small skipper

17 Jun 2026

Fresh

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

Unsurprisingly, given everything R and I got done yesterday, today I was tired and stiff, and as ever in these situations, quite grumpy. So I guess it was probably inevitable that nothing in my day really seemed to flow properly. … Continued

30 Jun 2025

Thirsty

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Warwickshire | 0

The heat today was toxic – though I’m aware that anyone trying to survive the current temperatures in Spain would have welcomed our high of 31°C as a blessed relief – and while I’ve never been very good at dealing … Continued

16 Jun 2025

Expected

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

What with one thing (Skomer) and another (taking care of the Boy Wonder last weekend) it was over a week since I’d last toured the local Odonata sites and recorded my findings, so this morning I drove up to Cleeve … Continued

1 Jul 2024

Skipping

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

After a dreary morning, late this afternoon the sky suddenly brightened, and it warmed up by several degrees. Within a couple of minutes the black horehound patch, which had been virtually deserted, filled with competing bees, butterflies, and hoverflies, and … Continued

28 Jun 2024

Living dangerously

by JDO | posted in: Bees, Butterflies, Invertebrates, Moths, Worcestershire | 0

At the point when the Wool Carder spotted the red spider mite and turned to look at it, he lifted the spikes at the end of his abdomen in a way I’d have interpreted as threatening if I’d been the … Continued

11 Jul 2023

Relief

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

Photographing small, mobile subjects in poor light and strong, gusty wind really is a fool’s errand: I took around three hundred photos today, and I’ve kept nine of them. By early afternoon I hadn’t produced a single image I actually … Continued

2 Jul 2023

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

Yesterday I took a walk around Tilly’s field, the hay meadow that’s about a hundred metres from our house, and found not only Small and Essex Skippers, but scores – maybe hundreds – of grasshoppers and crickets, in different stages … Continued

18 Jul 2022

Limp

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, My garden, Worcestershire | 0

When it’s so hot, even your proboscis goes limp. At 2pm today it was 38°C in the shade at the back of our house. By 4pm, when the sun had come round, the thermometer was measuring 46°, and we were … Continued

10 Jul 2022

Coiled

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

With our garden so baked and parched today that there was almost nothing moving in it, I ended up wandering back down to Tilly’s field to see what might be happening there, and found that the Skippers were still skipping … Continued

5 Jul 2022

Small

by JDO | posted in: Butterflies, Invertebrates, Worcestershire | 0

The weather was so dreary this morning that I didn’t bother even trying to go out looking for subjects, instead concentrating on trying to clear some of my backlog of unprocessed photo files, while waiting for the day to brighten, … Continued