Four or five years back Small Coppers were reasonably plentiful in my area however (possibly due to our string of awful summers since then) numbers appeared to crash through the floor thankfully they seem to be doing a little bit better this year. I hope that the trend continues, after all the Wall seems to be bouncing back quite well in my area after enduring a lengthy decline.Hoggers wrote:Hi B'Saurus, thanks for your message and kind comments. Much appreciated.
I've generally never found Small Coppers in great numbers except at Dungeness where, if the weather's been good, they thrive. Yesterday I must have seen 50-60 of them and that's just in a small area, not the whole site!
I always try to get a close up look at them not only because they're Little Crackers but because you can find the blue spotted ones and other varieties too. I had a look on the Small Copper section of our esteemed UKB site and found photos of one that our equally esteemed Wurzel had found, which had less in the way of black spotting on the fore-wings, so rather like the one I saw yesterday. There are other, sometimes extremely rare, aberrations too. So yes, well worth checking out.
As far as today's concerned, I didn't have long on my dog walk but did manage to see three Clouded Yellows.
P.S I'm still scrutinising EVERY White just in case it's a Helice! As you can easily imagine, my head is Spinning!
Cheers and Happy Butterflying!
There used to be a cracking little site for Small Coppers & more close to home (about 4 years ago there were well in excess of 30 Small Coppers there) One day an electricity company came along and completely destroyed the site without the permission of the land owner! I was very upset about this needless destruction, it used to be great for Brown Argus and Common Blue as well. Unfortunately despite my hopes for a 'miraculous recovery' it has remained almost barren ever since.
I've been to Dungeness a couple of times (not for Butterflies) and it's wonderfully weird place to visit I really must get back there again soon.
I think you've still got a good change of finding a Helice CY, they should be around for a good while yet
Best
J