Small earlies

After an indifferent Odonata day yesterday, today I decided to go after butterflies. I knew that Prestbury Hill was likely to be busy on a warm spring Saturday, and it was, but happily it was teeming with butterflies as well as butterfly hunters: I'd barely walked onto the Bill Smyllie Reserve - the lower of the two fields - when I found myself stepping over competing Small Blues, Small Heaths, and Dingy Skippers, and I hadn't gone much further when I spotted the first Marsh Fritillary of the day.

By the time I reached Bill's bottom I already had quite enough photos, thanks very much, to justify the trip, but I was still missing two of my target species - the Green Hairstreak and the Duke of Burgundy - so I pressed on across the Cotswold Way into the bottom of the Masts Field. There I was lucky enough to run into a couple of very experienced lepidopterists, over from Warwickshire for the day, and they pointed me at not just my personal targets but also some Adonis Blues they'd been watching. I had heard that there were now Adonis Blues at Prestbury, but hadn't really expected to come across any today because it's still quite early in the season for them, and I was very happy to add them to my day list (though slightly dismayed to realise that my annual excuse for visiting the Winstone's ice cream factory on Rodborough Bank had just gone up in smoke). A little later I was able to repay all the help my new acquaintances had given me by finding them a Brown Argus, which ticked the last box on their target list for the day, and sent all of us away happy.

Though there were more butterflies around than I've seen at Prestbury Hill for a very long time, conditions for photographing them were a bit tricky. The light was strong and contrasty, and sadly very few of the butterflies were content to let me get within macro distance, which would have allowed me to even it out with fill flash. But in the circumstances I'm not unhappy with these shots. The main image is, of course, a Marsh Fritillary - such a Look At Me butterfly, in both appearance and behaviour, that it's a mystery to me they don't all get predated by birds straight out of the pupa. The second photo shows the most obliging Duke of Burgundy I found all day: most of them were furiously patrolling their territories and hassling every other insect that dared to encroach, but this one was just chilling - or more accurately warming - in a little sheltered dip at the bottom of the Bill Smyllie reserve. 

I believe that this post is my 4,000th blip - a milestone that I find slightly difficult to believe I'm about to pass, and likely to be just as surprising to anyone who knows my habit of starting projects with great enthusiasm, only to get bored and drop them again three weeks later. I'd like to thank the team at Blip Central for keeping the site up and running, and everyone who takes the trouble to read the screeds of self-aggrandising nonsense that roll off my keyboard. I don't know what we've done to deserve each other, but I think I got the better end of the deal - so thanks once again.