Dingy

Because I was still feeling a bit frail and grumpy this morning I thought I should probably stay close to home; and having done Odonata yesterday, I decided on a trip to the Butterfly Conservation reserve at Honeybourne, in search of some more small early butterflies. I really dislike this site, which is owned by one of the railway companies and used as a dumping ground for their rubbish, and I never feel totally safe there when I'm on my own, but sections of it have exactly the kind of low, sparse vegetation that appeals to species such as the Small Heath, Common Blue, and Green Hairstreak, and most especially the Dingy and Grizzled Skippers, so I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and went butterfly hunting.

I'm pretty sure I'd have had an easier time of it if the weather had been more settled, because all these little guys are more active in sunny weather, and the Skippers in particular like to bask on low vegetation. As it was, with interludes of bright sunshine alternating with much longer cloudy periods, and a stiffish gusty breeze blowing throughout, I had to hunt high and low for my quarry. In fact, for about the first twenty minutes I saw nothing at all, and it was only a grim determination to get something on camera that kept me walking round and round the site.

In the end I did find all but one of my targets - the Green Hairstreak is continuing to evade me this season - and though the few photos I managed of the Small Heath and the Grizzled Skipper were poor enough to be excused as "just record shots", the Common Blues and Dingy Skippers were more cooperative. This was my last Dingy of the morning, and happily for me it was set off rather better by the sun-bleached plank on which it had chosen to bask than it's cousins had been against moss, leaf litter and dusty bare ground.

The Dingy Skipper is the UK's most widely-distributed Skipper, though it's most concentrated in southern and central England, and it lives in small, discrete colonies, so is never likely to be numerous at any given site. It's less fussy about habitat than the increasingly scarce Grizzled Skipper, and can be found on chalk downland, open hillsides, railway embankments, dunes, cliffs, abandoned quarries, and sometimes in woodland clearings and rides. Its wingspan averages about 3cm, making it a little bigger than the Grizzled Skipper, and slightly smaller than the Common Blue and Small Heath. It's fast, and flits along close to the ground, which makes it quite difficult to track, but as you see here, it does like to bask, and I find that when it has settled it tends to stay still, provided you approach it slowly. Another helpful habit from the butterfly hunter's point of view is that it shows a preference for yellow flowers, so it's always worth checking out dandelions, buttercups, and bird's-foot trefoil if you're looking for a Dingy Skipper.