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Other reports : Wildlife Update by Graham Hart (butterflies plus birds and wildflowers) Mammal report by Dave Watts

Related articles : Ariège forests Orchids of Ariège Raptors of the Pyrenees Bears in Ariège The Mont Valier natural reserve

Graham Hart gave this talk to the Butterfly Conservancy in the UK in 2002.

The region in question is the departement of Ariège and further east into the Pyrénées Orientales, from the foothills to the high peaks dividing France and Spain.

It is very poor region financially and one of the most backward agriculturally. In some areas hay was being cut by hand and collected by carts pulled by oxen as late as the early 1980’s, and in a few cases up until the early 90’s. However since then the region has been catching up very quickly. Now there are tractors everywhere and big bailing machines to make hay and big bale silage.

One hundred and fifty years ago the region was overpopulated. The mountainsides were much less wooded and there were many terraces built up the steep slopes, where people grew crops. Hamlets were built high up valley sides where people lived in the summer: there they grew their crops and tended to their animals that were even higher on the summer grazing pastures.

Over the last hundred years the region has become progressively depopulated. Woodland has once again grown up on many of the abandoned terraces and meadows and that process continues today, providing very rich, but of course temporary, butterfly habitat.

Comparing pictures from just forty years ago with today, it is alarming to see the extent to which the woodland is invading abandoned meadows. This abandonment of land is a continuing process with increasing mechanisation. The first land to be abandoned is the highest; generally it is the furthest from the village and the most difficult to manage because of the impossibility of getting agricultural machinery there. As mechanisation has changed from hand pushed motorised cutters to tractors and to bailing machines more and more lower areas have been abandoned too.

In summary, steeper areas tend to be abandoned leading to succession and woodland invasion and flatter areas are being managed more intensively.

Another problem is the aging of the farmers. In one particular valley the youngest is in his mid fifties and there are no youngsters coming along to take their parents’ place. The life is hard and so the farmers’ children mostly choose to go and live in a town or city when they grow up.

There are however a number of young people moving into the area to farm; these are of a mix of nationalities and come to escape from modern life. They lead very simple, precarious lives, often just scraping a living making cheese or other produce. They keep the land in a more traditional way; their aim is to live in harmony with nature. These people need all the encouragement they can get, however the system is against them.

There is a strong tendency for farms to get bigger; this pressure is obviously economic but also the chamber of agriculture is very much in favour of bigger, more modern farms using modern techniques. They are not very interested at all in organic farming.

If we split the region into three we can look at things in a little more detail

FOOTHILLS: a limestone ridge running along the north of the Pyrenees

Traditionally larger farms than in the mountains.
The foothills are made up mostly of woodland and permanent grassland, with a relatively small percantage of arable land. The permanent grassland is either used for rough grazing (steep hillsides, rocky areas) or hay meadows.

The steep hillsides and rocky meadows are the refuges where butterflies will survive. However the extensive meadows, which at present support a wide variety of butterflies, are giving cause for concern.

The traditional time of cutting hay (late May) is deemed to be too late by modern agriculture, which advises cutting earlier for improved digestibility, and hence value, for the animals. Worse still is silage making, in which the grass is cut even earlier. Add to this the efficiency of modern machinery, cutting very low and speedily, taking just a few days rather than two or three weeks or more as previously. Also, in the past land was often left fallow from time to time or sometimes just lightly grazed for two or three weeks in autumn.

Now the emphasis is on maximum utilisation. Cutting earlier means annual plant species do not have time to sow their seeds and so they become very much rarer. The whole plant make up of the meadows changes.

A very common and visible plant family in these meadows is the Rhinanthus species, the Yellow Rattles. These are annuals, so are adversely affected by early cutting and this is easy to see. Also Rhinanthus is semi parasitic on grasses, so reducing the vigour of grass growth and helping keep the sward open.

I have known this area since 1991 and meadows that were once full of Rhinanthus species are almost devoid of them. The sward becomes grass dominated often with a lot of Lolium perenne (perennial Ryegrass) and with Crepis and Hieracium species, (Hawksbeard and Hawkweeds). The numbers of Leguminosae (pea family) and other plants such as Succisa pratensis (Devils bit Scabious) and Centaurea species (Knapweeds) become very much reduced or even disappear altogether, leaving a very much impoverished habitat for butterflies.

These changes are just through intensification of use and change of time of cutting. Add to that the fact that the use of chemical fertilisers is spreading ever closer to this area and it is only a matter of time until the farmers here start using fertilisers to "improve grassland". Then even the poorest meadows, that would have retained some measure of value for butterflies, will be ruined.


MID ALTITUDES

The situation here is very different from valley to valley. There is often a ten-fold decrease in the number of grazing animals leading to scrub and woodland invasion.

However in some places overgrazing is the problem. Where there is a good road up high, there can be a very high density of grazing animals transported up there; whereas areas that require one or two hours of climbing by foot are abandoned.

There is a massive amount of woodland encroachment; some mountainsides are now solid high forest where fifty years ago there was a mosaic of woodland, grassland and cultivation.

In other valleys entreprenurial farmers are taking over the whole valley bit by bit, as the older people retire. They play the subsidy system, abandoning all the land not easy to manage with modern machinery and intensively use the rest.

In some areas old steep hay meadows are being grazed in spring and autumn instead of being cut and the results look good. However even here scrub and woodland slowly encroaches.

Why was it that our ancestors did not over graze pastures like we do today? Two main reasons:
over grazing could ruin a pasture for subsequent years with undesirable weeds growing up;
in the days before effective worm treatments, grazing land too intensively risked a parasitic worm problem, which would lead to massive losses in productivity and to mortality of animals.

Even the organic farmers in Ariege, who manage their land at lower stocking density than most modern farmers, have to use a wormer at least once a year to avoid parasitic worm problems. This suggests that they too are over stocking the land in comparison with the early part of the last century.

I have a friend who hand milks seven cows and makes organic cheese, he has 18 hectares of reasonably productive land. Modern farmers would put at least fifteen cows on the same piece of land.

THE HIGH MOUNTAINS:
This is the area least affected by modern changes. Yes, grazing pressure has generally decreased, but there are populations of wild animals such as Rupicapra rupicapra, the Isard and the introduced Marmota marmota, the Marmot - now widespread.

Implications for butterflies

Firstly I should say that, with perhaps one exception, I do not think that these agricultural changes will lead to the regional extinction of butterfly species. However their distribution will become very much more restricted.

Euphydryas aurinia the Marsh Fritillary, is a species widespread and locally common throughout the region. At present it uses a range of habitats from dry limestone to very damp meadows. In the foothills, where there is a superb mosaic of grassland habitats, it pops up all over the place: often at low density with just one or two being found, in some places it is very common. So there is obviously marginal habitat in the first instance, with highly suitable habitat in the latter. The butterfly takes the opportunity when a particular area becomes highly suitable, and it flourishes. It survives well because of the healthy metapopulation structure seemingly so vital for the long term survival of this species.

Metapopulations of a whole assemblage of butterfly species are very healthy in these foothills, often being widespread.

Another example is Maculinea arion, which also occurs throughout the region up to over 2000 metres. In the foothills it is the nominate form Maculinea arion arion and in the mountains proper it is form obscura forming an altitudinal cline. For one species in particular, Maculinea alcon, all the known colonies in the whole region are in these foothills.

What will happen if most of the meadows become agriculturally improved or even if just the modern, more intensive type of utilisation without fertilizer continues? The Pyrenees will start to have the same phenomenon as in most of Europe, islands of wildlife refuge surrounded by a sea of modern agriculture.

Will this isolation cause the extinction of for example Euphydryas aurinia from the foothills as occurred in the south of England many years ago now? Does it matter if Euphydryas aurinia and Maculinea arion become extinct in the foothills, if they survive in the mountains? That will be the argument of the powers that be.

What will become of the already rare Maculinea alcon with increasing agricultural intensification? It is found in boggy areas where its foodplant Gentiana pulmonanthe grows. Will these areas be drained or will agricultural run off change their character and suitability for Gentiana pulmonanthe?

Hamearis lucina, (Duke of Burgundy Fritillary), is a species curiously only found above 950 metres altitude in Ariège, despite there being loads of suitable looking habitat at lower altitudes. It is very much a woodland edge butterfly here, usually just turning up in ones and twos. I have only once found more than that in any one small area. At this altitude much land has been abandoned. When we searched where it had been documented by Nabokov, we found only tall forest. Whole mountainsides have become closed canopy tall forest - in these areas Hamearis lucina will certainly not be found. Colonies are becoming ever more isolated. Will this isolation ultimately lead to local extinction? The answer will often be yes. In England we know that this species started off as a woodland butterfly and its refuge populations today are found on chalk downland. Where will the refuge populations be in this area of the Pyrenees? Are there any suitable refuge areas there?……….Yes, I'm pretty certain I have found it and it is a large area so don't panic.

Maculinea rebeli the Mountain Alcon or Rebeli's Large Blue is found at over 1000 metres altitude on limestone where its foodplant Gentiana cruciata, a perennial, grows. From my observations it does not tolerate shade very well, having watched it disappear under encroaching light woodland cover. I know of five sites, all in the same general area, and I am sure there must be more. It is just having the time to go and look and the vastness of the survey area.

One site consisted of just five plants, all covered in eggs, in a well grazed meadow. On another site, where there is the scurb encroachment, I counted just 12 plants last year and 15 this. Of the fifteen about half were being heavily swamped by Brachpodium pinnatum and Rubus fruticosus and had no eggs on. This meadow does not seem to have been grazed in recent years and the situation is getting desperate.

Should I care about an individual colony or should I be campaigning to keep the general area grazed? In general I am against small nature reserves in the mountains, it is at the landscape level that conservation must be encouraged. However, here we have a species known to live in small colonies, a flagship species that we should be able to do something about by reintroducing grazing and a plan is underway.

Lycaena helle the Violet Copper. This is a species that has benefited from a reduction in grazing pressure. It likes sward with tussocky grass or dead organic matter (mats of dead sedge leaves for example) on the ground, presumably for pupation sites for the over wintering chrysallis which I have unfortunately not yet found. Here it only flies at over 1000 metres altitude. Scrub and woodland encroachment is fairly slow this high, in the very damp prevailing conditions. However, the total lack of grazing in some places has produced dense monocultures of Molinia coerulea (Purple Moor Grass) tussocks or a monoculture of Filipendula ulmaria (Meadow Sweet). Light grazing ensures that the Polygonum bistorta (Bistort) can survive, providing superb egg laying habitat among the Moninia tussocks and stands of Filipendula. The area of distribution of this rare butterfly is around 500 square kilometres. This may sound a lot, but in comparison with the size of the mountains it is tiny. However, if as expected, at least light grazing continues it is not under threat.

In France there is no site protection system, such as occurs in the UK with sites of special scientific interest. There are two amateur organisations in the region concerned with wildlife conservation, but these rely totally on the goodwill of landowners.

In France the only protection system comes in the form of Parc National and Réserve Naturelle, where they are more concerned with planning control and hunting control than species conservation. The Parc National in the Pyrenees is in the high mountains as are the Réserves Naturelles. There would be no hope of getting that type of declaration in the foothills.

Most nature conservation is concentrating on nature reserves, trying to reconnect isolated habitat patches, to reconnect the landscape, improve metapopulation structure and survival of species.

Here today there is a landscape that is still largely intact, with healthy metapopulations and a great variety of all manner of wildlife. This conference is about landscape and butterflies, so what should be done to prevent the destruction of this landscape by modern agriculture?

Should a ring be put round the region and within it ban all use of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and insecticide? Seems like a good idea to me.

Should organic farming be highly encouraged? Yes, definitely a good thing but it is not the be all and end all. Even organic farmers may try to use every spare corner as much as possible to maximise profits.

Should people taking on small mountain farms be paid a minimum wage to run the farms in a low intensity way and allow them to keep any profits? This would ensure that they can at least survive without too much worry and make them custodians of the land, keeping it beautiful for all, rather than expecting marginal farms to be economically productive units.

Should the subsidy system be changed - and I know I am far from the first person to say this - from a headage basis to an area basis, setting limits on stocking density, timing of certain operations such as hay making, and how short the sward is cut?

It is clear that modern agriculture and its system of subsidies only destroys wildlife. For years many people have been saying the Common Agricultural Policy badly needs reforming, yet each year there is a stalemate and nothing changes. I know the French are totally against changing it, but if we want truly to talk about nature conservation on a landscape level then the Common Agricultural policy must be reformed.