In NZ, where I live, the monarch is a self-introduced species (arriving once people started growing host plants in their gardens). The most common foodplant is Gomphocarpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomphocarpus_physocarpus, which is fairly frost hardy. NZ is hardly a butterfly hot spot, so I'm ...

Hi Solomon This is an interesting observation. What a shame you couldn’t get a confirmatory photo. I am familiar with the area (having grown up in Barnstaple) and I’ve often wondered if silver-studded blue might be present somewhere on that coastline as I can remember seeing a distribution map quite...

Nice photos. The webbing on gorse is due to the gorse spider mite Tetranychus lintearius, if you zoom in on the image you can see tiny orange dots in the webbing (easiest to see on the edges of the webbing), which are the mites. Cheers Quentin

Hi This is my first post on UKbutterflies. I grew up in the UK (Devon), but now live in NZ. I enjoy dipping into the forum posts from time to time as NZ, while wonderful, has a rather impoverished butterfly fauna. I'm fairly confident the parasitised larva is a grass emerald Pseudoterpna pruinata, w...