Things have been quiet on the moth front - nights a bit cold and discouraging for trapping - but I've just nabbed a pic of another of our regular butterflies to add to the ones I posted recently.
I'm a bit off butterflies in the garden, to be honest, after the absolute devastation wrought by Large, Small and Green-veined White caterpillars on our purple sprouting, but I have no objection to this visitor: the Brimstone which loves sipping nectar from our runner bean flowers. Quite the opposite.
This one is a female, much paler than the bright yellow male, whose colouring is one of the theories about the etymology of the strange word 'butterfly'. The Brimstone is a 'butter coloured fly', so the argument goes. I've added the second picture because the boundary line created by the runner bean leaf on the upper right is so sharp that it reminds me of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife where the hero Will uses a very sharp knife to cut his way between different worlds.
Memorably, this first happens among those odd-shaped trees on the Oxford Ring Road by the Banbury Road roundabout (as I unfailingly remark to poor Penny every time we sail past on the Park & Ride bus from Water Eaton).
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