Prior June-versus-August rain slopes did not give a clear repeated relative Ringlet index response in England and Wales in 1984-2024

We tested whether rainfall timing within the previous summer was linked to the Ringlet index relative to Meadow Brown. We used 82 paired country-years in England and Wales in 1984-2024. Four country and period models held summer rainfall total, July rainfall, temperature, current weather, time and site-count ratio fixed. Slopes for a 100 mm transfer from August to June were -0.276, -0.072, -0.246 and -0.193 log10 relative index units. Only early England had a four-test HAC interval below zero. The other three intervals included zero. A block-bootstrap check gave an adjusted p value of 0.0976 in early England; none of the four bootstrap tests rejected zero. The pattern did not repeat clearly across countries and periods. This is a seasonal allocation test on previously used public data, not an independent observation network. Short samples, high leverage, correlated weather, sparse early Welsh coverage, source-index uncertainty and species-specific detection limit inference. We do not estimate pollution, daily extremes or a causal climate-change effect. Code, frozen sources, hashes, all models, influence checks and figures support offline reproduction.

butterflies · rainfall timing · Ringlet · Meadow Brown · observation bias · UKBMS