Just a flutter of bright orange like a piece of confetti blowing across the moor, – the male Small Heath butterfly (above). They’re fairly widespread in the UK and, of course mostly found on heathland – not in suburban gardens. It’s quite a small butterfly, only just over half an inch from head to tail, and they always perch as shown…. with wings closed. That way you won’t see the bright orange across the upper surface of its wings until it starts to fly. The male, slighter more colourful than the female, commands its own territory, while the female tends to wander all over the place.
2019 was a great year for butterflies generally but the biggest ‘event’ was the arrival in Scotland of millions of Painted Ladies – this happens every ten years or so. I recall last summer someone in a nearby town, posting an image of around 100 Painted Ladies on a single bush. Our garden topped out at about 15. These beauties can’t survive a UK winter so they are summer immigrants from the continent. They fly up all the way from sub-Saharan Africa breeding new generations as they go as the adults only live for around two weeks – a brief season.
Still, as you see there were some other butterflies queuing in front of my lens last year. Let’s hope we all see them back in numbers again this year. Usually July is my best month to find them. I’ll look for them early on on a sunny morning, when they are still a bit sleepy and sit around on stems and flowers waiting to get warmed up by the sun.
These photographs and the memories of those days out in the sun last year, certainly help brighten up the troubled times we’re all having just now.
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