Well I think this is a Small Skipper but the pictures are not good enough for me to be 100% sure. Let me explain why.
There are four species of little orange Skippers.
The Lulworth Skipper lives in Lulworth, Dorset and hardly ever travels and never more than a few miles from the coast. We can discount that one.
The Large Skipper we know well, it looks like this.
It has a chequered pattern on it’s orange wings and importantly it has hooked tips to it’s antennae. We have to look at the antennae.
That leaves us only two options. This is either a Small Skipper or an Essex Skipper. They look almost identical.
The difference between the Small and the Essex can be seen on the club of the antennae. On the Essex it is all black and on the Small the underside of the club is brown. You really have to get a picture from the front to see that clearly. I think that in this next picture there is obvious brown at the very tip of the antennae and that makes this a Small Skipper.
But I have shown these pictures to the experts and they won’t confirm that I am right which is usually a polite way of telling me that I am wrong or more exactly, that my pictures do not contain enough information for a positive ID.
B*gger. It has taken me ages to get these!
To make matters worse the Essex Skipper isn’t confined to Essex and the two species often fly together. Even if I get a positive photographic ID on one animal the next one could be something different.
These are little Skippers. I am not sure which one but I think that they are Small 🙂
A Tramp in the Woods 