Male Brimstone through the garden just now. He may have a chance of meeting his own offspring. This is the one species to be having a really good year here in what's generally been a very poor spring for butterflies.

Mouse Moth would be a good candidate.

I collected a bunch of fallen oak twigs earlier in the month, hoping to pick up some Purple Hairstreak larvae. Instead I got this formidable beast - Twin-spotted Quaker moth, Anorthoa munda.

From Huelva province, Spain, late last month. Here's an Orange-tip egg on Tower Mustard Arabis glabra, a common enough plant around the Mediterranean but a rarity in Britain. It is, however, used here as a foodplant as well.

Pollination in action, two years ago in Dordogne. Note the orchid pollinia on the left-hand butterfly's proboscis (the butterflies are, I think, parthenoides)

Dizzy Skippers, imo.

All winters and springs are different, and each species reacts in a different way. This year the orange-tips are out early but the sallow blossom is running late.

Whilst we're talking snakes, does anyone know if putting corrugated metal down for reptile surveys can be used to create bare ground for the establishment of butterfly foodplants?

More Orange-tips...

I like the way Minnie's alert ear directs us to the butterfly.

The Orange-tips have started to emerge.

Same here in Somerset - only one vanessid to date (unidentifiable but flight pattern suggested Small Tort). A few Brimstones about. Opportunities for butterflies are few and far between amid the endless rain.

Male Brimstone in central Exeter on Monday.

I have seen butterflies. Admittedly, I had to go to the south coast of France for them...

I wouldn't dare walk in the woods round here. Far too slippery.

Thanks Pete and Roger! If we’re both still around, Roger, I look forward to losing the bet! When I was 21, in the winter of ‘85-6, I watched Halley’s comet creep through the constellations. When it faded from sight in the spring, I said, ‘See you again!’ That requires me to live to 97… Guy Belated ...

Thanks Wurzel. Hopefully the Glanvilles will still be there in 2024 - in truth I'm surprised they have lasted that long, as their populations seem to struggle to survive on chalk downland. I've seen Marsh Fritillaries a couple of times at Priddy, and they certainly used to be resident there 25 years...

Enjoying the pictures! The kites have arrived in numbers here in east Somerset in the last couple of years, to the extent that I saw one over the garden on 1 January 2023, becoming my first bird sighting of the year. Their arrival has coincided with a drop in the buzzard population and I wonder if o...

Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary With the Bentley Wood Small Pearls now sadly gone I once again had to make the trek to Priddy Pools for my fix of this species. However they seemed to be having a lie-in this year and when Philzoid and I first visited none were found and we had to make up for their l...

Lovely Small Eggar larva - we get these locally in Somerset, with blackthorn and wild rose being the usual foodplants. We don't find it everywhere, but for some reason it's a little more widely distributed here than Brown Hairstreak is.