Butterfly walking

I found time at the weekend, amid many distractions, for a walk round the 'butterfly field', as I think of the gentle, five or six acre hillside beyond our house. It has generous field edges, a feature of this part of the world related, I think, to nature conservation subsidies. Wildly mixed tree-planting has also been done on three sides and the hedges are a tangly riot of plants.

The cereal crop is organically farmed too, which hasn't done it any favours in terms of the thistles, poppies and many other wildflowers growing amid the shoots of corn. But this too is excellent for the butterflies. And so of course is this Summer's endless sunshine.

The flaw in my arrangements is that I have no camera currently and so rely on my iPad with its excitingly cracked screen. The said sunlight makes it very uncertain for me what I am photographing. You should see me stabbing with a finger at the blurry image which I think is the butterfly, hoping to get it into focus. The insects don't stay long, either, unlike the drowsy moths of a morning in the trap. It must be rather pitiful seeing an ageing gent stalking a Common Blue for ages and ages. But sometimes the cherries all line up in a row, as with the lovely Brown Argus in my top picture.

My second lot of composites is rather less successful in focussing terms, so I will have to go back as soon as I can find time and creep about some more. I was pleased with my third picture, however. Just a Meadow Brown, but reasonably precise for me.

When I put the Brown Argus on Instagram, a friend commented that they had similarly been pursuing a Large White, one of the UK's commonest butterflies and the bane of allotmenteers because of its voracious caterpillars. The hunt was worth it because the 'Large' White turned out to be two Small Whites, vigorously mating while in flight.  I must have come close to a similar experience with the two Commas in the pictures to the left (sorry for blurring) and below. Can you see them at either end of the one below? They were undoubtedly out on  a date, but I discreetly left them to it.

We have some 30 species of butterfly here, none uncommon, and it is a delight to see so many of each type as well. My first composite shows a Ringlet, Small Copper and male Common Blue as well as the Meadow Brown; and my second, below, a Hedge Brown or Gatekeeper (very well-named as it confines itself to the edges of open fields), the Brown Argus again twice (top right and bottom left), a male Common Blue with folded wings in the bottom right corner and a female Common Blue (easy to muddle with the Brown Argus but with its orange upperwing spots less like arrowheads and its underwing pattern a different version of dots and dashes.