Thank you for your thoughts, Paul and CC. You seem to agree that the abdomen looks girly, though CC doesn't want to commit himself to this 100%. I will record an open verdict, given that the wing shape and apparent sex brand strongly suggest a male. Next year I shall pay more attention to sexing these butterflies.
For the record, here are a confirmed male and female from the same colony, this year:
![Image](http://www.guypadfield.com/images2012/walbum1203.jpg)
(Male)
![Image](http://www.guypadfield.com/images2012/walbum1208.jpg)
(Female)
The female is obviously considerably more worn but the longer tails are still apparent (as they are on other female photos late in the year) and the forewing is open and rounded.
After making my earlier post and looking for something to eat I discovered to my horror there was no beer in the house. So straight onto the bike and down to the valley, passing via my short-tailed blue meadow to see if it had recovered from its July scything - or more probably mowing. The answer is that it hasn't recovered. It had been mowed to within inches of its life and very few nectar sources or larval host plants had survived - there was bare ground in places. A shame. It won't necessarily be the end of the short-tailed blues, because they can move in from nearby colonies (there are a handful very close together), but I think it might have broken the continuous six-generation sequence I have observed there for the last three years.
There were a few common blues, gamely going about business as usual, and I was just thinking one would make a good photo when the lep equivalent of a scud missile came spinning across the meadow from the other side and scuttled it. It then took out two more common blues before twisting and turning at lightning speed back whence it came. It was, of course, a long-tailed blue.
There were two long-tailed blues with slightly overlapping territories and I watched for about half an hour before I had worked out the domains and habits of each. One had base camp at the very edge of the mown area and would rest for about 20 seconds on grass stems between each round of proactive agression. Flying up from his grass stem he would first zoom out across the meadow to attack the long-suffering common blues, then come back to base camp and spin up and down the edge of the meadow, then finally he would head in the other direction until he met his rival and the pair of them would rise 100m into the sky, where they disappeared. He would then descend and take another 20-second breather on a grass stem. SO, while he was out on patrol I snuck in and knelt down next to one of his resting places. Here he is:
He is in quite good nick considering his extreme agression and is obviously a generation on from this one I saw in the same place on July 4th:
He might be a home-grown boy.
It is worth keeping an eye open in the UK any time from now on for these spinning furies, which I think must be under-recorded. They are rather small blues, and appear more so in flight because they are dull coloured even when fresh. Males are very alert and wary. In the vicinity of a suitable food plant (pea family - preferably showy and fragrant) they set up territories but otherwise are highly mobile. They are not resident in Switzerland but migrate in from Mediterranean regions every year, like painted ladies, and many of them continue northwards. I've seen them in Brittany, in the Channel Islands and one in Suffolk.
Guy