The peacock butterflies are late this year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/28/wenlock-edge-butterflies-autumn

Version 0 of 1.

A shadow flits through the dog days of August. Slow and languid, a peacock butterfly tacks its unpredictable way across a landscape going to seed. In flight it seems made of those soft darknesses that reach from hills in the west through woods on the Edge and out across fields and verges. At rest or when it's feeding on a flower, it looks like a painting: all wine-dark seas and blue moons. Its wings open in random pulses and, like its flight, disrupt any following of its pattern and then startle with a burst of eyes, like a flash mob appearing from nowhere. The peacocks are late this year. There was a time when we thought they might never come, drowned out by the rains.

Although they're not around in huge numbers, at least they're here. What do they find? Until the next deluge, the harvest is a frantic manoeuvring of machines: combines, balers and ploughs. Already the landscape colours are changing from the blond of ripening crops to dark turned earth. The impulse to cut seems overwhelming: mow, strim, flail. But the impulse is overtaken by a detachment from what is being cut. Hooks, scythes and sickles make the act of cutting conscious and responsive. Machines remove that physical connection between person and herbage and slash through summer to keep the landscape tidy. The butterflies will be lucky to find anything on which to lay their eggs. A few tatty whites, an exhausted meadow brown, sidle across an uncut relic of meadowland bristling with browning knaps and thick with grass seed. Thistledown begins to spin into a breeze bringing more rain from the west. It will pass over a little churchyard in the hills, a remote place with a gravestone to the memory of Lily Maud, who died in 1911 aged 23: "Be ye therefore ready..." reads the inscription. The butterfly here is stirred by the same breeze and readies its flickering shadow.