Fluttering by

 

This is the best time of the year for spotting beautiful and still reassuringly common butterflies, sometimes easy to see because of their lovely colours and sometimes betrayed only by sudden, fluttering movement. The Orange-tip is one of the daintiest and it comes laden with memories for anyone who has enjoyed its company for over seventy years. I remember them first as companions at the start of school's Summer term, along with bluebells and cow parsley.

As so often in the Animal Kingdom, the male gets the best deal with the actual orange tips to his forewings, but the female is also exquisitely coloured. The one above made its way into our shed where I keep the moth trap safe from robins, and had a brief panic among the spiders' webs before I cupped my hands and let her out. The male was one of many which welcomed her back among the garden flowers.

Holly Blues are traditional companions of the Orange-tips, emerging from the chrysalis at the same time and in equally large numbers. The little, jinking flashes of bright blue which you see along hedges and borders will be Hollies; they emerge a month or so earlier than our other small blue butterflies.

They have one annoying habit which is almost always preferring to rest with their wings folded vertically over their backs, concealing the glorious bright blue of their topwings. The underside is lovely too; a chalky blue with a delicate arrangement of dots as shown in the top left picture above. But the bright blue is what I want to see. 

I managed it by making a short video with my iPhone and then taking still pictures from the clip, also above. But the result is a little blurred. Then yesterday, walking alongside a suburban beech hedge in Oxford to meet Penny, I spotted several Holly Blues and fortuitously stalked the one below. A lovely, freshly-emerged female, she kicked the folded-wing trend and posed; not just for a moment but patiently; and for a second time after initially fluttering on. Thank you!

My third day-flyer caught my attention when we were chatting with neighbours in the sunshine and i saw a scrap of greeny-grey fluttering around a patch of unmown scrub. As soon as it was polite to do so, i slipped away and followed the insect which seemed inexhaustible but finally settled down on a shady stretch of hedge. I crept up very slowly but needn't have taken so much care. having used up a vast amount of energy on its flying meander, this little Green Carpet moth settled down for a long rest.

Can you see it in my first picture below? So long as they do not move, resting moths and butterflies are usually very hard to find.

Here it is, closer-to.  This one was conforming exactly to online descriptions of the species which, like other Carpet moths, was named in the late 18th century when rolls of carpet were arriving in England from the Far East with patterns as wonderfully intricate as this little creature's. The moth flies at night - and there are lots of them in the trap just now - but is easily disturbed by day and often takes to the wing shortly before dusk. That was when we and the neighbours were chatting. I checked again after a 15 minute ramble and it was still on the same leaf, slumbering away.

Two more interesting newcomers for the year in the trap meanwhile; a Pale Prominent with its craggy outline when at rest, and a male Pale Tussock, a hairy moth with a hairy caterpillar which vexed the hop-pickers in days gone by and gave rashes to those with sensitive skin. Mind you, they were pinching its favourite food.