Category: Biology

I have now added a sixth butterfly species to the list I’ve photographed this year for the first time, beating the total of five new species last year. The Small Blue (Cupido minimus) joins Adonis Blue, Black Hairstreak, Grizzled Skipper, Wall, and White Admiral on my list.

The Small Blue has to be the most brown of the Blues. The male has a bit of a bluish suffusion close to the body, but is basically a brown butterfly like the female. The wings have a white fringe and the underside has black spots that are unlike those of the other blues and resemble the Holly Blue but with beige as the ground colour rather than blue. However, its vernacular name rings true in the adjective “Small”. This is definitely the UK’s smallest butterfly. The scientific binomial might be translated whimsically as being “the smallest Cupid” but strictly speaking translates from the Latin as “a desire for the least”.

I saw the Small Blue for the first time on a visit to Trumpington Meadows nature reserve not far from Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. A Cambs Wildlife Trust rep there, who goes by the twitter handle @HarryHedgehog7, pointed me to a small footbridge that crosses the M11 motorway from the Meadows to an additional chunk of wild area beyond the old crop research site. There is abundant Kidney Vetch (Anthyllis vulneraria, also known as woundwort), which is one of the larval foodplants, although the caterpillars are cannabilistic and will eat each other, and while the colony did not appear to number in the hundreds as can occur, there were at least a couple of dozen that showed their true colours among the vetch.

Also seen, Common Blue (not that common, but the males are definitely blue), Small Tortoiseshell (quite a large butterfly, but its pattern is reminiscent of a coloured-in tortoiseshell), Large, Small, and Essex Skipper, Marbled White (which are sort of marbled but they’re actually a type of “Brown” Satyrinid butterfly), and a lot of Six-spot Burnet moths, which definitely have six spots on each wing.

Incidentally, the M11 is an arterial road that connects Cambridge with London, one might wonder whether the Cambridge-educated politicians and civil servants had the public’s interest or their own travel interest at heart when this road was first planned…

In my 2021/2022 quest to see and photograph more butterflies, especially species I’ve not seen before, I’ve been monitoring the Cambs and Essex butterfly sightings page. In 2021, I clocked several new species (Chalkhill Blue, Dark Green Fritillary, Green Hairstreak, Purple Emperor, Purple Hairstreak, and White-letter Hairstreak) and so far this year another five: Adonis Blue, Black Hairstreak, Eurasian White Admiral, Grizzled Skipper, and Wall.

Among the sites visited are Monk’s Wood, Overhall Grove, Waresley Wood, Hayley Wood, Woodwalton Fen NNR, and Woodwalton Marsh and several others. This week, I also discovered a woodland closer to home, The Edwards Woodland in Dry Drayton. It was planted in 2005 on a 14-acre plot owned by the late Sir Robert Edwards, Nobel laureate and co-pioneer with Patrick Steptoe of IVF as discussed here.

The Woodland backs on to the north-east side of Madingley Road between Dry Drayton and Madingley. Reports on the Cambs & Essex site suggested Marbled White and some Clouded Yellow might be present. I saw lots of Marbled White, Ringlet, and Meadow Brown on my visit, but sadly no Clouded Yellow (I had seen that species on the former patch of wildflower meadow adjacent to farmland at Waresley Wood up from Brown’s Piece in 2020).

There are only now a handful of species I will be able to see fresh to me in our neighbourhood, without having too big a carbon footprint.

I’ve been making a concerted effort in 2022 to see more of the quite limited number of butterflies we have native in the UK (I’m up to 36 so far, second season of trying harder). Have now added Eurasian White Admiral to the list thanks to a visit to Brampton Wood not far up the road in Cambridgeshire.

Brampton isn’t too far from Monk’s Wood, which I visited in May to see the newly emerged Black Hairstreak for the first time. It must be noted that there are hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of Black Hairstreak at Monks Wood but perhaps an order of magnitude fewer there than at Brampton. Brampton is the second oldest woodland after Monks in Cambridgeshire but has vast acreages of blackthorn, the larval footplant of that species.

Saw lots of Black Hairstreak, Satyrium pruni, at Brampton Wood, several dozen, perhaps. It’s a rather rare butterfly restricted to a clay-soiled corridor from Oxon through Northants and into Cambs the larvae of which feed only on well-established blackthorn and the adults of which rarely venture a few metres from where they emerge from their pupae.

Given the surveys carried out by wardens there on five small patches of blackthorn and the several hundred acres of blackthorn not surveyed it is likely that there are several hundred thousand of this incredibly rare butterfly on this site.

Lots of Silver-washed Fritillary, Argynnis paphia, at Brampton Wood too.

This is a male of the moth species Nemophora metallica. I’ve written about them on the blog several times over the last couple of years.

Those “horns” are the male’s antennae. They can be up to three times as long as the moth’s forewings. The female’s antennae are half the length. The species loves a bit of Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis) it being the larval foodplant. The dayflying Brassy Longhorn is found in the South of England and across East Anglia generally where Field Scabious grows. They are on the wing in June and July.

Thankfully, last year I managed to persuade the Environment Agency not to prematurely mow the patch along the Cottenham Lode where this species seemed to be thriving these past couple of summers. I hope the EA sticks to its promise again this year, so these little beasties have a better chance of reproducing and the scabious of setting seed. The next step is to persuade the EA to halt all spring/summer mowing of the banks of the lodes so that other invertebrate and botanical species might get more than a foothold. Obviously, the Agency has to consider water flow as the lodes are drainage ditches that criss-cross the Fens. That said, there is no obvious need to remove vegetation so brutally as they often do in the spring/summer if at all.

I’ve taken a number of trips to Devil’s Dyke, Cambridgeshire in the last couple of years, tramping back and forth along the chalky ridge looking for butterflies. In the summer time, when the weather is fine you can almost reach right up and touch them. Saw my first Dark Green Fritillaries and Chalkhill Blues there in 2021 and my first Adonis Blue in 2022 (an unofficially introduced species).

9th June I walked (150 minutes from 10am) from the car park at the Newmarket July Racecourse section to the A14 break and kept a tally of the Lepidoptera I saw, posted data to Cambs&Essex page:

Butterflies

Marbled White 54 (actually one of the “Browns” – Satyrinae
Small Tortoiseshell 7
Dark Green Fritillary 16
Green Hairstreak 3
Common Blue 5
Meadow Brown 10
Large Skipper 5
Small Heath 8
Red Admiral 3
Large White 1
Brimstone 3

Moths

I have been photographing and reading about moths in detail only since late July 2018, I reported on my first year of mothing here. In that time, I have seen well over 400 and photographed as many. They are such a diverse group of insects with marvellous patterns. They come in all shapes and sizes and as I have mentioned before, the butterflies are simply a grouping within the moths, Lepidoptera. Their many names are something of a wonder too.

Some moths have more than a passing resemblance in terms of shape and habit. Take the Mother Shipton an the Burnet Companion. Now, I’ve seen these in wildflower meadows quite a lot so far this year. The Mother Shipton famously has patterning on its forewing that is reminiscent of a caricature of the legendary 16th Century witch Mother Shipton (purportedly a woman named Ursula Southeil, although it was only many decades after her death that the legend of her fortune-telling and ugliness were invented.

Now, in the mothing books, Mother Shipton is often placed on the same page as Burnet Companion. They are very similar in shape, size, and habit but with a rather different scaly patterning of their wings. You would imagine that taxonomically and genetically they have to be closely related, and presumably they are. And, indeed, Mother Shipton’s scientific name is Euclidia mi (Clerck, 1759) and Burnet Companion is Euclidia glyphica (Linnaeus, 1758). So, they are in the same genus, although originally Mother Shipton was in a different genus Calistege…which seemed odd, given how obviously similar it is to Burnet Companion.

Incidentally, the Burnet Companion is so-called because it frequents the same environment as the Burnet moths (Zygaena species) although strangely its flying times are reported as not overlapping as much you might imagine so “companion” is perhaps a little misplaced as a name.

Pretty much all of my curated moth photos are in a cluster of galleries over on my Imaging Storm website, under the banner Mothematics.

The Adonis Blue butterfly – Lysandra bellargus was present along Devil’s Dyke in double figures when I visited this week. Last year, there were much rarer reports of sightings, so it’s presumably established something of a colony here.

However, all is not as it seems. This species was not recorded at this site until very recently. Indeed, when the naturalists were first systematically recording species 200 years ago, it was definitely not listed as one of the natives in its natural habitat by Leonard Jenyns in this area. It’s usually found on chalky downs in the south of England. Devil’s Dyke itself, it should be noted, is not a natural feature, it’s of human construction.

It is likely that Adonis Blue has been deliberately and unofficially released by members of the public in the area and has begun to become established as it has also done in Therfield near Royston. The ones fluttering by Devil’s Dyke at the moment are perhaps second or third generation adults. It’s the correct habitat for the species, just not in the natural place.