Last weekend I spent 3 days in Corfu practicing butterfly photography with a few different types of lens, and making records for the local atlas project. There is a very active butterfly community of locals, ex-pats and regular visitors, a good Facebook group, and a great website and super printed r...

Speckled Wood is still a novelty for me here in East Perthshire. They have been spreading, and I've been tracking them approaching our village - their range was only 1km away at the end of 2023, so I'm expecting them to arrive in my garden in 2024. This is a 2023 picture of one from a recently-estab...

I took photos of this Scottish pair up at the Devil's Elbow in Glenshee on 18th June - a memorable day as I found new sites for SPBF and NBA in this beautiful but almost unrecorded area, along with mountain hares and ring ouzels. A wide angle macro shot was 2nd in the 2023 photography competition, b...

We have a puzzling event of an adult Holly blue found in mid January in Edinburgh. An ivy hedge was being cut and the butterfly was found crawling on the cuttings. This species overwinters as a pupa not an adult, so something unusual has happened. My first assumption was that a pupa must have been a...

We have Small coppers breeding on sorrel in our garden most years so occasionally encounter very fresh ones that hang around for a while. This was a nice one that posed for a few photos over a couple of days in August.

Lots of opportunities to photograph Red Admiral this year. Two favourites: a battle-scarred on in my Perthshire garden and one on Dahlias in Fife.

Wow, good luck Trevor. Whenever I've had decent numbers of eggs like that I tend to end up with a crate full of plastic bottles holding cut oak twigs in water! I think the key is to have faith that there are tiny caterpillars tucked away here and there and keep refreshing the twigs with new ones (ne...

Dark Green Fritillary and SPBF are quite common here thankfully (Perthshire) - I get DGF in my garden, and both are pretty widespread and easily encountered in the uplands. I hope it stays that way. I didn't see either species around the places I I lived in England, but it does depend where you happ...

David M commented in the PBF favourite photos topic that Pearl-bordered Fritillary is one of the few species more common in Scotland than in England. This set me to thinking, what others are there? Just for fun, here's my list off the top of my head (not based on any data analysis, just subjective k...

I spent a good few days hiking around upland Perthshire trying to repeat sightings where they hadn't been reported for 10 years or more, following a target list from Butterfly Conservation Scotland. I did eventually find them in about half of the areas targeted, but it was hard work with many miles ...

I think this was the only Painted Lady I saw all year in 2023 (Perthshire). Luckily it stayed around our garden for 3 days, and got used to me photographing it well enough to allow wide-angle macro shots (middle image) with the lens almost touching it.

I always like to see what you're posting Guy - it brings back memories of a great few years I spent living in Switzerland and south Germany. Your book inspired me to try wide angle macro photography too. No idea what kind of kit you are using but I bought a Laowa wide angle macro lens. A whole new a...

Interesting photos from Glen Feshie. If they live on river gravels that are submerged in winter, how does this affect larval survival rates over the winter?

This year will be a real test - massive amounts of water up here. Hoping they come through ok.

Each year we get one or two Dark greens making a 1km excursion from their Perthshire hillside colony to visit our spring-flowering buddleia globosa in the back garden.

Are larvae allowed? My favourite this year was this first instar demonstrating feeding damage.

Dingy skipper pictures from the amazing Glen Feshie in Highland Speyside, where this species along with Small blue live on river gravels that are submerged in winter.

Jack, if they have another year in 2024 like they did in 2023, you might not have to wait long. They appear to have jumped from Fife to Aberdeen in 2023, although of course there might have been previous undetected movement. There’s even a possibility that they arrived in Aberdeen from across the se...

Very interesting Dave. Do you see Holly Blue as a species that forms discrete, isolated colonies and could therefore form very local adaptations? I generally had an idea that they wander quite freely and sometimes even travel large distances (eg they turned up in Aberdeen this year, 50 miles north o...

Interesting, thanks bugboy. Because they overwinter as pupae,a first brood being late must mean they have locally adapted to emerge from pupae later? Or maybe more likely they just disperse on normal emergence, and only re-colonise the site when the foodplant is suitable? So the larvae there end up ...

I've read in some places that Holly blue is single-brooded in the north. However here in Scotland on the very northern edge of the range it has been clearly double brooded (even a very small number of third brood individuals). I initiated a 2023 postcard and Facebook-based survey for the residents o...