, and with presenter, lecturer and explorer, George McGavin, who is The One Show’s resident bug man. He was a delight to work with, funny and charming, enthusiastic and passionate and wonderfully eccentric - just how I’d imagined Eleanor Glanville being when I was writing about her, in fact.
There are no portraits of her (that I know of), so her butterflies are the closet we can get to her in a way. And thanks to George, I was able to get really close! He clearly has a way with insects (just like Eleanor, he has several named after him after all) and he cajoled one of the little Fritillaries to sit obligingly on his finger!
I was undecided whether or not just to move to the island for the month, since BBC Inside Out, the regional news programme for the south, had also contacted me wanting to film a piece about the Glanville Fritillary, and date was set for the week after the One Show filming.
This time the presenter was Matthew Oates, National Trust Conservation Officer and butterfly expert. We found a colony of Glanville Fritillaries on the cliffs at Compton Bay, but when we came to film the next morning, they had vanished. Butterfly collectors in Eleanor’s day were viewed with great superstition and suspicion, accused of sorcery and witchcraft and necromancy, because butterflies were thought to represent the souls of the dead and were put forth as proof that alchemy was possible. Matthew decided that there must be some witchcraft at work! But we did find one pretty newly emerged butterfly to film at Compton and returned to Wheeler’s Bay to film some more. This visit coincided with a rather spectacular immigration of Painted Lady butterflies and I also saw my first Clouded Yellow.
After the filming was over, my husband three young children - one of whom is the same age I was when I last visited the Isle of Wight - joined me on the beach and we had a lovely time body-boarding and building sandcastles.
The One Show feature will be broadcast on 27 July and Inside Out in September.
1 comment
Written by Island Eye on 16 July 2010 at 13:30:00
Definitely life is full of changes ...sometimes it is important to take them.