Thanks for the plant ID, Buggy - I've seen one with yellow flowers now and see it's a kind of mustard. The leaves do look a bit like rocket - I wonder what they taste like? Hopefully the Orange Tip caterpillars will enjoy them.
Somehow photos don't fully capture the deep chocolate colour of a new Brown Argus, Trevor and Wurzel, but that one wasn't a bad stab, I must admit.
There will be a few more Coppers to post I suspect, but thet last one does look pale enough to qualify as an ab. However, there are well over a hundred different abs to sort through! Oddly enough though, the very first one illustrated on the British Butterfly Aberrations website is ab.
intermedia, described as brassy rather than reddish-coppery coloured.
http://www.britishbutterflyaberrations. ... berrations It looks like a close match to me: the one I saw was brand spanking new, with full fringes and not a mark on it, and compared to the others was markedly pale (as you can see in the other photos). It is a sort of halfway point between normal and the exquisite silvery-white ab.
schmidtii. Now that
would be something to see!
Tuesday 5th May. Cooler, breezier, but generally sunny. Within a few minutes of leaving home on my morning walk around my local patch, I spotted a Holly Blue flying very uncertainly at the bottom of the hedge and watched it flop down into the grass. Time for a rescue! It clambered onto my hand with no encouragement at all, probably because of the relative warmth and shelter it afforded from the cool breeze. In fact it readily opened its wings to reveal a splendid new female butterfly.
After allowing it to warm up for a while, I transferred it to the most sheltered bit of sunlit bramble I could find nearby, and was rewarded with a great series of poses.
Eventually it settled down, probably to wait for the sun to climb and warm things up properly.
A couple of males later on tried to compete, but there was no comparison.
Having said the other day that Orange Tips don't gets tattered, just faded, I came across one that had suffered in both regards.
Having not seen one for ten days, I came across two Commas today relatively close together. One posed, but the other was rather more active.
I only found a couple of Small Coppers too, but I knew there would still be plenty flying down at Staines Moor later on.
This Peacock was typical of the handful still being seen - basking within sight of large banks of nettles, and no doubt preparing for an egg-laying spree
The good numbers of white butterflies included this almost unmarked male GVW. They have an almost chalky texture to them.
Finally, after seeing that first Brown Argus yesterday a few miles to the south, I now found the first of the year on my local patch - if previous years are anything to go by, the first of many.
However, the star of the morning was that very first butterfly.
Dave