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Painted Lady butterflies are nomads. They carry out a 7.500-mile round trip from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle every year. They cover up to 100 miles per day at an altitude of up to 3,000 feet and a maximum speed of 30mph. They are the most widely distributed butterfly in the world.

It is usually the children of the original migrants that arrive in the UK in May, having been born on route, in Spain, and then it is a third generation that return South in September.

In the record-breaking heat, the National Trust attributed the butterfly boom, one of the nature highlights of the year, to climate change. Painted Lady butterflies were among many migrants and plants that enjoyed a bumper year.

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A group of visiting Painted Lady butterflies.
Image: Veronica Bosley via Pixabay

Many different cultures share beliefs about butterflies as spirits.

Blackfeet Native Americans thought that the butterfly spirit brings us our dreams and the Navaho regarded butterflies as an emblem of happiness and, along with other cultures, a symbol of rebirth.

In ancient Egypt and Rome butterflies were believed to be the souls of the dead, and in ancient Greek the word for butterfly is ‘psyche’ which means ‘soul’.

The Aztecs believed that the happy dead in the form of butterflies would visit their relatives to assure them that all was well, and in Mexico, on the holiday known as the Day of the Dead, butterflies are seen as their returned souls.

In the 17th Century, in Ireland, it was even against the law to kill a white butterfly because of the belief that it bore a dead child’s spirit, similarly in Germany.

In Japan there is a belief that white butterflies are the personification of a person’s soul whether they be living, dying or already dead, and the butterfly-souls of your ancestors are regarded as guardian angels to help you, or warn you against danger.

This idea of a creature embodying a living person’s soul was used by Philip Pullman in his trilogy, His Dark Materials (brilliantly dramatized on BBC TV).

Pullman’s ‘daemons’ though were always close to their soulmates and died when they died, whereas the Japanese butterfly souls are true ‘free spirits’, free to roam, and continuing life after death.

It is Red Admiral butterflies that are generally found to be unafraid of human beings and calmly sit on them. They are not long-distance migrants, hibernating during the winter.

September, when there is most nectar, is a great time to spot them as their numbers are boosted by further migrants from across the channel.

Because of their affinity with us, more than most they are the species often regarded in myth as those symbolising our souls, and in view of their life cycle, the transformation of the soul through resurrection.

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A Red Admiral butterfly - the 'psyche on my sleeve'.
Image: Emphyrio via Pixabay

Shakespeare wrote 154 Sonnets, 14-line poems which follow a strict rhyme-scheme and metre (rhythm when spoken).

They are widely regarded as some of the finest love poems ever written. However, Shakespeare was fully aware that where there is love, there is grief.

His only son, Hamnet, born to his wife Anne (Hathaway), died at the age of eleven. Hamnet’s non-identical twin, a girl, and their other daughter survived. The cause of Hamnet’s death is not known, but it was possibly from the bubonic plague, rife at the time.

In London, where Shakespeare was then working, the plague claimed one quarter of the population. In the outbreak of 1592-93 the Crown ordered the complete closure of all London theatres.

Shakespeare was in the middle of a run of his King Henry VI History plays at the Rose theatre, a financial disaster. He would likely also have lost some of his friends to the epidemic. Sound familiar?

Sonnet 30 deals with the pain of grief, the fact that we never really get over the loss of a loved one. In the final two lines though Shakespeare holds out some hope of closure.

I will leave the last words to the Bard: 

'But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.'