My first small skipper

The spells of sun yesterday and today have brought out the first Small Skippers at the nature reserve. This nice fresh male hardly ever stopped to perch and it took me a while thrashing through thistles and nettles to get a couple of shots. This is the view all butterfly recorders try to get as there is an almost identical cousin of this species, the Essex Skipper and the two can only be reliably separated by checking the undersides of the tips of the antennae. In this case, the orange/brown tips show it is definitely a Small Skipper; if they had been black, it would have been an Essex Skipper.