You have my permission to be lazy...
Most of the sparks which set me off on a writing foray come from my photographs. I browse aimlessly (and happily) through my archives of photographs and one will pop out and set me off on a kind of writing-fuelled thought-journey...
More often than not, I don't know where that journey is taking me until I reach the very end of the the piece. It's quite lovely!
Today's inspiration is this photograph of a skipper and a marbled white. These are species of butterfly which take to the air in the late spring and through the summer, carrying pollen from one plant to another as the go about their business of feeding so they can lay their eggs to propagate their species.
Butterflies can lay between 20 and 300 eggs on their 'chosen' plant - the plant on which they know their caterpillars will best thrive. It seems like quite a large number, doesn't it? It is, until you consider that some of those eggs fail to hatch, are predated, or damaged in some way by environmental factors. The ones which make it to the point of hatching emerge as caterpillars - something you are, I am certain, familiar with. This is where the 'running of the gauntlet' continues... the caterpillar has to 'dodge' the veracity of the blue tit, or the cuckoo, or the frog or the toad. It has to survive the myriad human factors which can thwart its survival too; pesticides, mowing, carelessly placed feet... you get the picture.
It keeps eating, regardless - forever - and ever - it is VERY HUNGRY indeed (tip of the hat to Eric Carle). Its sole aim at this stage of its life is to consume enough calories to develop into new body tissue so it can begin to pupate. It doesn't understand what breeding is, nor does it care about finding a mate. It just wants to eat so it can grow bigger and stronger and turn into a pupa.
Pupation is the process whereby the caterpillar builds itself an organic dressing room which has just a single garment in it, and it takes off its caterpillar onesie, swapping it for a beautiful butterfly shaped evening-gown.
At this point, those 20-300 eggs have dwindled to around 20% in number so we are left with between 4 and 60 pupae to move to the next stage of lifecycle... the absolutely stunning adult butterfly.
And here we go again! The trials of being a butterfly continue and the next sole purpose is to collect the resources needed to make the best possible eggs and that is ALL that a butterfly cares about at this stage. It MUST have:
1) a food source - this might be nectar, but it might also be the salts and minerals that exist on the surface of a big poo, or even a dead animal - butterflies aren't all petals and sweet scents, you know!
2) a mate - but not just any mate. It must be the best, possible mate in the area. It must be a beautiful mate, a strong mate, and an alluring mate. The male is less fussy, but the female is very choosy indeed. She wants her eggs to produce the very best and strongest caterpillars. So she shrugs off those scruffy-looking weak and meagre males and seeks out the most pristine, and handsome example she can find and allows them to mate with her.
Now, during this process, the butterfly has to survive predation once more - from all of those greedy birds, and reptiles and even other insects and of course, the arachnids! They must weave in and out of traffic without becoming a windscreen or bonnet casualty. At this point our original numbers are seriously reduced and maybe 20% of the pupae which emerged will go on to successfully mate. In real terms, this means we are down to between 0.8 (NOUGHT POINT EIGHT!!!) and 12 butterflies managing to go on to successfully produce eggs. And this is in a GOOD year. In bad years, many fewer will succeed.
So, you see, it's a tough old gig for a butterfly to keep its species going - and we can make things so much better for them by simply allowing some of our neatly clipped lawns to develop into wildflower havens. You needn't even plant seeds!
It's not just butterflies either - that same patch of ground can support many, MANY different species! Imagine the feeling... the utter joy of being responsible for assisting the propagation of perhaps 30 or 40 different species just by cutting a section of your lawn as short as possible, and leaving it for a year until it seeds. Just one, or two cuts - preferably by hand, with a sickle or some shears - per year and you could be your own kind of demi-god - breathing new life into the world by doing less than you were doing last year. A wildlife superhero, no less!
It's important to remove the clippings because the clippings can add extra nutrients to the ground which in turn encourages the more vigorous species of plant to choke out the others - poor quality soil is KEY here. We are trying to perform the job of the selective grazer - the deer, the rabbit, the goat, the pony, and the cow to name a few... they don't leave the grass they chomp on the ground where they pulled it - they swallow it and deposit it in packets in random blobs of poo. Now, I am not suggesting that you go and have a poo in your garden, but do remove the clippings. You can go one step further if you wish, by composting the clippings down so you can use a compacted handful of last years compost in little poo-sized heaps across your newly created little patch of nature's paradise.
Be patient, too - it's the second and third year where all this comes to fruition. The diversity of a piece of less-oft-cut ground increases with time so in the first year you might get a lot of grass and not much else - perhaps the odd daisy or patch of clover - but in the second year... well... you just wait and see.
And there you have it... GO.. DO LESS... and GET MORE!