Clouded sunshine

A butterfly which I've hankered to see in Oxfordshire since we moved from Leeds in 2013 is the Clouded Yellow, a familiar flash of colour in coastal areas of the South but much less common inland. I've enjoyed watching them in Dorset above the beautiful beaches near Weymouth and Bridport but not in the fields and hillsides near home. Every so often, however, we have a 'Clouded Yellow Year' when they daringly move inland.

This year is one such and this week my luck changed. On a lovely walk beside the Thames on one of its quietest stretches, between Buckland and Appleton,  I saw first one in Chimney Meadows nature reserve and then a second just north of Shifford lock. Shifford is a nowhere place nowadays, just a farm and a quiet old church, but in King Alfred's day it was the site of the first recorded parliament in our history, an assembly called by the king in 885AD to discuss the defence  against the Danes of the vulnerable fords across the Thames. One of them was the 'Sheep Ford', now Shifford.

Clouded Yellows almost always rest with their wings folded, showing only the lemony-yellow underwing, but one of my iPhone snaps coincided with the first insect's take off and a sliver of the brighter, custardy colour of the topwings can be seen. On the left is my only picture of the second one in the context of a little riverside greenery in the otherwise drought-parched meadow.

My family have also been photographing butterflies, a much harder task than recording sleepy moths, and my daughter-in-law took this lovely picture in their garden in Wiltshire of a Small Tortoiseshell, a familiar English butterfly but in my experience less flourishing in recent years than its close relations, the Red Admiral and Peacock.

She also kindly sent the photos below of two rather similar mountain butterflies seen on a brilliant holiday in the Austrian Alps with our grandchildren.  I think that they are respectively an Arran Brown and a Large Ringlet.

Finally, here's a Red Admiral in our greenhouse. I shoo them and other butterflies out as soon as I can because they are quickly overcome by the heat.