www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Well,the last post did the trick. No sooner had I clicked 'send' than the sun came out and stayed out until mid-afternoon. Somehow, though, I could only manage an hour down at Brick Lane, the footpath and mature hedgerow described in the first post of this diary - I cannot make it out but ever since I retired I seem to have less time for idling!

A male Brimstone flew over the bonnet of the car before I had opened the door - a promising start. The wind was brisk, though, and still chilly despite the sunshine; it would be another visit in which any butterflies on the wing would be seeking some shelter from it. Within ten yards I had both Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock basking on the bare patches of the path. One problem we have here in the wider landscape is a lack of nectar plants, of wildflowers in general; dandelions are important, and so is ground ivy:
Like lots of others diarists, I am seeing plenty of Bee Flies - or are they Bee-flies?.They are so good at hovering it's possible to capture them in flight:
As I was photographing these, something white flew by - looking up, I was in time to see my first Orange Tip of the year, at last. Of course it was a male, of course it was already on patrol and of course a picture was out of the question. But once you start looking, there are insects everywhere in spring. I watched a cranefly ovipositing into algal weed in the shallow ditch than runs by the footpath. I've never seen anything like this before and had always assumed that they were all terrestrial in the larval stage;
When I reached the Gault Hole I could hear a Water Rail squealing - they nest here - and a Cetti's Warbler giving its explosive burst of noise - another resident bird these days. Way across in the reed-bed I could just make out the location of this year's Mute Swans' nest:
To my right was a spinney of elm which I have searched for White-letters, so far without success. It is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of butterfly habitats because in the early 1990s it was the little square of sheltered, weedy ground on which I first found Brown Argus in this area as they were making their great march across the countryside:
On the way back to the car, butterfly sightings improved. A Comma was resting on the footpath and allowed me to get very close:
At the same spot, my first Green-veined white of the year appeared and settled on the only plant of Garlic Mustard I had seen so far, even though there are good stands at several spots along the path later on. I checked but there were no eggs on this plant as yet;
My last butterfly was also a first, the first female Brimstone of the year feeding on ground ivy, another locally important nectar source. It appeared to have some difficulty inserting its proboscis into these complicated little flowers:
Almost at the car, I glanced into the ditch for the last time and found this three-spined stickleback holding territory in the shallow, sunlit water. This tenacious little fish can be found in the most unlikely places, and they have fascinating sex lives but that's another story. I put it in here just to see if it's the first fish ever in the diaries but now I seem to recall seeing some in the beaks of birds! Oh well, here he is anyway:
It's amazing what you can see in an hour of spring.

You're taking me back now Rob - in my youth we used to call them Robinies on account of their red breasts!

Pauline wrote:You're taking me back now Rob - in my youth we used to call them Robinies on account of their red breasts!

Yes, me too, Pauline. Many hours were spent catching them from streams and ponds...And the sun was always shining over the blue-remembered hills,

Rob

Ahh yes, Robin Red-Breasts to us too when we were kids, and the smaller ones were always 'tiddlers'

Great reports and photos, I still haven't seen a Brimstone settle yet this year.

Cheers,

Neil.

Happy days!! What child of the 70s DIDN'T catch sticklebacks?

So glad I was a teenager before these pastimes were usurped by mindless video games.

I did too, in a stream near my Nan's house in Seal, near Sevenoaks. There was a broken bridge and the north Downs were in view. We had to cross a railway line (on a level crossing) to get there. Probably the last time I saw a kingfisher.

Ah....takes me back.

Lee

Thanks to all for the comments - who would have thought that there are so many sticklebacks in the streams of memory?

Rob

Sticklebacks started me off and I've been fishing ever since

Great stuff Rob - especially the Green Veined It wasn't Sticklebacks for me but a small Minnow like fish which we called 'Bullheads'

Have a goodun

Wurzel

Hello Maverick - me too, been fishing for about 53 years now! Mostly coarse in the fens but also a long-time stillwater trout angler and every year I manage a week in the West Country for my favourite thing of all, the sea trout. I wonder how many other angling butterflyers there are in these forums - or are they butterflying anglers?

Hello Wurzel - growing up in the fens, the bullhead was a fish of legend for me, and I never saw one until I was all grown up - but after much searching as a boy I did find a stream with stone loach in it. That was a great day. Now it's a golf course.

Rob

Not to mention the tommy ruff
Been fishing for the same amount of time
Had a few small fish on my hols in Cuba as well
Im from North wales originally and started on sea fishing but have tried everything
Also had two seatrout on my own flies in Scotland
Mainly carp fishing now,I've got two Northwest thirties under my belt

Hi Maverick,

odd how names vary locally - we always called them bobby ruffe. They used to be so common they were a pest but now I rarely hear of anyone catching them. Thirties from the north west must be pretty unusual still but down here carp are becoming a nuisance, having been stocked into every pit and pond and now beginning to dominate rivers too.

The link to butterflies isn't so strange when you remember that Richard Walker (I think) said that angling is just applied entomology. Obviously he was talking about fly fishing but it sort of holds. Most serious anglers study fish rather than just catching them, just as we study butterflies,

Rob

Not to mention the bird life,bugs,toads,frogs,the list goes on

Hi Rob, I've been angling for about fifty years too and you see an awful lot when you blend quietly into the landscape. I think it was Hugh Falkus who quoted this, but not 100% sure, "There's more to fishing than catching fish".

Mike

Hello Mike,

it's good to know that there are at least three of us! Falkus's book on sea trout is one of the best angling books ever written, in my opinion, and it's still the first thing I pack if I'm heading west. And if fishing was only about catching fish, I'd have given up years ago...

Rob

After attending grandson Daniel's second birthday party in the next-door village, we decided to walk home as the sun was shining and we were in no hurry. The farmer who owns some of the fields is a good birding friend of mine and so it was alright to take a shortcut around one of his fields of autumn wheat, instead of going the long way round to the old airfield. No camera, not even the trusty close-focusing Papilios - this was butterflying at its most basic. But there were butterflies all the way along the trimmed hawthorn hedge, with its thin fringe of nettles, and they were all Small Tortoiseshells. Some were battered and barely recognisable, others were remarkably fresh-looking. A couple were amongst the nettles and might have been preparing to lay but most were simply enjoying the sunshine, basking on the bare soil, already hard and dry despite the deluges of last winter.

We must have put up at least twenty in the hundred yards or so of field margin before we reached the road. Two thoughts came to mind: first, we always say that hard winters are best for over-wintering butterflies but in my part of the fens we had just a couple of sharp frosts. yet large numbers of hibernating butterflies seem to have come through this time, even though it was a very mild, very wet winter indeed. Second, we were walking in a place that no-one would ever consider giving a second look for butterflies but here they were in good numbers. Multiplied across the many similar fields that stretch away from my village in all directions, just how many Small Tortoiseshells were flying this afternoon? If we have good weather this year, the numbers later on could be spectacular unless Sturmia bella really gets amongst them.

The final part of our walk was along a section of The Rushway. At last I saw my first two Speckled Woods of the year, typically flitting through the section with dappled sunshine, and then we passed a courting couple - a pair of Green-veined Whites dancing together around a spray of garlic mustard.

The forecast is promising. I think I'll be back tomorrow with binoculars and camera.

Hi rob
I think you will find there are a good number of fishing butterflyers on his site including myself! There does seem to be a bit of a connectionI seem to remeber having seen a photo of a very nice brace of perch and I know Neil Hulme is a lapsed fisherman.
Of course probably the most famous of all is "BB" Denys Watkins Pitchford who wrote any number of famous angling books and bred purple emperors, releasing them into Fermyn Woods - can thoroughly recommend the book BB's butterflies which was published last year.
Kind Regards
Mark

We all need our own site !!!

On days like these it is not difficult to see what Robert Browning was longing for. In the morning I had to do some writing but by midday the lure of sunshine and birdsong was too much. Within five minutes I was out in the fields. The new tenant farmer has created an access track; it isn’t a conservation headland – we have very few of those – but it has already provided some marginal habitat that butterflies will use. A Peacock was basking here, and I make no apology for posting another picture of a battered old warrior – they will soon be gone;
Looking back from the track, I could see the trees at the end of my road – a single oak and two good-sized English elms. Both have their requisite hairstreaks in good years. These elms have a decent amount of blossom now but later I noticed that many of the smaller secondary trees that White-letters also use have very little:
The field is, unusually, spring-sown this year like many others because it was used to produce maize for bio-energy last year. That was harvested very late and then the weather took over. This change in the cycle will undoubtedly have implications for wildlife. Along the track, this plant was growing:
I think it is charlock but I’m not great with plants. I don’t know to what extent it is used by whites such as the Green-veined but it is quite common locally:
Once onto The Rushway, butterflies began to appear. There was only one patrolling male Orange Tip; garlic mustard has declined here over the years, seeming to prefer the edges of the path to be mown more often than they are – an unexpected victim of budget cuts? But Speckled Woods were common, with at least ten along the path. Some were basking out in the open just as Jeremy Thomas describes them doing early in the season, whilst others were in more dappled situations, and a few were already showing signs of wear – time, it seems, waits no more for butterflies than it does for us:
The footpath is beginning to look attractive but we are desperately short of wildflowers here. I passed a solitary bluebell. It’s probably an escape and a Spanish interloper but we have to take anything we can get!
I don’t see many Small Tortoiseshells on blackthorn blossom whereas it is very popular with the Peacocks. Green-veined Whites were also common, flying up and down the path but rarely settling. One that did was captured on a dandelion but is over-exposed, as usual:
Where the footpath climbs a slight hill, we have one tiny hay meadow. Sadly, every year the owner sprays it with weed-killer. It’s impossible to think that the cost makes this worthwhile but old habits die as hard as the few plants that might have flowered here:
Beyond the meadow is a small field of rape. This is always attractive to whites and there were a dozen or so flying over it but rarely settling. Most would have been Green-veined, I think:
Where The Rushway meets Widdens Drove, butterflies were numerous. Four male Brimstones were in view at one point, along with more whites, Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells. There is a good nettlebed here and I had come with the hope of finding the latter species egg-laying. Within ten minutes a female had arrived. Watching the process of leaf selection is agonizing as she crawls over numerous identical-looking possibilities and rejects them all. Sometimes she bends her abdomen under the leaf and then changes her mind yet again – all very familiar to the married among us, I suppose… This part of the process took 25 minutes.
The spray finally chosen was on the south-facing edge. Once she has begun to lay, nothing will move her, not even the lady out walking with the inquisitive Jack Russell. Though I lay flat out taking pictures, this lady calmly passed by and said “Good afternoon”; either word has got round or I no longer look at all dangerous. The Tortoiseshell continued to lay for at least ten minutes before she left the leaf and rested in the sun nearby. I was able to get a close-up of what she had done, and the whole process amazes me more as time goes by: surviving all the hazards of a caterpillars’s life, the frantic feeding in late summer, finding a hibernation site where mice won’t eat you, finding a mate and then producing that mass of tiny green pearls to begin the dance again, joining the end to the beginning:

Great report and observations, Rob

By the looks of the eggs, there are two batches there. Judging by the size of each mass, I would say that they were laid by separate individuals.

Vince