A few pictures below.

Well, It’s just as well got to Gibraltar, as it’s been hard going since then, due to wind, rain and,above all, lack of sunshine. However, Easter Saturday gave me my only passable day of March, with intermittent sunshine and near-average temperatures. My first bee-flies appeared on that day, along wi...

I find the hour by hour Apps very inaccurate, whereas the BBC TV forecast, and the video forecast on the Met. Office website are rather more reliable. 12C and overcast, and 12C in brilliant sunshine, as we all know, are in different leagues for the butterfly enthusiast, especially at this time of ye...

This year, here in east Anglia spring has arrived early, but not exceptionally so. Certainly the Snowdrops and Daffodils were early, but things have slowed since then, due to the rain and lack of sunshine. There is some hawthorn on the road verges in flower, but most of it is in bud, as is the horse...

Not forgetting Gibraltar’s most famous inhabitants, the monkeys. Or, more accurately, Barbary macaques. These are the only free-living monkeys in Europe and, even in March, plenty of tourists had come to see them! 1F563F9A-3565-4229-BE12-77FD55E9C3F5.jpeg 47E843C9-ABA4-4254-A9F4-F01EEA6BF574.jpeg AA...

Thanks Trevor. Wholeheartedly agree. Even without the other stuff, I would happily gone to see those two alone. Thanks Wurzel, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to get the season off of a flying start! Thanks David. We certainly had a good time. We picked the right weekend, too, as the following ...

The next day, Monday 18th March, promised more fine weather. So we headed back to the upper Rock. One of the first butterflies we found was this Painted Lady which was still warming up, the only one we saw in GBZ. 1F721BAA-73C0-4BAB-8351-637AD781AEC5.jpeg We came onto the Rock from a different direc...

Well done on your quest for Spanish Festoon. We had dozens of them on Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago, but we now know how lucky we were with the weather!

A great species, I’m glad caught up with them in the end. Your patience paid off!

The next day, with a full day of warm sunshine forecast, we headed to the Upper Rock nature reserve, via the Mediterranean Steps. Amid the glorious views to the African Continent, several butterflies flew past. But the first thing that stopped for pictures was this Small Copper, one of several seen ...

With dull, wet weather throughout February and well into March, a dose of warm sunshine was desperately needed. Gibraltar fits the bill perfectly! The forecast had been good running into our long weekend there, but I didn’t dare believe it. So imagine my delight at getting off the plane, and feeling...

After a sunny January, February was very mild, very wet and rather dull. The snowdrops peaked in the first two weeks of February, a couple of weeks earlier than last year. Here is Chippenham Garden,near Newmarket. D04BA68B-14D3-4B6B-BA3C-89119A507F68.jpeg 40BA9FC8-FC52-4086-BFB7-34C6C6DEA7E1.jpeg Th...

Well done Neil. I also managed to catch up with these glorious, exotic visitors this year.

It’s been a few years, but the waxwings this year have given winter pleasure to a great many people.

My first Small Tortoiseshell of the year at work in Harlow, Essex, in weak, hazy but warm sunshine.

Well, it’s certainly a start, Trevor.

What an impressive Camellia you’ve got there.

Thanks for posting, Neil. Late or not, your updates are always a most enjoyable read.

Backed up with some glorious images, of course!

Autumn, in contrast to spring, was dominated by stunning heatwaves in September and early October. A visit to Anchor Bottom in Sussex at the beginning of the month produced excellent numbers of Adonis Blues, many freshly emerged. However, it was relatively quiet after that. The much hoped for mass e...

Thanks Wurzel. That’s my suspicion, that numbers of this damp loving species crashes after the drought. I expect a recovery this year.

Agreed David, won’t be long now. Snowdrops in February, daffodils in March.

So much to look forward to.

Summer. The cold, cloudy conditions continued in East Anglia for the start of June, as any visitor looking for Swallowtails would testify. Meanwhile the rest of the country enjoyed warm sunshine and, eventually, we joined the party. June became a warm and sunny month, and perhaps it was this that re...

Thanks Wurzel. It was lovely to see them. It was also nice to go somewhere warm for a change! Thanks David. West was definitely best in the first half of 2023! Despite the weather, the spring flowers were excellent. Here are some Essex bluebells. One of my favourite sights in all the world. 009B3115...

Spring. The most remarkable thing about spring 2023, to my mind at least, is that there was not a single spell of warm, sunny weather. Even at the end of May, I was still waiting for temperatures to reach 21C for the first time, something that goes unnoticed with statistics. Rain and snow in March w...