Wonderful hatch of butterflies

I sample the numbers of all butterflies every week at one downland site and have done so for 34 years not missing a single count.

This year on May 21 the whole valley at Kingley Vale was shimmering with male common blues, which are bright sky blue in colour, the females of course being much less colourful with shades of dark and a ring of reddish spots.

The photo by Brian Henham shows a pair of adonis blue butterflies which are very similar taken on a hillside in East Sussex.

I expect there will be a lot of those much rarer butterflies too this year. The common blues I saw last month were the first brood of this year from eggs laid by their parents last summer.

After courtship they will lay their eggs which will hatch into butterflies in the last week of July, so that will be something to look forward to.

Common blues are found all over the natural downland and even on common and in wide hedgerows. All that's needed really is the food plant for the caterpillars, which is bird's foot trefoil.

The young larvae also need ants which will carry them underground for safe keeping when the larvae exude honeydew on which the ants are hooked.

Apart from common blues I found a really good hatching this spring of dingy skipper butterflies which are very pleasing, since at Kingley Vale they appeared to have become extinct.

Then all of a sudden after a ten years' absence, there they all were again, not exactly swarming but certainly not having to be searched for.

These are very plain little butterflies, being not much bigger than bluebottle flies and sooty brown in colour.

Dingy skipper caterpillars also feed on bird's foot trefoil. They have a close cousin in the skipper family called the grizzle skipper, and they have also done very well this year.

Their caterpillars feed on wild strawberry leaves but the grizzled otherwise have the same habitat as the last two.

Apart from these three, butterflies have not been plentiful.

On some days during my five mile sampling walk I have hardly seen another butterfly: a few peacocks, brimstones, and orange tips. But these are early days.

The main contingents will appear in July and August when up to 35 species of butterfly will be in the air.

All we want is good weather at harvest time for crops of both butterflies on the nature reserves as well as cereal crops on the farms.