What a surprise

 

I have had plenty of excellent moth surprises since we moved from Leeds in 2013 and I re-lit the lamp to shine just north of Oxford. New hawk moths, abundant middle-range species and the glorious arrival of the Clifden Nonpareil. But I never expected the same thing to happen in the very much smaller world of UK butterflies.

There are only 59 species of these compared to over 3,500 types of moth. Yet this year has seen two completely new arrivals in our garden and immediately around. I mentioned my discovery of the very elusive Black Hairstreak back in mid-June; now its delightful cousin the Brown Hairstreak has come to visit us for the first time. 

I was patrolling the edge of our lawn on a lovely sunny day two weeks ago to take a photographic record of the butterflies and day-flying moths. I found Speckled Woods in a well-shaded corner and then moved on into the sunlight by the main flower border where the likes of Meadow Browns and Hedge Browns often flutter around.

My eye was caught by one of them which I took to be a Hedge Brown until the last minute. As I pressed the iPhone camera button, I realised that it was something else; a little smaller and more brightly orange. The moment took me back to a year ago when I saw my first-ever Brown Hairstreak in the car park of the Premier Inn at Newhaven, just as we arrived back on foot from the Dieppe ferry after a week in France. That one was so vividly russet-orange that I mistook it at first for a Comma.

I told our local hairstreak expert about the latest arrival and he was interested that, like the Newhaven one, it was truanting from its usual habitat of hedgerows and ash trees. Interestingly too, it appears to be drinking dew from the Day Lily's petals, rather than nectaring on the stamen. Given hairstreaks' fondness for aphid honey, perhaps it had found a watered-down variant of this favourite tipple.

The other exotic day-flyer much in evidence at the moment is the Jersey Tiger which seems to be rampant in the South of England now. We played Spot-the-Tiger with my grandchildren and a larger version of the photo above, which shows the back of their car. Below is the moth's more appropriate refuge after our game had scared it off up into some bushes.

I mentioned the other day that this is the insect which congregates in vast numbers in the mis-named Valley of the Butterflies on Rhodes - which seems to have been spared the wildfires, thank goodness. Here is a picture from an online visitor's log of just one small part of the valley's horde.

The last time we were down at the grandchildren's in Wiltshire, I saw another one fluttering about an outside light and then yet another in a nearby bush.  We have just spent the weekend in Topsham near Exeter at a family gathering and, lo and behold, what should be sharing our B&B but the Jersey Tiger in the third picture.

Here below are the results of another afternoon's meander with the iPhone, this time in the grandchildren's garden. And below that is one of their dragonflies, a White-legged Damselfly, kindly identified by Conehead in the previous Jersey Tiger post, which is always to be found on the same small unmown patch of their lawn.

In the moth trap, numbers remain high but arrivals are predictable and I have had no newcomers for some time. Below we have a Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, I think, and a Dusky Sallow followed by the hedge-munching but rather handsome Box Moth, a good old Elephant Hawk, one of the Summer's stayers and around since May, a Silver Y embracing a Common Footman watched by a micro-moth to which I will return for ID at some stage, and finally the excellent front breeches of a Ruby Tiger.