07/06/2018 - Whin Rigg
Well - another one of
those days!
We have a PhD student in our research group who's just embarking on her first field season surveying Mountain Ringlets. A couple of us went out with her today - her first day of fieldwork on the project - to help out and ensure it all went smoothly. My main job for the day was to teach her how to distinguish the males and females - despite never having encountered
Erebia epiphron before, I have plenty of practice of sexing
E. aethiops, and many other species besides! Being such a lovely day, and with the combined promise of a rare butterfly and two more Wainwright peaks to tick off their wall-chart, my parents tagged along as well!
The target today was the Irton Fell population - being relatively southerly, westerly, and low-elevation, often the first site to see MR flying. It didn't take long for us to find a very obliging female...
She was quite happy to pose - and sat patiently as we tried out best to move stray grass stems and shadows out of the way! Having seen a lot of Scotch Argus, and seen in photographs that the two
Erebia species look fairly similar, I had wrongly assumed they were the same size as well, so I was charmed by these dainty little butterflies!
We moved further up the site, and it quickly became clear that there were hundreds of Mountain Ringlets flying. The site is massive, and we pretty reliably saw a butterfly every few metres for almost three kilometres, so the population must number in the thousands here. The population of Small Heaths will be ten times that - but I didn't even attempt to stalk one today!
The females were the more obliging, of course, and in retrospect most of the photos I managed to get were of females.
It looks as though I caught this one in the act of laying an egg - amazing, and a great pay-off for my habit of always trying to get a few face-on shots!
There were a few interesting moths about on the fellside as well. We netted a rather tired looking Clouded Buff, and then found this much fresher Mother Shipton.
Having completed the day's surveys, my colleagues headed back to their car whilst my parents and I headed onwards for the summits of Whin Rigg and, up a spectacular ridge-walk above the Wasdale Screes, Illgill Head. The Mountain Ringlets were also flying on the summit of the latter - at much higher elevation, and with some distance walked between the two peaks without a single MR seen, I presume this functions as a largely independent population from the main Irton Fell colony. As we started our descent into Miterdale, just before leaving the MRs behind, the mountain had a final gift for me - as a Mountain Ringlet came to sip my sweat, first from my leg before fluttering, without any encouragement, up to my hand.
The descent through Miterdale was long, hot, and not so interesting as we had hoped, but there was a last surprise in store halfway down - my first Wall Brown of the year!