My bug haul for the day….
Butterfly field:
4 Common Blue (three males and an extremely battered female) – moderately skittish, though photographable;
1 Brown Argus – from the position and behaviour, probably the same male I blipped here, but just thirteen days later terribly faded and absolutely ragged, and probably not long for this world – so not at all skittish, but too sad to post;
1 Cinnabar – so ridiculously skittish that my record shots are largely blurs of red wing among the tall grasses;
5 Common Carder bees – too busy to be skittish, and nice to see, as this species seems to be having a bad year, but none in a good position for a photo;
lots and lots of Thick-legged Flower Beetles – no at all skittish, but too… boring, somehow;
2 Meadow Brown – skittish;
1 Burnet Companion – so skittish that I didn’t even see it at the time, but it turned up flying through a record shot of one of the Meadow Browns;
3 Large Skipper – 2 of them madly skippish skittish, but this one almost Zen-like…. until I got just a tiny bit too close, when she disappeared – poof! – like Kaiser Söze.
Crop field:
1 female Banded Demoiselle, with something so huge in her jaws that she didn’t seem able to deal with it – she was so skittish that she flew backwards into a wheat ear trying to get away from me, and dropped like a stone in among the stems (yes, I do feel guilty, thanks for asking);
1 Harlequin;
1 Thick-legged Flower Beetle, looking rather fetching on a red poppy;
2 female Andrena cineraria – photographable, but not especially photogenic;
several skittish Whites.
Tilly’s field:
1 Mother Shipton – tempting, but skittish;
about half a dozen Meadow Brown – the new ones skittish, the older ones too busy feeding on short flowers amid the long grass to be easily photographed;
1 Silver Y – not exactly skittish, but it flew deep into the longest grasses in its determination to be alone (probably hung over from last night’s assault on my red valerian);
1 female Banded Demoiselle – perhaps the ghost of the earlier one, or maybe word has already gone round the village about me and my camera, because she fled when I was still about 10 metres away;
1 White-legged Damselfly – very, very skittish;
2 Speckled Wood – too busy fighting each other to be skittish, but still hard to photograph.
Back at home:
1 Painted Lady – extremely skittish;
1 Brimstone – less skittish, but still…. well, skittish.
A squad of bees, all apparently off their faces on geranium nectar, and not in the mood to pose for photos. I thought of at least recording them, but by this point I’d run out of steam.
So, the Large Skipper it is then. It’s always a pleasure to see these, the first of the orange skippers to appear here each summer; I love their patterned wings, and their extravagant antennae – and they never seem to be around for very long, sad to say. And given the way most of the village invertebrates were behaving today, it was something of a relief, quite frankly, to catch this female sitting still.
