Daily Telegraph Butterflies

[Charles Nicol]

there was an interesting article about UK butterfly extinctions this week.... the accompanying photo shows an unusual Large Copper:

the Large Tortoiseshell looks atypical also:

[David Simcox]

And a photo that looks rather like a Common blue! I'm afraid these mistakes are usually down to the Photo Editor rather than the author of the article.

[Benjamin]

They got the Black-veined White right - 1 out of 4 ain’t bad.

[Pete Eeles]

Good grief - what a car crash!

How on earth is that remotely a Large Copper? Here's a recent photo of George Clooney from the Torygraph that also raised my suspicions

sss.jpg (6.8 KiB) Viewed 535 times

Cheers,

- Pete

[Charles Nicol]

hehehe my suspicions were correct !! thanks guys.

the article itself was very well written by proper scientists ...

[David M]

It's amazing how often the media depict the wrong species in articles such as this. You'd think with Google images being so readily available that those preparing the pictures would take a simple few seconds to ensure accuracy.

To get 75% of the species wrong though is Premier League incompetence.

[PhilBJohnson]

I've done my research.
"The relatively larger scale Small Tortoiseshell looks like a summer brooded female on lavender.
The other butterflies were imported into the picture, with "nice" yellow backgrounds, to help you take a closer look.

[millerd]

To get 75% of the species wrong though is Premier League incompetence.

I think a 25% success rate is pretty good compared to that of Premier League footballers capitalising on goal-scoring opportunities...

Back to the point: fact-checking doesn't seem to be a journalistic strongpoint these days unfortunately. When you are in the lucky position of actually knowing exactly what's correct, you find that almost any given news item is riddled with misconception, inaccuracy and worse.

It's also noticeable that a run through of Google images on any randomly selected butterfly almost always brings up a selection of photos of the wrong species lurking amongst what's offered.

Dave

[David M]

...I think a 25% success rate is pretty good compared to that of Premier League footballers capitalising on goal-scoring opportunities

Yes, but a very poor rate compared to what would be achieved if Premiership footballers' images were used in newspaper articles.

I can't imagine for a moment that a headline about Sadio Mane would include a picture of Raheem Sterling.