I was totally amazed today to see what seemed like countless numbers of Peacock Butterflies all together in a sun-drenched field of ripening wheat. Most of them had settled, one per wheat-stalk, while a few flitted idly from place to place. I’d never seen the likes of it before….so many Peacocks….hundreds….all in one place….but then, as I took a step forward to take a photograph, they suddenly did that flashing, distracting eye-spot thing that Peacocks do and took to the air as one….a cloud of russet-brown and purpley-blue….Wonderful!It was a little piece of uniquely uncharacteristic animal behaviour that could mean almost anything….or, then again, nothing at all.Unusual weather patterns of late, dislocated seasons, record dry spells alternating with record downpours, hail and snow in June and July, strange cloud formations, unusual light effects, storms and floods….and more floods! Add to that the number of increasingly strange episodes of animal behaviour I’ve been witnessing lately….such as the shoals of laterally rotating eel that I saw from the “bridge over the River Wye” in Chepstow back in June….they were just about breaking the surface of the very muddy river water, but I considered it to be odd behaviour simply because the thicker-skinned eel doesn’t normally rotate like certain other species of fish sometimes do (except that we’ve all been recording increasingly high levels of acid in some of the heavier downpours of rain on odd occasions since around 2005) nor, for that matter, do eels gather in fairly large numbers in the middle of June ….Then there have been the small to medium-size flocks of Starling flying virtually blind late at night in and around my own village throughout this Summer (certainly not normal behaviour for them either)!There have been a hundred other, far less obvious things as well, but I notice them….the localized patches of mutated, twin-headed Dandilions which test as completely normal….or the colony of seventy or more Rooks that I watched a week or two ago as they repeatedly flew down from the trees to land on the road….then back into the trees after a few moments of head-bobbing and feather-shaking antics….then back to the road for more head-bobbing and feather-shaking….they did it over and over again….I’ve never seen that before either….wierd! Then there was the Gordian knot of writhing Earthworms, probably forty or fifty of them….the size of a cricket ball….on Robinswood Hill near Gloucester. I haven’t seen one of those since the 1950s….On that occasion, I placed the heaving mass in a box to take to school for “show and tell”, but sadly, all the worms had separated by the time I got there!

Such examples of extreme animal behaviour are certainly unusual (though not always entirely unheard of in other species) and I would normally dismiss them as being fairly insignificant if they occured in isolation over many years, but these incidents are not isolated and they are happening in quick succession! Coincidence? Perhaps….or separate pieces of a much larger and infinitely more complex picture? More worryingly, some say that they could be symptoms of something far more sinister! Mmm….I don’t know about that, but something of a very fundamental nature is undoubtedly changing out there and only time will tell how serious it really is!It’s no good asking the experts either, they’re always far too busy focussing on the bits and pieces of whatever they’re studying at the time to be able to take-in everything else as well, but some of the farmers and the rural “characters” I’ve spoken to just lately have also been noticing some pretty odd stuff….as one of them said to me….“there’s something more akin to a shift of some sort….in Nature herself….almost like a shiver or a shudder”! Or, as one particularly elderly and knowledgeable country gentleman called “Old Tom” (son of “Even Older Tom”), observed the other day….“it’s like someone’s walking over Mother Nature’s grave”!