Weep for the 2023 Purple Emperor season, and Pray, hard!
Purple Emperors, the males especially, are highly vulnerable to being smashed to smithereens by gales. They roost in treetops, like this -
Or worse, hanging from the underside of oak leaves... If they had any sense whatsoever, they'd roost on the sheltered, leeward side of oak boughs and trunks, but they don't...
Today's Fresh to Strong SW winds will have shredded many an Emperor, and blown many more to Kingdom Come (wherever that is...).
Teste 2020, when a gale that ran from June 27th to June 29th blasted them away. We were finding maimed Emperors on the forest floor, like this -
We'll find out the extent of the damage when the wind subsides and the weather improves, as is forecast. Fingers' crossed, we may just have got away with it...
On the big picture, there is an unusual degree of disparity between the state of the flight season at Knepp and other sites in the deep south, and elsewhere. North of London it seems still too early to determine what numbers are like (apart from in the Bucks / Oxon woods, where iris is always relatively 'early').
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