12th and 13th November, the dying embers of 2017
Two sunny mid-November days, not the most obvious days to go out hunting butterflies, especially since I have my winter woolly’s on now, but in this day ‘n’ age you never know what may appear. It was a toss-up what day to go where, two days and two sites in mind, no prizes for guessing what those sites may be
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
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In the end I plumped for Shoreham on the Sunday, hoping that the south facing slopes and banks would shelter me from the arctic breeze. Not much luck in the respect unfortunately since the northerly wind had a distinct westerly twang to it and was circumnavigating the otherwise sheltered sunny sites and put a very firm lid on the temperatures.
A bit of wandering down on the harbour did turn up a solitary Red Admiral in the same spot they seem to be hanging around.
A cursory look round on the nearby Nettle growth added several more eggs to the previous visits total.
The only other things flying here were birds, lots of birds. This little spot does seem to punch above its weight in the biodiversity stakes. Wrens, Dunnock, House Sparrows, Goldfinch, Robins, Meadow Pipits and Greenfinch were amongst the avian life seen in and on the dense undergrowth
A pair of Kingfisher were darting along the water’s edge, too nippy and nervous to grab a picture though.
On my last visit I also noticed some Kidney Vetch in flower
and today I had a proper look around, discovering good amounts of the stuff on the path and the water’s edge. I’m not sure if Small Blue have been recorded here but there is definitely enough Vetch to support a small colony. (A look in a book called
The Butterflies of Sussex by a couple of blokes called
Blencowe & Hulme, there does seem to be a small blue square smack over Shoreham in the Small Blue entry)
Mill Hill, as I expected, was rather windswept. Had it not been for the strong wind I’m sure I would have seen a Clouded Yellow or two as on the odd occasion when the wind abated you could feel the warmth of the sun, but sadly, these breaks were few and far between and very short lived.
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Monday felt decidedly colder. Bookham was bathed in a mixture of low weak sun and crisp frosted leaves and I certainly wasn’t going to find any butterflies but there’s always eggs and larvae to find.
Even so I was surprised to find two active Small Copper cats in their little nursery. Of course ‘active’ is a relative term in this context, at temperatures only a few degrees above freezing I imagine any feeding was happening in slow motion. But with these leaves being frost encrusted only a few hours previously, you gotta hand it to them, they are tough little things!
Elsewhere, and for the third year in a row on the same low hanging branch of an Oak I found a Purple Hairstreak egg.
I keep meaning to stake out this tree one summer afternoon in the hope of catching a female egg laying, maybe next year...
Like yesterday birdlife was numerous, flocks of Redwing could be heard in the Blackthorn thickets and various small birds were busying around looking for small morsels to keep them going. One of the most numerous (and you can’t say this very often nowadays) was the Marsh Tit, they seemed to be everywhere today!
As usual at this time of year I also kept my eye out for Brown Hairstreak eggs, finding around 30 new ones scattered far and wide. Like the Small Copper’s they are tough little things. This is the same egg before and after defrosting!
Last time I discovered a cluster of around a dozen on a particularly popular Blackthorn sucker, but unfortunately, the ongoing work to encourage Nightingales here, (removal of dense scrub to promote fresh growth), had nearly destroyed this particular Blackthorn. It had been well and truly trampled by whatever heavy machinery had been used recently. A bit of rooting around though uncovered nine. I’m not sure if they are all still viable, several suffering varying amounts of superficial damage to the outer shell but as of today I have seven rescued eggs living in the back of my fridge. The remaining two were attached to the main ‘trunk’ of the shrub and I couldn’t remove them with destroying them.