The number of Commas I have seen here has been increasing year on year. This year I haven't seen quite as many as I did last year, but it seems there may be more to come!
On 21 July I was distracted again, when I was working in my study, by a Comma butterfly flitting about on the nettles outside my window. I realised it was laying eggs, so made a mental note of where I had seen it and at lunchtime I checked out a particular nettle stem. There I found an egg in the centre of the underside of a leaf.
I picked the stem and kept it in a jar of water next to my desk to watch it develop.
On the 28th July I noticed it had hatched and there was a little black caterpillar, about 2mm long.
The caterpillar tended to be quite inactive and remain on its leaf, only moving once the leaf had more or less been completely eaten. I was hoping to be able to determine which instar it was as it grew, but I became completely confused! So, below are some pictures as it developed. In this one it is two days old.
Here it is 12 days old.
And here it is at 20 days old. Every time I moved the nettle in order to photograph the caterpillar it would contort.
And here it is at 21 days old.
When it was 29 days old it spun a silk pad on a leaf stem and hung straight down from it. Of course it curled up as soon as I tried to take a picture! It remained like this for a day.
On the 21st August it formed a lovely chrysalis, mostly dark brown with two golden spots.
Two weeks later on 4th September I noticed that the segments on the abdomen area of the chrysalis had started to stretch apart, so I thought the butterfly would soon emerge.
I didn't expect it to emerge so soon, though. Half an hour later when I looked, there was a butterfly hanging there!
I took the stick that it was now on outside into the sun. The butterfly remained on the stick for a couple of hours, then flew off onto a fence post, where it remained until about 4pm before it flew off.
