On Sunday 14th August I welcomed a group on site for the second of our BTCV species identification courses, this time focusing on butterflies and moths. The weather was glorious as everyone arrived, with cloudless skies, a gentle breeze and the temperature rising nicely.
So without hesitation we headed out around the public footpath and the first species to make a welcome appearance was a purple hairstreak, flitting around the canopy of an large ash tree on the woodland corner. A distinctive species when seen close-up, they are a little harder to spot up in the canopy. Look for flashes of silver on the underwings, as the butterfly flutters through the green leaves of ash and oak trees.
Further down the path we encountered a good range of species including green-veined and small whites, a stunning male brimstone, gatekeepers – both females and the males showing off their brown coloured scent brands on the forewings and the closely related meadow brown.
However, it was down on Phase 2 when the fun of butterfly identification really began! One of the course participants managed to catch a brown argus and female common blue and we were able to examine them in the same pot together. At a glance these two species look the same, with dark brown upperwings, fringed with orange spots. However, they are very subtly different…look at the underside of the forewing – the female common blue has two extra small black spots, outlined in white, close to where the wing meets the body that are not present on the brown argus.
And not forgetting the moths – the star species of the day had to be two of our reedbed specialist species caught in the trap the night before. The first was southern wainscot, a very delicate looking species whose caterpillars feed on common reed. This was followed by the impressive bulrush wainscot. They are quite a large species with a wingspan of up to 50mm, their caterpillars feed on another wetland plant species, reedmace, sometimes (inaccurately) known as bulrush.
And once again thanks to Ian Cattell from the BTCV for organising the course.