First Butterfly of the Year

After a long grey, damp winter we woke up this morning to see white frost on the ground and a lovely blue sky. Although it was colder than it has been for some months, it was lovely to see bright weather for a change.

At lunchtime I went for a walk along the river to an area where I have often seen my first butterfly of the year, but there was nothing there. I told myself that I was being stupid as it was far too cold for a butterfly to awaken.

On my way back to the office I walked along a cold, shady pavement and noticed a little brown triangle out of the corner of my eye. I stopped to take a closer look and saw that it was a Small Tortoiseshell. It was almost certain to perish where it was, as the sun would never reach it and it was likely to be trodden upon.

So, I picked it up and carried it to a sunny spot where I put it on a Marigold. Almost immediately it opened up its wings and I hope it managed to have a feed to give it the energy to survive the remaining cold days of winter.

It was lovely to see a butterfly again. I hope it won't be too long before I see more.

Orange Tip - Anthocharis cardamines

My favourite butterfly is the Orange Tip, Anthocharis cardamines. When it first appears in April, I know that the butterfly season has started in East Lothian. Other butterflies appear around the same time of year, but they all produce a second generation later in the year. The Orange Tip only has one generation and in East Lothian they usually occur from mid April until the end of June. They are commonly found in the lush vegetation along the edge of water courses.

It is only the male that has the beautiful orange tips to its wings. The female lacks the orange and has slightly larger black tips to its wings. When they are freshly emerged they have a lovely checked edge to their wings and white antennae.

The underside of the wing is a marbled white and green and when they completely close up they are remarkably well camouflaged.

Around here the most common food plant for the caterpillars is Garlic Mustard, Alliaria petiolata. Cockooflower, Cardamine pratensis is also listed as a common food plant, but I have never found eggs or caterpillars on it. The adults feed on the flowers of both of these plants and you can see from the picture of Garlic Mustard below how the underside of the wing looks just like a flower head!

The spring and summer of 2012 was particularly rainy here and this appeared to have quite an impact on the butterflies trying to survive at the time. I didn't find one egg on any Garlic Mustard, but discovered that this year they had chosen a garden escape, Dames Violet, Hesperis matronalis to lay their eggs on.

The butterfly above is laying an egg and you can see the tiny white egg on the Dames Violet below.

Sadly the area where I do my butterfly transect is along-side the River Tyne and in July it flooded and all of the Dames Violet was submerged. After the waters subsided I didn't find any surviving eggs or caterpillars. Hopefully, there will be others on higher ground that have survived and they will colonise the river banks again next year.

The caterpillars are cannibalistic, and the female butterfly only lays one egg per flower head.

 Within a couple of days the egg turns orange ...

... and the caterpillar hatches sometime between one and two weeks later depending on the temperature.

The caterpillar lives its life feeding on the seed pods and by the fourth instar it has developed a white  shading to its upper side.

Up until this year I have never managed to find an Orange Tip chrysalis. The butterflies, eggs and caterpillars are relatively easy to spot, but the chrysalis is cunningly disguised as a thorn or bud. Last weekend I was at my father's house. He lives in a woodland and in a sunny spot I saw some dried Garlic Mustard seed heads. I spent some time searching them and the surrounding shrubs and I was delighted to find a chrysalis on a dried seed head of a Garlic Mustard plant growing in the wall of a derelict mill. I was thinking that if we have heavy snow this winter the Garlic Mustard plants would be flattened, but the plant with the chrysalis was beautifully sheltered under the branches of some elm trees. It is amazing that butterflies seem to consider these things when they lay their eggs!

I have been told that there are two colour forms of the chrysalis. Brown is more common than green. Now I know what I am looking for I will have a look for some more the next time I visit my dad. It is amazing to see the way the caterpillar has woven silk onto the stem of the plant to attach itself. It should remain there until next April, when hopefully it will emerge into a beautiful butterfly.

Northern Brown Argus - Aricia artaxerxes artaxerxes

There is a magical little corner in a valley close to where my father lives in the Scottish Borders which has remained untouched for years. Amongst the heather and grasses there is a lot of rock rose, which is the foodplant for the caterpillars of the Northern Brown Argus butterfly, Aricia artaxerxes. The valley runs for about a kilometre up into the moors, but the best area is a sheltered slope next to an old oak wood. Below the slope is a flatter damp area next to the burn (stream). The butterflies tend to fly on the south-facing slope during the day and then roost amongst the taller grasses and sedges in the bottom of the valley in the evening.

The yellow flowers of the Rock Rose, Helianthemum nummularium, stand out in the sunlight, but unfortunately when I visited this area last year it was quite overcast.

Despite the weather there were still quite a few butterflies around.

The reason I visit, each June or July is to see the Northern Brown Argus. These are a small butterflies with a wingspan of about 25 to 30mm. They occur only in the north of England and Scotland and the sub-species artaxerxes, which has the distinctive white spots on the forewings, is only found in Scotland. This one is a male.

The underside of the wings is similar to many blue butterflies, but the Scottish sub-species often lacks the dark spots inside the light markings.

This one is a female and just after I took this picture she flew off and laid an egg!

Although the eggs are small they are quite easy to find on the dark Rock Rose leaves.

This is really a little beyond the macro capabilities of my camera and this is the best I could do I am afraid. This egg is only about half a mislimetre across, though!

Another butterfly that is very common in this area is the Ringlet, Aphantopus hyperantus. 

And there are plenty of Common Blues, Polyommatus icarus.

There were also a lot of Meadow Browns, Maniola jurtina;

Small Whites, Pieris rapae;

Green-veined Whites, Pieris napi;

Dark Green Fritillaries, Argynnis aglaja;

And my first ever Small Pearl Bordered Fritillary, Boloria selene.

This area used to be quite heavily grazed by sheep, but recently some trees have been planted in the bottom of the valley and it is no longer grazed. I hope that the bracken doesn't take over and smother the Rock Rose. It would be a real tragedy to lose this magical little corner.

Small White - Pieris rapae

A couple of summers ago I was sitting in the garden when I noticed a Small White butterfly, Pieris rapae, land on a cabbage plant that my wife was intending to give to the hens. I watched it for a while and noticed that it was laying some eggs.

Of course the cabbage plant now had to be saved from the hens!

Small white eggs tend to be scattered around rather than laid in a group.

After only a few days the eggs hatched and there were small caterpillars wandering around the plant. Here's an older caterpillar on a nasturtium leaf. You can probably make out the row of yellow dots along the side and the yellow stripe down it's back (do caterpillars have backs?)

It was some weeks after the caterpillars had disappeared that I spotted this chrysalis on the hinge of our garden gate. Luckily there was just enough room for it not to be squashed when the gate was opened.

Last summer we had some more Small White caterpillars on some nasturtiums in the garden. Here is a caterpillar that has crawled up the house to form a chrysalis. It has attached itself to the wall and is thickening up.

The following day it was a chrysalis. You will notice the remains of a small black wasp next to it. I had noticed that the chrysalis was flicking and spotted the wasp on it (which I dispatched!). Some of these are parasitic and lay eggs into the chrysalis. Sadly I was too late for this chrysalis and a few others.

Here are a couple of the chrysalises that didn't make it. The holes are where the wasps emerged.

To end on a happier note, here is a freshly emerged butterfly from one of the chrysalises that the wasps didn't get!

Alicante, Spain - Butterflies - April 2011

After a long and exceptionally snowy winter we headed for the sun of southern Spain for a week. We rented an apartment in Torrevieja, which unfortunately didn't prove to be a particularly good location for butterflies.


These little Geranium Bronzes, Cacyreus marshalli, have spread along much of the Mediterranean after being introduced from Southern Africa on geranium plants. They were enjoying the pot plants at the apartment.

I've never had any luck photographing the upper side of the wings!

Most of the area around the apartment was quite built-up and the surrounding landscape was very flat. I had been recommended a walk along a river - the Rio Segura, where there may have been more butterflies. Unfortunately the day I was there it was quite windy, so there were very few butterflies about. Of course, I saw the ubiquitous Small White butterfly, Pieris rapae.

Part way along the river I spotted a track heading up towards a farm where there was a scrubby knoll that I thought looked promising. On one small sheltered, sunny spot I saw some blue butterflies amongst the wild flowers and herbs. They turned out to be Black-eyed Blues, Glaucopsyche melanops. They are stunning little butterflies. The the upper side of the males are two shades of blue with a black surround and narrow white edge. The females are mostly brown with a few blue flecks. The under-sides of the wings are grey with lovely black markings.

I spent some time just watching the small colony of these beautiful little creatures. I had a very brief view of these in Portugal a couple of years earlier, but it was fantastic being able to watch them so closely.

On the drive back to the apartment I saw a small white butterfly at the side of the road, so I stopped and tried to get a closer look. It turned out to be a Bath White, Pontia daplidice, but it wasn't keen on stopping for a picture. This was the best I could manage. I did see them later in the holiday in a couple of places, but never managed a picture.

Another day I headed for the distant hills, thinking that there may be more butterflies there. However, the hills seemed to be further away than I thought and I got a little lost and ended up by a reservoir. Initially there didn't seem to be many butterflies there, but after I had been there a while they started to appear. This is a Spanish Marbled White, Melanargia ines. There were a couple of them arguing over a sunny spot. I kept trying to follow them to take a photograph, but every time one settled the other would fly past and disturb it. I noticed that they always came back to the same point and so I just sat and waited with my camera ready and before long one flew into shot!

Other butterflies that I saw on the trip were:

Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui

Large White, Pieris brassicae

Swallowtail, Papilio machaon

Clouded Yellow, Colias crocea

Southern Swallowtail, Iphiclides feisthamelii

Speckled Wood, Pararge aegeria aegeria

Wall Brown, Lasiommata megera

Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta

13 butterflies in total. I was expecting to see more, but I was thrilled to get good views of the Black-eyed Blues and Spanish Marbled Whites and I was particularly pleased to see the Bath Whites, a butterfly I hadn't seen before.

Large White - Pieris brassicae

Two summers ago our kids occupied themselves one day by collecting caterpillars from some nasturtiums growing outside our neighbour's house and bringing them into our garden to eat our nasturtiums!

They turned out to be the caterpillars of Large White butterflies, Pieris brassicae. Over the next few days they grew bigger ...

... until our nasturtiums had almost all been eaten! Then one day I noticed a couple of caterpillars climbing up the walls of the house.

When they reached a sheltered spot they shed their skin and then started to fatten up. If you look carefully, there is a length of silk around the second segment from the right holding the caterpillar to the wall.

Within an hour or so, they were looking more like a chrysalis.

And this is what they looked like a couple of days later. This was the end of September and the chrysalises remained there all winter. One day the next spring I checked and discovered that the chrysalises had all emerged and I had missed the butterflies!

This is what the adult butterflies would have looked like.

Menorca eggs!

There were so many butterflies in the orchard of the villa we rented that on three occasions a butterfly landed close to me and laid an egg.

This one is a Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus, or at least I think it is. The butterfly that laid it was a pale form and possibly could have been a Berger's Clouded Yellow, Colias alfacariensis. The only way I know to tell the two apart is by the caterpillar, but unfortunately I never found it!

This one was laid by a Cleopatra, Gonepteryx cleopatra. A few days later I saw a little caterpillar on the same leaf, but I didn't see it again after that despite looking on several occasions.

This egg was laid by a Swallowtail, Papilio machaon. When it was laid it was white and it turned yellow the first day. Three days later a brown line appeared around the egg and the next day it hatched.

Here it is chewing on its egg shell. Unfortunately, this was the last day of our holiday so I didn't get to see it develop any further. They grow into spectacular-looking caterpillars.

Menorca - Butterflies - July 2010

Menorca is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea. There are about 25 species of butterflies occurring there with another five or so having been recorded as vagrants. We spent two weeks there in the summer of 2010, staying in an old farm house near the centre of the island. Attached to the house was an orchard, (where my daughter counted 19 different kinds of fruit trees) which turned out to be the perfect place for butterflies. I wasn't expecting to see too much, but I was to be pleasantly surprised.

We arrived in the evening just as the sun was going down, but there were still some Speckled Woods, Pararge aegeria aegeria, flying by the house. These proved to be very common flying anywhere with a bit of dappled shade.

Probably even more abundant than the Speckled Woods were Holly Blues, Celastrina argiolus. I was delighted to see so many of them living along the ivy-covered walls of the orchard.

Southern Brown Argus, Arica cramera, enjoyed the wild flowers in the orchard...

... along with a few Common Blue, Polyommatus icarus.

The Small Copper, Lycaena phlaeas, was less common, but still a lot more abundant than in Scotland.

I am used to seeing Small Heaths, Coenonympha pamphilus, on coastal grasslands and moors in Scotland. They seemed a bit out of place to me in the orchard. Back home they also tilt their wings towards the sun whenever they land in order to catch as much warmth as possible. In Menorca they always faced into the sun so as to catch as little sun as possible!

I was pleased to see a lot of Clouded Yellows, Colias croceus,  in the orchard. They seemed a lot less timid than those I had seen in Portugal.

The other yellow butterfly that occurs there is the Cleopatra, Gonepteryx cleopatra. These have a lovely flash of orange on their upper wing, but they always rest with their wings closed so it is only visible when they are flying. They also have an amazing ability to blend into the ivy when they roost at night.

As in most places in Europe, Large Whites, Pieris brassicae, were fairly common.

I saw one or two Small Whites, Pieris rapae, too.

A familiar sight in Scotland, but not so common on Menorca is the Meadow Brown, Maniola jurtina.

I spent ages following a Southern Gatekeeper, Pyronia cecilia, along the Alengdar Gorge, but it just wouldn't settle long enough for me to take a photo. This one appeared in the orchard and was much more obliging.

What I assume was the same Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, always appeared in one particular area of the orchard.

Red Admirals, Vanessa atalanta, enjoyed the fallen fruit. They are amazingly well camouflaged when their wings are closed.

Having only just discovered Wall Browns, Lasiommata megera, back in Scotland it was funny also finding them in Menorca. As with most of the butterflies I saw there, they rested with their wings closed, whereas in cooler Scotland they tend to rest with their wings open absorbing the sun's rays.

This is the best picture I could manage of a Two-tailed Pasha, Charaxes jasius. These are amazing butterflies with a really powerful flight. It was great watching them gliding amongst the fruit trees.

On the last day of our holiday this Lang's Short-tailed Blue, Leptotes pirithous, visited a bush next to the swimming pool were it remained for most of the day.

The other three species that I saw, but wasn't able to take a picture of were a Long-tailed Blue, Lampides boeticus, a Swallowtail, Papilio machaon and a Geranium Bronze, Cacyreus marshalli, making 20 species for the trip. This was a lot better than I had expected. What Menorca lacks in variety of species is more than made up for by the number of butterflies in the air.