I was doing a bit of moderately enjoyable gardening this morning (thank you Stihl), when a small brown butterfly whizzed past me and disappeared over the wall into the next-door garden. Someone who’s been fooled* less often than I have by this kind of apparition might have got excited at this point, but even though I’m an old hand at misidentifying butterflies, it turns out that you can – just occasionally – teach an old dog new tricks. So I said to myself, Ah – the Gatekeepers are out, and calmly carried on edging the lawn.
Half an hour later I reached the front garden – which is looking pretty sharp these days, if I do say so myself, apart from a single clump of ragwort and ox-eye daisies and one very large thistle, which I’ve left in the middle of the lawn as a joint food resource for the nectar feeders and two-fingered salute towards some of my prissier neighbours – and what should I find but another Gatekeeper. When I first saw him** he was nectaring on the thistle (mwahaha), but on spotting me he fluttered over to the montbretia patch and attempted to impersonate its orange flowers. Bless.
D: C3, D8.
* It’s too early in the year for Brown Hairstreaks, luckily, and I wouldn’t expect to find one in my garden anyway, but they’re about the same size as Gatekeepers and have similar colouring, and during Brown Hairstreak hunts I’ve embarrassed myself more than a few times by going “Oh! There! On the hogweed! Isn’t it? Oh. Sorry. Just a Gatekeeper. Again…”
** Only male Gatekeepers have that distinctive brown smear of scent scales on the forewing. There are nice photos of the over and underwings of both sexes at Butterfly Conservation.
