We haven’t seen many butterflies this year. Even on sunny days we’ve not seen more than half a dozen and I’ve been starting to worry that we were in for a disastrous year.
However, things took a turn for the better today when Julia came back from the lavender patch with reports of 16 Small Tortoiseshell as the headline figure. I had to have a look for myself and found the butterflies dotted about all over the lavender like rubies on velvet. Of course, I exaggerate, they were more like orangey things on purple shrubs, but for a moment I felt in the mood for a simile. Butterflies and sunshine can have this effect on a man.
On a more prosaic level, it gave me a chance to compare new camera with old one (I think the old one won) and several exciting times as I thought I saw new species.
The possible Ringlet turned out just to be a very brown meadow brown but the skipper gave me my first photograph of a Large Skipper. It took me over 20 minutes to identify it when I got the pictures back to the computer, but the pointed antennae (from a picture taken by the old camera) finally solved it for me.
It’s a bit like children – they all look the same to me. Unlike children, of course, I can take lots of photographs without incurring any suspicion.
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It hasn’t been a good year for butterflies here either, and the ones I have seen have been too frisky for me to photograph.
Fingers crossed that it gets better…
Ours are in short supply, too
It’s back to overcast skies today here, and we had rooks on the bird feeders.
;-(
We had loads of butterflies a few weeks ago, including one day when I spotted at least 4 or 5 different varieties. I’m not as good at identifying butterflies as I am with birds, though, so can’t tell you what they were. (But they were different colours and sizes, so I’m sure they were different kinds.) Recently, of course, it’s been much cooler and wetter, so whether or not they’ve been out, I haven’t!
Yes, they are tricky little blighters!