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| Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. 1 August 2026 |
It is difficult to imagine the look on a 1950s lepidopterist’s face had she or he been told a Comma butterfly had been spotted in Ayrshire. Even in England the butterfly then had a limited distribution in the south, although it was spreading back to earlier haunts as the 1951 edition of that classic The Observer’s Book of British Butterflies explained:
Up to about 1924 this butterfly had been gradually disappearing from all its old localities, and was more or less confined to Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Monmouthshire. Since then there has been a remarkable increase in its numbers, and it has been reported from the southern, western, and midland counties and even the London district*.
The Butterfly Conservation website takes up the story:
…the most remarkable feature of the Comma has been its severe decline in the twentieth century and subsequent comeback. It has spread northwards through England and is now widespread in south-east and central Scotland and its range is expanding.
Over the past years there have been a number of reports of Commas in Ayrshire and this one is the second we have seen in the garden.
The Comma, Polygonia c-album, has an unusual specific name in that it it hyphenated. However, that was the one given to it by Linnaeus himself and the Comma was a species with which he would have been familiar since it occurs throughout Europe and into western Asia.
Informative studies have been made on the genetics of the food preferences of the Comma caterpillar. At present in Britain the preferred food plant is common nettle with hops, elms, currants and willows following on behind. The great decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries was thought to have been caused by a major reduction in the cultivation of hops. If that decline was responsible then the shift to nettles and subsequent recovery could have been an event as significant as industrial melanism and its reversal in the Peppered Moth.
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| The underside shows how well the butterfly is camouflaged when its wings are closed The white marking is in the shape of a comma; hence the name |
*The Oxford comma (no pun intended) was alive and well in this Observer’s Book. Described as the compiler of the book William John Stokoe had drawn the information from The Butterflies of the British Isles by Richard South (also published by Frederick Warne). The first edition of The Observer's Book of British Butterflies book appeared in 1938 when Stokoe was 74; it ran for many editions, some long after the compiler’s death. William John Stokoe was born on 30 July 1864, the son of a railway signalman. In the 1921 Census and the 1939 Register he was living in Finchley with his wife. In 1921 he was art manager for Frederck Warne and in 1939 ‘Book Publisher’s Editor’. Stokoe died on 16 March 1947. His name continued to be associated the the various Observer’s Books he had compiled.
