22 OCTOBER 1937, Page 16

Sulphur Butterfly Last week I came upon a singularly gorgeous

sulphur butterfly ; and the pleasure its appearance gave emphasised the impression that never before had I seen so few autumnal butterflies. The odd thing is that this general paucity (of admirals, peacocks, painted ladies, commas and the rarer fritil- laries) has been associated with unexampled and scarcely credible accounts of hosts of migrants that came and went and wholly vanished. Mr. Frohawk in t7..e Field, and others in the Entomologist, write of ten or twenty thousand red admirals in a host, rivalling even the common whites, which are in- veterate migrants, in multitude. Where these vast companies went is a mystery. Neither even they themselves were seen again nor did they leave a progeny. It seems most probable that they were wafted out to sea again ; but it is one of the details of this year's observation of migrant butterflies that some of the companies made good progress against, a consider-