Playing with Butterflies

It is a miserable one today. A cold wind has blown in from somewhere and brought lots of cloud with it.

It is a good day to demonstrate my Butterfly handling technique. They will be at my mercy.

The poor little things can’t do anything about it, they need sunshine, they need to be warm to fly and they will be very lethargic today.

The first butterfly that we found was a female Orange Tip.

The first trick is the weather. I have been out at two o’clock on a sunny afternoon and can not get anywhere near them. I am already very close to this one and she would have flown away if she could, she is too cold and I can do what I want with her.

Now. You must not touch her in any way,  only she may touch you. She is very easy to break and we are big and clumsy.

Just put your finger right in front of her, minding her antennae and legs and just depress the flower a little bit.

You can talk about politics or the economy but not war, it has to be gentle depression.

As the flower gives way under her feet she will step forward onto your finger and once her front feet are on you can just roll your finger under her and you have her. I don’t exactly have this one where I wanted. I wanted her on my finger tip for display purposes but she has crawled onto my knuckle and I can’t move her. This will do.

It is a butterfly Fizz.

I have picked this one up because she was in deep shade, I am going to move her into the sunshine. As soon as she feels the sun she will open her wings and bask and she will fly away. It will only take about two seconds for her to warm up enough to fly so I have to get lucky with my photographs.

And she has gone.

The pictures aren’t great but never mind we will try again later.

You can only do this with the white ones (any of the whites). This little Speckled Wood was flitting all over the place, a little bit of cloud doesn’t bother him.

It is simply because white reflects light and heat and dark colours like brown absorb it and the Speckled Wood warms up much easier than the Orange Tip and flies on much cooler days.

I have never been able to approach or pick up a Speckled Wood, or any of the other dark ones. Sometimes they will land on me by chance and of course if you raise them as your own you can release them but that is as good as it gets.

Now I am just going to leave the butterflies for a moment because I have noticed the seed pods of that flower she was sitting on and I want those photographs. It is Garlic Mustard.

Thank you for indulging me, I needed those photographs for my files.

I have just noticed another flower.

Have you ever wondered where Primroses go when they die?

Hmmm… a small lack of floral compassion perhaps?

Anyway I have and I care. I want to know. So I am choosing a nice female plant with pin flowers…

I am going to perform a couple of autopsies on her dead sisters.

Very interesting, this is how we find things out.

Perhaps if I sewed them back together and passed electricity through them, then I could reanimate them. Now which bit went with which?

Back to the butterflies and we have found another Orange Tip, this one is a male.

Just in case there is anyone in the world who wonders how I can tell the male from the female. Well, it is only the male who actually has orange tips to his wings (On the inside). With a few years of practice and an element of expertise in this field absolutely anyone can tell the difference.

I am not going to try and pick this one up. He is as docile as the female was and I could do what I wanted but….

Okay he is in the shade but the whole world is in the shade, the sun is behind a cloud and we are in the open this time. Plus I would much prefer to photograph him on a plant than in my hand. This time he is on Cow Parsley.

Cow Parsley is absolutely brilliant and provides a mass spectacle to rival the Bluebells. It really is beautiful but we will do that in a bit.

What I am going to do is stand beside him and wait for the sun to come out again, it will take twenty five minutes and then I will fail 🙂

There is a reason why I like to do this sort of stuff alone. Sometimes if I am waiting for a bird or animal I might wait for hours, I sustain myself by imagining the shot that I might get if everything works.

I like to walk with other people and talk about flowers and nature and stuff but I don’t try and take photographs. I have tried and they always say, “Go on, get what you need, I am happy,” but I can only get guilt, maybe I will do it once for twenty minutes or so but then when I want to do it again, I just can’t.

Nobody just wants to stand and look at me for hours on end… almost nobody.

This is the reason that I work with an Air Head. (I couldn’t have a better companion/assistant)

She understands the importance of botanical research, she understands my interest in  entomology, she understands that big game hunters have to make a living just as butterfly collectors do and she will make any sacrifice. She is priceless.

Oh dear, he is staring at a bush again. I think that he is looking for his marbles and we just have to wait.

(He never finds them)

Best Dog in the world, that one.

Here we go.

That’s a fail. I have taken much better pictures than that. Never mind, the Dog got walked.

I will have to wind this up now or my daily post will take two days to write. Take care.

Happy Face

It is like a Spring day out there today. It is like it is March and the sun is shining 🙂

In March the Butterflies come back and so today we are going out to look for them.

Fizz has got her happy face on.

I haven’t seen that face for a long time. She is not really happy (well, she is always happy) she is hot and she is panting and it hasn’t been hot for a very long time.

It didn’t take us long to find a Butterfly. This is a Red Admiral.

The Red Admiral is a migrant species that arrives here in the UK in May and June flying in from Europe and North Africa.

It is only fairly recently that it has been considered a resident species, they don’t like our cold winters.

Butterfly Conservation says on it’s website, “There is an indication that numbers have increased in recent years and that overwintering has occurred in the far south of England.” That needs updating.

This animal has survived the winter in Gloucestershire and hopefully I will soon see a lot more. Hurrah for global warming 🙂

It does look a bit tatty but so would you if you had been outside all winter.

We better find it some nectar plants. You can try some of these.

Lesser Celandine.

Dandelion

Common Field-speedwell

There is another one, a Small Tortoiseshell.

Oh Joy. The flowers are flowering, the Butterflies are coming back and Fizz has got her happy face on.

Primrose

ColtsfootNow Fizz and I are tired of all this sunshine and Butterflies and flowers.

We are going up on the bank to get our photographs taken with the sheep.

On the way we find another little flower that we haven’t seen yet this year.

This is Hairy Biittercress.

It’s good for Butterflies.

Okay, let’s make some selfies.

Everybody crowd in.Our shadows are getting very short, mine used to be about ten sheep long.

I have written about Stellaria media today but I have had to leave quite a lot of important stuff out because I just didn’t have the photographs. I haven’t seen it in flower yet but it won’t be long and then I shall get the pictures and update the post.

Stellaria media, The Common Chickweed

Common Chickweed is a member of the Stellaria genus of flowers. It is a very small flower, about a quarter of an inch in diameter (6-9 mm) and in common with other Stellaria species it has five white petals.

The  five petals of Stellaria media are divided right down to the base, giving the flower the  appearance of ten petals and note that the petals of Common Chickweed are shorter or no longer than the sepals and that the sepals are hairy.

(Common Chickweed, Stellaria media 6-9 mm)
Compare Common Chickweed to two other Stellaria species that are commonly found here.

(Lesser Stitchwort, Stellaria graminea 7-12 mm)

(Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea 15-25 mm)
Common Chickweed has three styles that sit on a green ovary. The number of stamens can vary from three to eight.

(Stellaria media, 3 stamens)

(Stellaria media, 8 stamens)
Common Chickweed has a weak stem, it will often trail along the ground but it seldom rises more that about eight inches. It is a small plant but if you find it growing in any quantity it is worth remembering that it is a tasty edible. The leaves can be eaten raw in salads.

The leaves are oval and smooth edged with a point at the tip, they grow in opposite pairs along the stem. Leaves at the base of the plant have quite long stalks and toward the top they are stalkless.

Common Chickweed has a tradition of use in herbal medicine and is most commonly used to treat skin conditions, cuts, bruises and burns

It is a valuable wildlife plant, a food plant to several moth species it is probably best known as being favoured by birds. Chickens eat both the plant and the seeds and that is how it gets it’s name, many small birds like finches eat the seeds and you can also feed it to cage birds.

        Taxonomy

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Caryophyllales

Family: Caryophyllaceae

Genus: Stellaria

Species: Stellaria media

Wildflowers in the Springtime 🙂

Interesting things you can do with a Butterfly

Butterflies are not just for looking at 🙂

This is a post for the friends that I have made in the last few months, friends who have never seen this blog in the summertime.

Winter is so difficult for nature bloggers, it’s a wonder that we post anything. There is a different world coming and it is beautiful.

Butterflies have been big in my world this weekend. On Saturday I discovered a beautiful Small Tortoiseshell overwintering in my flat.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day here and while I was out a Comma flew in front of me.

This isn’t the one that I saw yesterday, that was over a hedge and lost in a field almost as soon as I saw it. This is just a picture of another Comma.
It is still much too early for Butterflies, there are no nectar plants about yet but it is okay they will just go back to sleep for a bit.

The Butterflies will be here in four weeks. It isn’t very long to wait.

It is not very unusual to see Butterflies here in the winter. Whilst many species overwinter as Caterpillars or as a Chrysalis we have five local species that overwinter as adult butterflies and they can wake up and have a little fly around on any warm winters day.

The other three are: The Red Admiral.

The Brimstone.The Peacock.

So what can you do with Butterflies besides look at them?

You can abduct them and raise them as your own 🙂

The Small Tortoiseshell is probably the first one that you will find.

These are little yellow caterpillars that live in colonies on Stinging Nettles. If you want to try raising Butterflies in a different part of the world, pick a species that has an easy to obtain food plant, they eat a lot.

I made some mistakes when raising these and so I shall share the wisdom gained.

I chose large caterpillars, thinking that they would be quicker to raise than little ones. Most of my Caterpillars died and it wasn’t that much fun.

They died because they had already been attacked before I found them. In the wild there are a lot of insects that lay their eggs in Caterpillars and the larva grow inside and eat the Caterpillar.

This is a Tachinid fly injecting it’s eggs into a Small Tortoiseshell Caterpillar.

Pelatachina tibialis, Nasty little beast.
So I did successfully raise Small Tortoiseshells but it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped. Lesson Learnt, I went out to collect some Peacock Larvae.

Take the smallest ones that you can find, the less time they have been in the wild the less chance that they will have been got at.

Peacocks are the little black ones that also live on Stinging Nettles.

I only took a few, I thought, it turned out that I had about forty in my little jar and from those I released thirty three Butterflies, many more than would have made it if I had left them in the wild.

Now you can buy Butterfly raising kits. I don’t really like these. The most common species is the Painted Lady and this is because the Painted Lady can eat artificial food. So you generally get five little Caterpillars in  a jar and the bottom of the jar is smeared with artificial food, there is a piece of paper under the lid for them to attach themselves to and the jar is otherwise empty.

This is a horrible way to raise Caterpillars, in an empty jar. It deprives them of their youth. I am going to show you that Caterpillars are lively, intelligent animals. They have a social structure and they get great joy from swinging about in the jungle that is their home.

This is how I am going to do it.

Make them a home.

The tray of mud is because the nettles will need water but I can’t put them in water or the Caterpillars will drown themselves.

That is it. You don’t really have to worry about the Caterpillars escaping, they will stay on the food plant so long as you keep them provided with fresh greens.

I admit, I came down one morning and found this.

What on earth is going on here?

We are going to join the circus.

You bloomin’ well are not!

They had plenty of leaves they just weren’t fresh enough for them. You do have to keep on top of them.

Most of the time they like to hang together.

Although you do get the odd little one that has a mind of it’s own.

They grow very quickly and they moult their skin four times. Each time that they moult there is a bigger and more beautiful Caterpillar inside.

Those are not dead baby Caterpillars in the next picture, they are just the discarded skins. The little black spots are called frasse and they are Caterpillar poo. They eat a lot, so guess what else they do a lot 🙂

You need to clean them out regularly as well as change their leaves.

It won’t be long before you want to take these beautiful animals out for a photo shoot.

Now things are about to get interesting and we have a problem.

When they are in their final moult they will decide to leave the food plant. They are going to shed their skin one more time but this time there will be a chrysalis inside and so now they have done eating and they need to spread out.

My solution was to put them in my kitchen cupboard. (This might be a problem if you live with a partner)

My clever little animals knew what was expected of them and they hung themselves all around their new home.

Watch the Caterpillar shed it’s skin one last time. I have speeded this up X4 because the whole process took six minutes.

The Caterpillars now make themselves a little sticky pad of silk to hang from and the most critical moment of this final moult is the very last bit when the chrysalis must abandon it’s old skin and attach itself to the silk pad. That is what all the twisting at the end of this video is about.

What happens now is a miracle. The Caterpillar will completely dissolve inside it’s chrysalis, only a few cells remain and from these cells a Butterfly grows. Something really wonderful.

This next video is speeded up x2.

Now I just have to show you how to pick up a Butterfly and then we can let them go.

Never touch it’s wings. They are covered with very fine scales that will be displaced if you try to pick it up that way, the Butterfly needs these scales, they are not just for shimmering colour.

Put your hand in front of the Butterfly and invite it to step on.

So long as you are known to the Butterflies this works every time.

If the Butterflies don’t know who you are then try rescuing a Butterfly Princess from the long grass, this will earn you a reputation  as a friend of the Butterflies and then it will be easy.

Now it is time to say goodbye.

Today the sun is shining and it feels like April. Fizz and I are going to look for Butterflies.

Shepherd’s Warning

It wasn’t a good day to be a shepherd. It wasn’t a good day to be anything really.

It started off very nicely.

Then the sky turned black and the rain started. It was a very short day anyway and now it is night and gales are buffeting the farm and the rain is pounding against my windows.

I am all cosy indoors but all of my little animals are living out there and it is just another winter’s night.

I wrote about Bird’s-foot Trefoil today and I will show you that in a bit, first I thought we could look at some moths. I would have liked to put more into my flower post but that was supposed to be about flowers.

Day flying moths, some of them are just as pretty as the butterflies.

This is a Speckled Yellow moth (Pseudopanthera macularia). It’s caterpillars feed on Wood Sage and it is common in open woodland.

This next beauty is a Green Silver-lines (Pseudoips prasinana). Another woodland moth, this one favours Oak and Birch trees.

This next one isn’t a moth at all, yet but it will be. It looks a bit like an old Birch catkin.

This is the caterpillar of a Scalloped Hook-tip Moth ( Falcaria lacertinaria) and it feeds on Birch, naturally.

This next one is called a Silver Y moth (Autographa gamma) , try and guess Y.

This is a summer visitor arriving in the UK from May onwards it comes from Southern Europe. It  is not a fussy eater, Bedstraws, Nettles, Clovers, it also likes Peas and Cabbage.

If we have another day like today then I will post more moths tomorrow. Here are my flowers.

Lotus corniculatus, The Bird’s-foot Trefoil.

       This is a flower of grassland. It grows in meadows and on heaths in forest rides and if you are very lucky, in your garden.

Bird’s-foot Trefoil is very variable in size. Amongst short grass the small flowers may be just inches off the ground.

In long grass it can grow to about twenty inches. It seems to be able to flower at whatever height the surrounding plants are rising to.

In many parts of the world Bird’s-foot Trefoil is grown as an animal fodder and I read that it can yield up to four tons of hay per acre. That is difficult to comprehend when you see the tiny flowers growing in short cropped grass.

The name Bird’s-foot comes from the seed pods which are claw like and resemble a Bird’s foot. Another popular name for this plant is Granny’s Toenails.

       The Trefoil part of the name is a reference to the leaves. Each leaf is actually made up of five leaflets but two of these are at the base of the mid rib and the remaining three form the trefoil at the end of the leaf.

New buds continually form and grow from the centre of existing leaves, which makes it difficult to study the form and shape of the plant.

It has a squarish stem.

It also has a very deep tap root (up to three feet deep) that allows it to thrive on poorer soils.

Bird’s-foot Trefoil is a very important wildlife plant and as such a wonderful addition to any garden. It is especially valuable as a larval food plant for many of our most beautiful Moths and Butterflies including the Dingy Skipper, Green Hairstreak, Silver Studded Blue and these Common Blues.

       Amongst the Moths it is a larval food plant for the Six-spot Burnet and for this next one the Burnet Companion.

The Bird’s-foot Trefoil is a member of the Pea family, known as the Fabaceae and sometimes by the older name of the Leguminosae.

It is native to the UK, Eurasia and North Africa.

       

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Fabales

Family: Fabaceae

Genus: Lotus

Species: Lotus corniculatus

Wildflowers in winter.

Butterflies and Flowers (November)

There is only so much fun that you can have with a dog and a puddle.

I think that we all need to grow up a bit and be more serious.

You first 🙂

Yesterday the rain was torrential. All of the lower fields are flooded. I was really surprised to wake up this morning to this sky.

I can live with that. Today Fizz and I are going after Butterflies but we also want to look at what is still in flower.

The Butterfly idea was doomed to success. Even before I stepped out of my front door I saw one.

A rubbish photo but I took it in case this was the only animal that I saw today. It is enough to prove that they are still about.

So flowers first. Fizz is always in flower. Unfortunately all that water avoidance that she was doing resulted in her getting a thorn in her foot.

Let the doctor have a look.

Get out of the way and I’ll kiss it better for you.

There. I have saved your life again.

Other flowers.

Most of them we were expecting.

Silene dioica obviously. I put that on EW earlier, I haven’t created all the links yet but it is here Red Campion

Bramble…

Hogweed is still going strong.

There were plenty of flowers still to open… This is an important nectar source at this time of year.

There were plenty of seed heads too.

Herb Robert, it doesn’t seem to have a season.

There are still a few Ivy flowers about but not many.

There is a lot of this next one, White Dead Nettle. The last of the dead nettles it won’t be very long before it’s little red cousin will be popping up to welcome  the spring.

We pretty much expected to see those and that is a fair summary of all that I could find in flower in this location…. Except for this next one.

A lovely Field Rose. This one is out of season but the bush didn’t know that and it had buds just about to burst into flower.

So I didn’t chase butterflies up and down the track because I have only just done the Red Admiral. I just wanted to record their presence. These are the only butterflies that I am still regularly finding.

I saw one Dragonfly but I only saw it as a silhouette against the sky as it moved down the track in front of me. It would have been a Migrant Hawker, I am pretty sure that is the only big one still on the wing in November but I couldn’t get close enough to properly confirm that, which was disappointing.

Back to being childish…

Oh dear Fizz. How did you get so wet?

One Last Butterfly?

We have had some lovely weather just recently but this morning when I took Fizz out the sun was shining and it felt cool. T-shirt,  shirt and body warmer on at mid-day, I think that the summer is fading.

So let us not waste a drop of it.

The Red Admiral has frustrated me all summer, I saw plenty but just couldn’t get close and then I got close today. The Ivy seduced the poor animal and it was helpless to resist me.

This animal didn’t mind what I did. It was the one that we all look for. I put my camera down and looked closely with my eyes and I felt in awe of it’s beauty. I could probably have picked it up but I didn’t think of that, anyway it was busy.

The Red Admiral is a wonderful subject to use when discussing butterfly anatomy because of it’s colour. As a brush footed butterfly the hairs on it’s brush feet stand out, it has the best labial palps of any butterfly that I know and it’s probiscus and antennae are pretty cute too but I don’t feel up to doing butterfly anatomy tonight. I am just drinking in a beauty.

Anybody who wants to use my photographs to help to explain to their own audience is more than welcome to do so.

So anyway this butterfly wasn’t comatose and it flitted around all over the place but it didn’t mind me following.

It is just an insect but I think that I am blessed to know an insect.

Thank you very much for the pictures. Yeah, yeah, you will be a star now, I have just got to talk to those connections that I told you about. Don’t worry it just takes time. Thanks for the pics. 🙂

You were beautiful.

There is a house in New Orleans

They call the Rising Sun.

2009

This is a post about painted ladies. I haven’t seen such a lady for a while now and even though there are many very beautiful things in my life I still remember and miss my friendship with this one plus I think Alan Price was a gifted man.

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy,And God, I know I’m one.

Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui:

This Butterfly is a migrant from North Africa. Sometimes we get a lot of them and sometimes we don’t. The last really good year was 2009 and my camera was my old FZ50, I could do better today but cameras are not everything, sometimes the love shines through.

Nineteen hundred and sixty four was an age of innocence, I was just eight years old. Alan Price was a gifted musician from Newcastle, England who wrote a song about a butterfly that he had probably never even seen. How clever is that? 🙂

Oh, mother tell your children, not to do what I have done.

I haven’t seen any Painted Ladies this summer and I guess now that I am not going to. This is what they look like. 🙂

Chasing the blues away

It is hard to stay down when you are with such an irrepressible butterfly basher as Fizz. She gets so much joy from bouncing about in fields it is infectious. Our favourite walk at the moment is around the farm fields. The grass is so thick and taller than she is,  she has to “bounce” just to get through it but she seems to love it.

So my apologies for my absence over the last couple of days but I have been a bit under the weather. Feeling better today, I have a lot to catch up on.

Fizz didn’t get a walk yesterday, I couldn’t face it. Looking out of my window the whole of the UK was “under the weather,” it must have been pretty frustrating if that was your holiday day.

It is raining steadily again today but I have a plan that if nothing else I will make a video of just how wet a dog can get.

So here are my Blues. Little glimpses taken over the last few days when we did get out.

 

Pretty Little Things (3 of 3)

Lord Tusk, Beloved of the Faeries.

Photography tip of the week: Love your subject (get loved back)

Well look at this, an invisible butterfly.

Well nearly. I don’t really see many invisible things and I almost missed this one.

What are you doing hiding in the long grass?

You know who I am, I’ve been looking for you because you are beautiful. Don’t be afraid of me and then I won’t be afraid of you, that’s how it works. You can call me Col.

Thank you for trusting me. I would like to put you on a Thistle and take your picture, you are much too lovely to be invisible.

I will give you Six Dee if you will open your wings for me. That is about two and a half new pence and a little silver coin that we used to call a tanner. It is not a lot of money but it is beautiful.

That was a fail. She told me that she was not that sort of butterfly and she wouldn’t open her wings for Lord Tusk himself.

I might have trouble getting these shots because even the very friendly ones seem very determined to keep their secrets to themselves. I have to find a loose butterfly.

Nah, nah, I respect her for her decision. I just want to see and photograph it because I am a naturalist.

Obviously I love you very much.

Now about that Thistle shot, I hope that I didn’t embarrass you asking about that other thing. It is just something that I am really trying hard to get but not this time, maybe when you know me better?

Thistle.

Well this was a butterfly that plainly knew her own mind . She gave me this picture and I am quite pleased with it. I would have liked to have done the other deal as well but so it goes.

Next time.

Small Tortoiseshell Colours

I took Fizz blackberrying this morning. Yesterday got rained off, we got soaked but this morning it was warm and sunny for a while.

We didn’t get many Blackberries, there were too many butterflies in the field for that.

Here are some beautiful summer colours for my Small Tortoiseshell collection.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..