Peacock

Always a treat to see a Peacock Butterfly (Aglais io). There's certainly been a noticeable decline of butterflies in our garden this year, both in number and diversity. To be honest, there's been a noticeable, nay drastic decline in insects in our garden altogether. Still, in these darkening times we've got to take moments beauty where we find it. And isn't it beautiful, mesmerizing.

The Gatekeeper

 

They say the Gatekeepers' habitat is grass and scrub, so I was chuffed to see them in our garden, as grassy scrub land was the aesthetic we were going for. There's a lot of them too. No doubt attracted by our healthy and numerous clumps marjoram, one of the Gatekeepers' favourite sources of nectar.

The Gatekeeper

Our garden's full of Gatekeepers (Pyronia tithonus) at the moment.

The Comma

Spring returned this morning and with it the warming sun. Not bothered by my attention, a Comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album) suns itself on a trunk in the sunlit tranquillity of White's plantation. It's said that the ancient Celts saw butterflies as the souls of the dead, with the ability to travel between this and the otherworld. A beautifully romantic image for a people we usually see as quite macho and fighty.

Ready for take off

'Standing on the runway, waiting to take off, I want to fly....' (Brainstorm by Hawkwind). A Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) soaks up the autumn sun as it prepares to take flight into November.  The Red Admiral is as hard as flip, and can often be seen on sunny days throughout the year, even when other butterflies fear to fly.

Breather

A butterfly stops briefly for a breather on a Common Spotted Orchid before alighting once again to rejoin the aerial foray. 

Flutterbys

I've heard it said that the Celts believed that butterflies were the spirits of their ancestors returned to visit the world of the living. If so, they'd returned in force today and where better to return to than the ancient landscape of Cranborne Chase, a landscaped shaped and left indelibly marked by the activities of man for over 6000 years. The area is renowned for prehistoric archaeology and its butterflies, and rightly so, the air was thick with them, I'll say hundreds although really it must have been thousands but that sounds like I'm exaggerating, nearly every blade of tall grass or grassland flower was topped by a pausing flier, only for a short while though, as the slightest disturbance would send them skittishly aloft. Two types of butterfly dominated the grasslands today: the big and bold Marbled White (Melanargia galathea) and the smaller skittish Large Skipper (Ochlodes venatus) which in reality aren't that large at all. Both butterflies were beautiful and elegant, both filled me with childish joy and wonder as the air filled with them as we passed.

Peacock caterpillar

Following my previous post on caterpillars, there's not mistaking what this seething mass of Peacock Butterfly (Aglais io) caterpillars is saying; black and spiky, they're saying neither 'you ain't seen me, right' nor 'ooh look at me', no they're saying 'f*ck off!'. Further, the Peacock Butterfly caterpillar follows an opposite path to the Drinker Moth caterpillar by going from plain caterpillar to flamboyant butterfly.  It's a funny old world.

Adonis Blue

Adonis Blue's (Polyommatus bellargus) darted about Martin Down this afternoon; this chalk grassland species is restricted to the South and Southeast of England where it's often spotted in large numbers. When its wings are closed it's near impossible to see, but when its wings open its shock of blue stands out clearly amongst the prevailing greens.

Sprung

Butterflies and blooms; spring has definitely sprung.