Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. I'm Julie Backer, a librarian at West Vancouver Memorial Library. Welcome to Bring Back the Butterflies, a webinar with Richard Byrd that we're presenting in partnership with the Lighthouse Park Preservation Society. While we recognize that we are all in different places this afternoon, we would like to acknowledge that both Lighthouse Park and West Vancouver Memorial Library are situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Squamish, Slewitu, and Musqueam nations. We recognize and respect them as nations and their historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. When I think of the beauty of Lighthouse Park and the abundance of BC's fauna, such as our butterflies, I am grateful for the care and dedication to the land that has lived by the first nations. I am pleased that today's talk is part of the library's Earth Week celebrations this year. Earlier today, the library partnered with the West Vancouver Stream Keepers and the Coho Society of the North Shore to have kids release fish in McDonald Creek, so I'm thrilled that we've managed to celebrate animals both of the water and of the air today. Before we begin our butterfly adventures, a few housekeeping details. Today we will be using the closed caption feature for the hearing impaired. The program is automatically transcribed by Zoom, so please understand that it may not be a perfectly accurate transcription, especially with scientific terms. You will need to enable closed captioning by pressing the CC live transcript button in the menu area where you can see the mute button and all the other options. This is a webinar, so while you can see and hear us, we cannot see or hear you. We will not be using the chat or raise hand features. There's a Q&A option on your bottom menu bar. You may use that feature to type in any questions that you may have whenever you have them. We encourage you to do so throughout Richard's lecture. I will be monitoring the questions throughout the talk and ask them of Richard as time permits after he has finished speaking. You can also contact me through the Q&A if you're having any technical issues. I'll attempt to assist you once Richard has started his talk. It is being recorded and will be available on the West Vancouver Memorial Library YouTube channel, and we'll make sure that Lighthouse Park Preservation Society gets the link put on its website as well. I am now going to turn things over to Richard who will introduce himself and talk about bringing back the butterflies. Richard, over to you. Hello and thank you for having me. I have a lifelong interest in butterflies starting at the age of six years old and I can actually remember the moment when I became involved. And since that time I've done a bit of traveling here and there, observing butterflies, catching butterflies, releasing butterflies. More recently, in British Columbia, I've reared about a quarter of the species that are in the province to study their life history, and in particular the plants that they live on. So I will further delay, I will introduce butterflies and bringing back the butterflies. So conservation restoration is a challenge in today's changing world. And to really appreciate the significance of it, we have to look at the very broad picture, expanded horizons. And this is a diagram of life on earth since complex life began. The left hand scale represents time, starting with the present up at the top here, going back about 550 million years to the pre Cambrian. And the diagram on the right represents the number of species on the earth, starting at the bottom five hundred odd million years ago with a comparatively small number of species. And the gradually widening gray area represents an increasing number of species as a habitats on earth get a little more diverse. And then we have the sharp indentation here, which represents the first mass global extinction. And then from there, the recovers past the original number of species to establish a new record number of species before the second mass extinction event. The same thing happens to an even greater number of species, third max extinction event, fourth expansion, fourth event extinction, fifth expansion, and now another expansion events. And now, this is the time when the dinosaurs disappeared. So, now we have recovered over the last 65 million years beyond that number of species until comparatively recently, a record number of species on the planet. And now we are entering the sixth mass extinction. And the sixth max extinction might look something like the green line where we lose a quarter of the world species, or it'll look more like the red line where we lose 50% of the species on the planet. Now, the things to notice about the chart is, once there is an extinction event, it takes 60 to 100 million years to recover to the original number of species. So, if we have a mass extinction event, this time around to lose 50% of the species, it'll take more than 100 million years before we recover to that number of species. And the other thing about this diagram is that the previous five extinction events were all related to some astronomical events of a huge terrestrial event, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which was supposedly an asteroid impact on the planet. This sixth extinction event is due to one species and its effect on the planet, namely homo sapiens. So, why do we say that we lose, might lose a quarter to half the percentage of species on the planet? Well, amphibians can be regarded as a good indicator for future events because they are particularly vulnerable to their environment, to toxins, because they depend on both water and land, most of them, for their existence, and they also breathe through their skin. So, those factors make them very vulnerable and they're perhaps an indicator of what happens to the rest of the groups. And it's estimated that about half of amphibians on the planet are either in very rapid decline, or they are very rare. But amphibians are also not the easiest animal to spot all of the time. So in another sense, there may be not the greatest, not the most in your face indicator of what's happening to life on Earth. I do a lot of restoration work, spend a lot of my time rummaging around in the soil, looking under leaf letter, and it takes about an hour, 100 hours of such work, on average, before I come across one salamander. This one is in Satina salamander, photographed at Piccadilly Park in North Vancouver, and even when it's there, you can see it's quite cryptic and quite easy to miss. So perhaps we need a more in your face indicator of what's happening with life. And butterflies perhaps are the best example. These happen to be the ones that I have read in British Columbia. And these are the ones that are on the North Shore, fewer than the interior, because at these latitudes, the high rainfall tends to prejudice against large numbers of butterflies and moths. So 30 years ago when I made this box, I called this common butterflies of the North Shore. And I should perhaps rename this slide now because nowhere, none of these species are particularly common. With the sole exception of this guy here and near the bottom right hand corner, the cabbage butterfly, which is a non native and invasive species from Europe. And now it probably outnumbers all the rest of our native butterflies put together. So why the reason for the decline? Well, to understand that, we have to talk about life cycle. So butterflies life starts as an egg. So these eggs, this one was laid very recently, the one on the right laid perhaps 10 days previously. And here they are on the food plant of this butterfly, which is wild celery grows on the fourth shore or sea watch. So this egg, both eggs, this egg first will emerge a caterpillar, maybe about a millimeter long. It will eat its egg shell, nothing gets wasted before it starts munching on the edge of the plant. And then a few weeks later, millimeter turns into something nearly five centimeters long with the cryptic coloring. And here a swallowtail unique to swallowtails they have this organism in their head, which is smells, and they wave it about when a predator threatens, not always effectively. And this same caterpillar. Here it is. It's now undergoing undergoing its last skin change spun its silk to support it. And then the final skin change sees it form this people. And that's how it will spend the winter. And here in the spring, this is the old people. This is a leaf on the plant. And here is a butterfly having just emerged from the people. And it's allowing its wings to expand and dry, maybe for an hour or so before it's ready to fly. And this is the butterfly, the anise swallowtail arguably the most spectacular butterfly of our region. And it used to be present on the shore of Burrard inlet, but it's extirpated from bar in Burrard inlet. Now extinction is really a series of extirpatients. So we say the butterfly is extirpated from Burrard inlet, but it still exists elsewhere. Here's another swallowtail. This time the pale swallowtail. And this is a fairly new caterpillar. It's only about three or four millimeters long. And the camouflage you could argue is maybe trying to imitate bird poo. And here it's been feeding on the leaf, which is red alder. Here is the same caterpillar, and it's just on the go and it's fourth skinned shed, because as it grows it out grows its skin. The tail end of the caterpillar. And now it's changed its camouflage because when you're a few centimeters long, probably no good looking like bird poo. You have to adopt another strategy. So it's got these false eyes, maybe to try and look a little intimidating. And it's also adopted this green color to try and blend in with the leaves. You might be able to see the silk pad on which it's resting, and that gives it a firm grasp of the leaf. So when the older tree is blooming around in a windstorm, the caterpillar doesn't get shaken off the leaf. Here is the same caterpillar. And it's just undergoing its last skin change, its fifth skin change. And this is how it will spend the winter. That's not a piece of dental floss. It's silk, which the caterpillar has made. And if you look carefully, you can see the wing of the pupa. You can see the body segments and a few little breathing holes down the side. So this, together with the, this is the pale swallowtail, freshly emerged, they'll soon be out in May. And it and the western tiger swallowtail, these are two biggest species locally. Now I have a particular like for the western tiger swallowtail, because it's, it's probably our most spectacular common, commonest butterfly. And it inspired me to write a small piece, because it's one of the only butterflies that I have ever heard. I've only heard a butterfly three times in my life. And it was the western tiger swallowtail that was responsible for that. So I wrote a little piece called Sounds That Butterflies Make. It was the sort of late spring day where life seemed to burst from every pixel. I was appreciating a window of peace between episodes of small aircraft noise. The rocky outcrop covered in moss and spring flowers was an island in the still forest when over the trees came a visitor from another island. Large and bright yellow, it came in that undulating halting flight unique to a swallowtail butterfly. All fall, winter and spring, it had remained suspended as a pupa, and now was its two weeks in the sun. It dropped down into the clearing in a series of wingbeats and glides, a newly emerged male searching. It flew towards me, not directly, but in that jinking erratic way that teases you and has you willing it closer. I stood still. Any movement might cause it to veer away. On it came vertical black stripes visible now on the yellow wings. 10 feet, 5 feet, right beside my face. In the instant I lost sight of it, inches from my right ear, I sensed a movement that was both barely a sound and a faint kiss of air, a blink of magic. And it was a blink of magic, because as I say, it was only the three times, one or three times in my life where I've actually heard a butterfly. So this is the old, oldie of the butterfly world. The morning cloak, most butterflies as adults live for a couple of weeks. This butterfly can live for up to 10 months. So it emerges in July and it will hibernate in the winter in a wood pile or perhaps in the eaves under a shed. It has to overwinter to become sexually mature. And then in May they mate and they lay clusters of eggs, which leads clusters of caterpillars here on Willow. So this is the specific plant for morning cloak. And then the pupate and the butterfly emerges in June or so. And so if you, because it hibernates, if you see this butterfly flying around in January, could well be a morning cloak, because they are able to elevate their body temperature on a warm day in January to the point where they can fly and have a few minutes or a couple of hours in the sun on a particularly warm day. Now I have a particular liking for this butterfly, because this is the red admiral and this is the butterfly that is responsible for my lifelong interest in conservation. Because at the age of six, my neighbor near London had a flowering bush and groups of these red admirals and peacocks would come to nectar on the bush. And so I would be next door with my little six pence net, catching and releasing these butterflies before being chased off by a neighbor. And so the angle wing has something very important in common with the red admiral. And this is the butterfly also along with the morning cloak, which overwinter as an adult butterfly. So this is the other butterfly that you might see flying in January. The third butterfly has something important in common with the Saturn angle wing and the red admiral is the Milbert's tortoise shell. So what do they have in common. Well, part they don't have this in common. This is peculiar to the Milbert's tortoise shell because this is the butterfly with the golden pupa. And this is a nugget from the Yukon as a comparison. And the ones I read only about 10% were this golden color. So what are these three butterflies have in common the Milbert's tortoise shell Saturn angle wing and red admiral, their specific food plant is stinging nettle. They will not lay their eggs or breed on any other kind of plant. Now this particular patches stinging nettles, this photo was taken about 30 years ago, is in Caulfield Park in West Vancouver, you can see maybe Stearman beach in the far distance here. And I used to find Saturn angle wings, eggs and caterpillars along with the other two regularly on this patch. Now this patch does not exist, because it's been out competed by Himalayan Blackberry, which formed a thicket and crowded out this plant so this patch no longer exists. Now on this patch I also used to take cuttings of the young plants just as they were emerging. So I've come down to the trouble you may remember the beachside cafe where nettle soup courtesy of my cuttings appeared on the menu a couple of times. And a butterfly with an interesting life history is the Lachwins Admiral, seen here, seen nectaring on Salal. The butterfly has a lot of interesting life history because the caterpillars emerge from the egg in about July. They only feed for a couple of weeks, and then as a very small caterpillar, they chew the leaf, spirea or willow, in a way that they are able to draw the leaf together with their silk and form a little tube. So they spend the winter. And then when spring comes in May, they start feeding again to reach the full grown caterpillar stage pupate for the adult to emerge in June. This is the favorite of mine. This is the spring Azure, and these will be just emerging about now, other than the ones that overwinter the morning cloak, and the Saturday angle wing. These are the first butterflies you see in the spring. Most of the butterflies we've seen so far, the males and females are much alike. But the spring Azure, the sexes are a little different. This is a female, she's got a dark border around the wings. And when she flies, she's a little more cryptic, slightly harder to spot than the male, which is totally blue and very bright. So the first food plant is spirea and ocean spray. This is the only butterfly in our area other than the cabbage butterfly that might by some very occasionally be regarded as a pest. This is the pine white. Its food plant is Douglas fir. So it can on very rare years impact a little the foliage of a Douglas fir. And you can only see it on the in the treetops late July or the August week flight fluttering around. And this is a female that's come down to the ground to nectar and you can see her proboscis here. Sucking nectar up. This is the most wide spread butterfly in our area. This is the painted lady and painted ladies are present on every continent except Antarctica and South America. This photograph was taken on a recent hike I did in the South Sinai in Egypt.  She'll probably fly further north to lay eggs on her food plant, in this case, Malo, and the offspring in turn will fly north. And in certain years you have large numbers of these in UK, northern Europe, even Scandinavia. The painted ladies in our area. The wintering grounds are in Sonoran Desert in Mexico. So in some years and only some years they make it in large numbers up up here for one conditions are just right. This is the smallest butterfly in our area, the woodland skipper. And you can see it with its proboscis here and nectaring on Aster. And the woodland skipper emerges very late in the year in late July through to September. We do have an invasive skipper here and on the European skippling which is increasing in numbers but you can see this is a woodland skipper by the yellowish lines by the mottling on the wings. So I'm going to rename the local butterflies according to their food plot because this is what it's all about. It's not about the flowers that the butterflies nectar on. They've got lots of flowers to nectar on and they are not particularly choosy about what they nectar on. The key is in the caterpillar food plants. So I'm going to name them according to that. So we have older willow, willow and cottonwood, thistle and mallow, stinging nettle, stinging nettle, Douglas fir, stinging nettle, spirea and willow, spirea and ocean spray, lupin and salal, long grass, not the kind that's mown, and then finally the non-native which feeds on just about any member of the cabbage family. So you can see perhaps the big clue as to why these butterflies are becoming rarer with the exception of the cabbage white and that's because all the food plants they use are generally regarded as weeds and removed. Here is an aerial of the Colfield area in West Vancouver taken in 1984, shortly after the time that I moved here in around 1982, and you can see Lighthouse Park in the corner here. This is the same area taken today, not even 40 years later. And you can see the dramatic difference in terms of vegetation removal, removal of native plants. And that's not the only reason why butterflies are disappearing. Now, you might look at this strip of development here and think, well, there's always forest up here that butterflies can populate and the forest goes on for miles beyond that. But here's the thing, this strip, this developed strip, the conditions are dramatically different from up here. Up here is much cooler, much more rainfall. This is a special environment along the coastline where you get many more species that will not be able to do well further north. So it's not just the outright destruction of habitat that's responsible, it's also invasive plants which play a big role. I'm just going to read this out so everybody has access to it. Invasive species of animals, plants or other organisms which occur outside of their historic range of distribution where they become established and disperse, usually generating a negative impact on the local ecosystem and the plants and animals. So it's not all non-native plants that are a problem of the native plant, non-native plants that are imported here, only about 10% of them become established, i.e. can grow without continuing human intervention. So those 10% that become established, only 10% of those become invasive to the extent where they grow in dense patches and continually expand to affect the native vegetation. So of imported plants we could say that less than 1% become a problem and it's these 1% where we focus our efforts. So this is a very famous plant and I'm using it as an extreme example of a native plant and its native habitat. This is actually the burning bush of biblical fame Exodus chapter 3 which Moses experienced and it's been here for maybe 3,300 years and the next nearest one it's a blackberry and the next nearest one is a long, long way away. And you'd come across them occasionally where the water supply was particularly good. However, when a very closely related species, the Himalayan blackberry and the non-native habitat, they expand and they expand and I suspect that most people joining us today will have experienced and know exactly what I'm talking about. It comes to Himalayan blackberry and here is Himalayan blackberry actually caught in the act of smothering a native plant. This is harvest Brodea, a wonderful unusual little flower growing on rocky outcrops and this blackberry young now will soon cover this whole area. This is taken in Lighthouse Park and I think actually this particular blackberry has been dealt with now but let's do its own devices. It would inhibit the native plants around it so that only it would grow in this monoculture. So another characteristic, the same characteristic shown by Bohemian knotweed here over two meters tall in a patch near Cates Park in North Vancouver. And you can see why it inhibits other plants. There's nothing much can survive in the understory and where it's shady and compete with lack of light, lack of nutrients, lack of moisture. And there's also chemical warfare going on here because a lot of these invasive plants will secrete a chemical which actually inhibits other plants from growing. Another thing is shown here by Scotch broom. And here where there should be maybe nettles growing in wetter patches or spy rear or willows or any one of another native plants. There's just Scotch broom. Those are the plants which grow in sunny conditions and the next group of plants. They have a wider potential impact because as well as sunny conditions, they also grow in conditions of low light shady conditions. So therefore are capable of spreading throughout our native forest, which is still the most predominant habitat. The yellow lamium growing on the side of Brothers Creek in West Vancouver, and it forms such a dead match that it creates its own ecosystem because young trees cannot survive after a germination here because they're crowded out and may be affected by chemicals from from these plants. The lamium is a part which is particularly difficult to get rid of. This is one that I dissected in our garden, and it's their courtesy of previous neighbor who dumped a hanging basket containing lamium off her back deck. It took me several years to realize what was going on. Now we have to deal with this patch of lamium on an ongoing basis. The dissection reveals that the root is more than five times longer than the bit that's above the soil. The leaves and the stems. So when you're weeding it, inevitably you break off bits and it just keeps regrowing coming back year after year. One patch I worked on at North Piccadilly Park in West Vancouver. I think I counted eight times where I removed the spoiled patch and this was under ideal conditions flat nice friable loose forest soil and still the roots broke off and that patch came back. And here is a cocktail to more very common invasive species in our area, periwinkle, which is still sold at garden centers and English Ivy. And they have exact both of them have exactly the same effect of covering the ground and inhibiting anything else from growing. And this is a plant which is sometimes missed off the invasive plant radar screen. This is English Holly. And for every Holly tree that you see with berries like on a Christmas card, there are thousands of these in our native forest. Same effect covering the ground excluding the light excluding native plants. This is a survey I did on the edge of West Vancouver. And here this horizontal line is about 1.5 kilometers long. The mill stream road, and this line is about 500 million a meat 500 meters long, and each strip is 30 to 40 meters wide. This horizontal strip right on the edge of the urban area had 5% of its ground was covered in English Holly. The vertical line was at coverage of one and a quarter percent covered in English Holly. So English Holly is making its march northwards into the intact forest. And here is another plant Ivy actually spreading. This is the same area. This is the fence, the garden, and this is the plant spreading into the neighboring forest. Next stop Prince Rupert. And why do I say Prince Rupert? Because on this slide you can see the green area, which is the bio geoclimatic zone, our bio geoclimatic zone coastal western hemlock, which is stretches from here up to Alaska, an area of 11 million hectares. So what the conditions in this area, similar plants grow in this area in each zone. So in the south end of the area, where we have Holly and Ivy, it's just a matter of time, probably before they get to Prince Rupert, that's 11 million hectares, which we have impacted. And the problem about invasive plants is that nothing much eats them, which is good if you're a gardener in one way, just gardening for ornamentals, but not so good for the local wildlife. This is himmler and not weed. We have taken September. So these leaves have had all summer to have something feeding on them. And guess what? There's not a hole on any single leaf. Contrast it with red older. This was taken in June. These leaves have only been out a few weeks, and he had already those caterpillars and other things using this stuff, munching on it. They're creating this diversity. And when that happens, that means there's a whole secret world out there because it's not just about butterflies. We're talking about bringing back butterflies, but for every butterfly, there are maybe 100 species of moth. And that's a whole secret world out there represented by this cryptically colored moth. Here it is the outline on the trunk of this tree. So 100 moths to one butterfly, that's a lot of caterpillars out there. And that's the reason why birds such as this black-throated gray warbler and this yellow warbler, the reason why they migrate up from Central and South America. They come up here to breed because of all the caterpillars in the trees. So when we talk about enhancing butterflies, we're not just talking about enhancing butterflies. What I'm suggesting is one way of focusing on is to remove invasive plants and to replant with native plants. But butterflies, if that's where our focus is, but we're also planting for all these other species which will benefit. And also, by getting rid of invasive plants, we are hopefully slowing down the spread into the neighboring forest and slowing down the impact of invasive plants and affecting the whole ecosystem of the 11 million hectares in the neighboring coastal Western Hamlock Forest. So that's not all serious stuff. You can have a lot of fun with butterflies. I had a call from a teacher in West Vancouver many years ago and she had bought a kit for painted lady butterflies and they come and feed on this medium in the plastic dish. And she said, oh, we've got butterflies hatching. What do we do now? So I thought, this is an opportunity for a little school project. So I got my rearing cage down there with my work light and I put the butterflies in the cage with their food plot, thistle in this case. And before long, we had hundreds and hundreds of eggs. And a short time after that, about 10 days, we had hundreds and hundreds of caterpillars. And they needed all changing. So after school, three times a week, the mums and the kids would clean out the pots and put in fresh food plant. And a few weeks later, we had hundreds of butterflies. So I thought, well, what do we do now? It's like a lot of projects. They sort of tend to grow of their own accord. So I thought, let's try tagging them. So here I've got a rubber dam punch from Dentistry.  And with the smallest printing label I can find on the smallest font, I fold over a little tag. And that's why this painted lady has my telephone number on it. And then we released them at school. And I never expected to hear anything more, really, because after all, we only released a couple of hundreds. And when they did it with the monarch butterflies to track the migration to Mexico, they did tens of thousands of them. And about a week later, I was chatting to a friend of mine who was a biologist, and he was hiking on Black Mountain. And he said, Dick, I've seen one of your butterflies. And so this was a painted lady released in mid June. And she had flown a few kilometers north to to Black Mountain. So this is this is about the future. This was taken many years ago. And that's butterflies. And I'd be very happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much, Richard. That was so fascinating. We do have some questions coming in. I am going to go to a few of them now. First one, Jane would like to know what is the botanical name of Malo that you mentioned is the favorite food of painted ladies. It's, I can't give you the species name, but it's Malva m a l v a. And it's a common Malo. And we have some in our garden. It's got these beautiful pink flowers. And that also grows in profusion. I saw a lot of it when I was hiking in Israel. And that's why, and just the sideline the painted ladies I've never seen so many butterflies in my life was on that trip. There were thousands just within a within one's view at any one time. And occasionally we get to a point here where we get maybe a couple of dozen view at any one time. And I can't give you the species name, but you'll find it. It's a pink pink Malo growing, growing, growing here. Thank you. We have another question from an anonymous attendee. Have wildlife groups tried to get nurseries to stop selling invasive plants. Could municipalities ban sales of them, as they have done with pesticides. What can be done. Well, it's a, it's a difficult problem. I remember we had this discussion in the committee in West Vancouver, and I proposed the idea of banning the sale of invasive plants by local nurseries. And the, the, the argument against it was that people will be able to go into neighboring municipalities and buy the plant there. So that's, that's the argument. And I think probably will have to rely on education and moral persuasion so that people will come to realize that when they do plant something like periwinkle or Ivy or lamion that they are having a harmful effect on the, the local ecosystem. I found fascinating, Richard, that your comment was what was key is the caterpillar food plants because, you know, you go to the grocery store and you can see all sorts of, you know, wonderful flowers to attract pollinators to your garden including butterflies but apparently the key is the caterpillar food, which, as you say, are regarded as weeds. What can we do, you know, to to improve caterpillar food to increase butterflies across the lower mainland. Well, the, the list that the list that I gave you running through the list is the older trees and cottonwood trees and I realized those are very difficult to plant in one's garden, but they certainly have a place in our, in our parks and public public spaces in a garden maybe could hedge older trees quite successfully I do that by property on Keats Island, and the other plants can be planted I mean nettles have to be out of the way where people can brush up against them, they need good soil and they need moisture. And then the other plants can be planted or encouraged instead of invasive plants and things like Salel, leaving wild areas in your garden, not having everything really well cultivated and and carefully maintained. All those plants that I mentioned could all propagate quite well and can increasingly they are, but yeah well I say increasingly but mostly on a wholesale level they're actually quite hard to get hold of from most nurseries. So it requires some propagation or maybe salvaging from a developed lot or digging up seedlings that kind of thing. Stephen would like to know, and I'm a little embarrassed because I'm not sure if I know how to pronounce one of the words in this question but I'm going to give it a try to keep willow smaller, could they be copies copies in a rotation so we can keep more willows in smaller areas. Absolutely willows of copies very, very well, you can cut them cut them down and they resprout very successfully. So yes they are ideal for that. No question. I'm just going back to my to my other thought way way you have native plants and being invaded by non native plants. Sometimes you don't even need to replant you just remove the invasives and the native plants with a bit of supervision will come in off their own accord. Kitty would like to know how big a patch of nettles is necessary to attract butterflies. We need a very big patch. We had a patch in our garden. No bigger than this room and well actually was much more than this room maybe a quarter of the size of the room. And every year we used to get Melbourne's torture shells or read out rules on it, but they need to be in a fairly sunny place because butterflies do need some remember and the temperature. Continuing on the nettle theme, we've Stephen says that we have grown a patch of stinging nettles in our lane, but the leaves don't have any holes yet. When do we expect to see caterpillars. Okay, so the generally around June, I remember we're doing quite a lot of rearing in June, and actually you won't see many holes in singing nettle leaves because of the way that most singing nettle caterpillars feed. They'll either chew the leaf from the edge so you just see half a leaf rather than holes in the leaf like the slide I showed you of the older, or the caterpillar will feed inside the leaf. So it'll curl the leaf around it and eat the leaf from within. So you'll see a curled leaf and you won't see the actual caterpillar unless you open up the leaf. But where you do see caterpillars, I'm just thinking back to the Melbourne's torture shell, you'll see large numbers of caterpillars, you'll see large numbers of caterpillars feeding in a clump like in a black mass. When you walk up to the plant, they all drop off on mass, because that's their way of protection, calling into the undergrowth. And then if you're patient, you'll see them gradually calling up for refeed. Steven sends a thank you for that response. I also have a plug from Jane who says, being on the North Shore, we are lucky to have the Coast Salish Plant Nursery at Maplewood Flats that sells native plants so she does mention that as well. If anyone else has any questions, I encourage you to pop them in the chat now. I'll just wait one more moment in case there are a few more questions. Well, I wait for that. I will say a big thank you to Richard for being with us today. And thank you to the Lighthouse Park Preservation Society too, for arranging this talk with us. We are very pleased to partner with you. We usually do this about twice a year, sort of in the spring and in the late fall. I'm hoping again we'll do this again next fall and who knows, it might be on Zoom, but maybe it'll be in person, fingers crossed that we'll be able to do that again. I do have Sue sending a comment that says, I'm not sure if it's angel ring or angle ring. I'm guessing maybe angel ring. Sue, did you have anything else that you wanted to mention about that? Alrighty then. Thank you very much again, Richard, on behalf of Lighthouse Park Preservation Society and the library. A big thank you to Richard Beard for his presentation today. I can see lots of thank yous coming through on the chat and on the Q&A, so thank you from everyone. Thank you everyone for watching. Enjoy your afternoon and please do something to bring back the butterflies. Bye bye. Have a great afternoon. Thank you.


Your commentator is James Coy. Fierce fighting in Egypt, British and Nazi armies battle furiously before the gates to the Near East, the vitally strategic land of the pyramids. Three times Nazi Field Marshal Rommel smashes eastward toward Suez, his artillery blasting the desert, twice the British counter-drive to the west. Mastery of the air is won first by the Axis, then by the British, and mastery of the shell-torn sands of Libya seesaws back and forth. There goes the alert, and hardy desert fighters come from dugouts on the double to man the anti-aircraft batteries. Down to earth comes a Nazi bomber, one of hundreds knocked out of the sky. Cautiously, a soldier looks for signs of life, but there are no survivors. The defenders of Libya and Egypt reach their critical front when Rommel's columns clash with the British in the desert wilderness between Barakim and the coast. Here, American General Grant tanks get their baptism of fire. On the burning desert, first the tanks advance, then a smoke screen shields the advancing troops. Roars into the battle to blast the enemy supply lines. A German supply base and unprotected, a bombardier's dream, here go the eggs. Then follows the flowery pattern of destruction in the hot sands below. Battle nears a climax, but not a decision. But of action, this German tank stopped the shell. Rommel's battered forces are halted and pushed back. His air power is reduced. Field artillery pieces are battered, some beyond repair. The medical corps is constantly on the alert to administer to those who can be attended on the field. The more seriously injured are moved slowly to the rear in lumbering ambulances. And here is something of the fortunes of war. The best of fighting men sometimes are forced to surrender. Rommel's second in command, the Nazi General Ludwig Krüvel, salutes his captor. The war is over for these men who would like to be going back to Rome and Berlin, but they're on their way to internment. A British prison camp is at the end of the rainbow for them. Now the battle for Egypt shifts to the sea. Britain desperately needs supplies and reinforcements for her valiant 8th Army. A convoy from Gibraltar approaches the hot spot of the Mediterranean, the narrow straits between Tunis and Sicily. German and Italian dive bombers and torpedo planes begin the attack, and there's a close one. A continuous curtain of fire must be maintained to save this British convoy. Under the sea too, listening devices detect the sound of submarines close by. Destroyer's answer with depth bombs, dropping bomb after bomb, and all dangerously close. The gun crew makes a direct hit. It's one of Ilduchi's war eagles whose wings are clipped forever. And here's one of the most astounding scenes ever taken under fire. A huge enemy bomber staggers down to flaming destruction. Dusk approaches, and destroyers begin to lay down a smoke screen as reconnaissance planes report naval units moving into attack. Coming of night only brings on more intense action. One comes to the flaming desert. Tobruk has fallen. The RAF is desperately pounding Rommel's supply lines to halt his advance, and they stop him at Mersa Matru. Mastery of the air still belongs to Egypt's defenders. But neither side has mastery over the blinding, choking sandstorms that torture men and machines alike. Now the enemy's lengthening communication lines must be bombed. More American planes join the RAF. A sudden and dramatic change in command brings General Sir Claude Aukenlech to rally the battered Aethame and halt Rommel at the very gates of Egypt. Supply lines for Aukenlech's men are short, and reinforcements pouring from Cairo and Alexandria. There is a constant rumble of heavy trucks all through the back areas. Just as naval forces mine the seas, desert fighters mine the sands, burying tank traps loaded with TNT to stop the next assault of the Nazi armored divisions. Gun emplacements are set up to hang a curtain of steel in the sky if dive bombers attempt an attack. A fearless cameraman pictures the shelling of a supply train in the thick of the fighting. Tanks and trucks get through the shell fire to provide desperately needed reinforcements. The Nazi artillery firing blindly, Ares' Aukenlech's men and machines constantly. Here goes an American plane to join a squadron with orders to disrupt the thinning lines of enemy communications. The defenders are forced to salvage disabled tanks even under fire. They have lost far too many in the retreat from Tobruk to wait for another convoy to bring more. This one's too close for comfort, and so the fight for Egypt goes on, in the air, in the desert, and at sea. It's a desperate battle, a battle in which strategy and leadership are vital to victory.