Beetle orgy

The moth trap produced pretty routine fare last night but a wander round our local fields and woodland during the day was another matter. My first two pictures make it clear that whatever the woes of the world at the moment, there is going to be no shortage of Common Red Soldier Beetles.

While they were partying away, Penny and I also disturbed a whole series of Shaded Broad-bar moths , some of them flirting with Deadly Nightshade - the poison Belladonna - (Update: whoops, sorry, it's actually harmless Wood Nightshade; thanks for correction to Conehead54 in Comments) and, back in the garden, a brand new Comma butterfly, swooping around in all its russet glory, and a lovely Gatekeeper or Hedge Brown:

As you can see from the last picture above, I was cutting our hawthorn hedge - a multi-storey flats complex for wildlife, and in the process, I found large numbers of Ladybird pupae, a stage in their life cycle which lasts about a week.

As brightly-coloured as the adults, they are fastened to the leaves by a glue which they secrete. I have brought these three indoors and hope that we may coincide and get a short video clip of when they emerge.

Our last butterfly today is the Essex Skipper which is around in  large numbers, weaving in and out of the long grass stalks with tremendous aeronautical skill:

In the moth trap, we had the most handsome form of the Large Yellow Underwing (Update: Broad-bordered YU, sorry for lapse in concentration and thanks to Edward in Comments)  with its cappuccino colouring topped by a greenish tinge. Tomorrow, I hope to cycle over to Bernwood forest to see if I can photograph a Purple Emperor.