Small skipper

I find large and small skipper butterflies hard to tell apart but I'm pretty sure this is a small skipper Thymelicus sylvestris, feeding on marjoram at Stanhope in Weardale.

Skipper butterflies have a very distinctive way of holding their wings, half-open, that separates them from all other British butterflies and from moths.

When I first came to live in the North Pennines in the 1970s small skippers were unknown here but since then they have gradually colonised the area and their range now extends well into Northumberland; a butterfly good news story.

Small skippers

About a week ago, when we were walking near Wolsingham in Weardale, we came across a remarkable concentration of small skipper butterflies feeding on a single patch of knapweed on the road verge. There were about twenty and I don't think I've ever seen so many of these lively little butterflies in one place at the same time. Maybe they all hatched from a single batch of eggs laid last year.

Small skippers are something of a success story in North East England. Odd specimens occasionally strayed into Co. Durham in the 1970s and then in 1985 the late Bob Quigley found two flourishing colonies at Durham Wildlife Trust's Low Barns Nature Reserve at Witton-le-Wear. Alerted to the possibility that there might be others, lepidopterists began looking for them in other locations and since then small skippers have continued their range expansion into Northumberland.

Most bloggers have remarked on what a wonderful summer this has been so far for butterflies, and it's certainly a joy to see so many after last year's dismal showing. It seems to be a return to some kind of normality in butterfly numbers. With luck, we may yet return to run of decent summers that will allow future butterfly populations to continue to increase.

Bob Quigley was one of the local butterfly enthusiasts who discovered that ringlet butterflies were breeding at Low Barns reserve, again in 1985. At that time they were only known from a few scattered locations but since then ringlets have also become common in our region.

A Butterfly Bank: third visit

It's almost three weeks since we last visited the sunny magnesian limestone railway embankment on the disused railway line between Garmondsway and Trimdon, and during that time the withering heatwave has had a major impact on the flora. Most of the species that were in their prime then are coming to the end of flowering and are run to seed, but new flowers have appeared in their place.

The most notable newcomers are fragrant orchids, which are now present in large numbers. Fragrance is rare in orchids - they tend to rely on elaborate floral architecture and colour to attract pollinators - but this species has a powerful, sweet scent. It's individual flowers have a long spur filled with nectar that's only easily accessible to the long tongues of moths and butterflies - and on this visit there were plenty of butterflies along the bank, including .....

..... common blues ....

...... meadow browns, in very large numbers in glades along wooded parts of the old railway line

...... ringlets .....

...... small heaths.....

..... large skippers ....

... and a very fresh-looking small tortoiseshell that must have emerged recently, sunbathing on a limestone ledge, and .........

.......... in glades along the wooded parts of the old railway line, speckled woods. These two are courting - notice how the male is touching the underside of the female's wings with his antenna, perhaps detecting scent scales there (?). The courtship didn't last long because another male arrived and .........

....... a furious butterfly dogfight ensued, during which the female lost interest and flew away.

The newspapers and conservation organisations are quite rightly hailing this as a wonderful year for butterflies, during which their numbers have rebounded, but this seems to overlook the fact that most of those that are on the wing in early summer have actually hatched from eggs that were laid during last year's disastrous summer and have survived the longest, coldest winter in living memory as hibernating caterpillars, pupae or, in some cases adults. That surely says something about the resilience of butterflies to the annual vagaries of our weather and suggests that we need to be far more concerned about protecting habitats, like this wonderful butterfly bank, than the effects of annual weather extremes (not to be confused with long-term climate change, though) 

Butterfly Hot-Spot

A visit to Hawthorn Hive on the Durham coast at the weekend coincided with the recent emergence of several butterfly species, including this pristine male common blue and .....

.... and its rather more muted female consort.

The raised beach at Hawthorn Hive - a legacy of past colliery waste dumping - is covered with large patches of bird's foot trefoil, food for common blue and dingy skipper caterpillars, so this sheltered bay is a great spot to find both species - and also several others. The cliffs provide shelter from the wind, unless it's blowing from the East - and the prevailing wind is mostly south-westerley. Paradoxically, it's only the raised beach - produced by past industral activity - that protects this wonderful site for flowers and insects from being inundated by the waves. It's slowly being eroded and once it has gone the waves will be able to reach the base of the cliffs where.....

..... this green-veined whire was collecting nectar from bloody crane'sbill flowers...

...... while this large skipper basked on the same plant's foliage....

... and another .... amongst the grasses.

On the cliff tops above small heaths were flying in the grassland. They have a very distinctive way of sunbathing. Most butterflies orientate themselves with their back to the sun and open their wings to absorb the heat - like the common blues and large skipper above. Small heaths keep their wings folded but turn their whole body at 90 degrees to the sun's rays, so the underside of the wings on one side of the body only faces the sun.