Thank you everyone for your comments. (Trevor, same shoes as France then
David M, it is astonishing for me to see PEs in a number larger than 1, and I live in a good area. Something has surely happened? Goldie, I believe they will but Wurzel and Trevor will be enjoying even more species from the continent by then...so we still will need the
...and Wurzel, trousers are OK but I think my best experience of contact with HM was his visit to the sweat on my nose and forehead..
- not sure if I have a photo of that, but I do have pictures of close encounters with some wonderful butterflies - mostly my two sons as young boys on our French holidays)
It is good to know that even out of season my pictures are worth posting. And there is something less stressful, less competitive about being last with your stories...I'm delighted to be a month behind Wurzel, but then I cannot match his prose and insights.
So I will relate some more time with Emperors at Fermyn on the 3rd of July. I'd been persuaded to return with a good friend who I do the majority of my trips with. He'd not seen a grounded Emperor in many years and was very keen. So I again reached Fermyn quite early and we made our way straight to Lady Wood. Dennis did need persuading as we went past large numbers of Emperors at about 10 feet from the ground, gliding around and occasionally diving directly at us. But I was persuasive on this occasion and it paid off.
I'm going to include this picture purely for the story behind it, which was one of the days highlights for us. We came upon a really friendly lady staking out a large area of dried up horse dung. There were no Emperors and we fell into conversation about the dung. I said, naively as it turned out, 'that it was a good pitch as there was so much poop'. She explained that she had collected it all and arranged it there. And, just to emphasise that she arranged it a bit more with her bare hands and delicate fingers and said she'd already had some interest...So we hung around and in conversation I asked about her dung collecting and needing a good wash before lunch. She said it was OK as she'd got some wet wipes before her sandwiches....
But it worked and we were able to secure lots of pictures of a couple of visitors with her bait.
I'm not a fan of baiting, and not attracted to the shit shots that occur as a result. But I admire her dedication to the task in hand and she was a good handler of the butterflies as well as the manure. ...As we left we resisted the chance of shaking hands and simply doffed our hats.
We saw her again later in the day and asked how she was getting on. She said a car had come along at speed along her track and wrecked all of her work scattering it in fragments, and she'd not got the heart to put it all together again...but she'd seen many more butterflies and was seeing lots whilst walking too.
Alongside all of the Emperors there were lots of other butterflies. I took this and five other shots of a Silver-washed courtship flight. I'd toyed with the idea of a moving GIF ...but there is too much movement but It was the best I've achieved over several years of trying. I will eventually improve my skills and perhaps shoot some video, but I was quite happy with getting both male and female in the shot and mostly in focus.
As the day was mostly about seeing Emperors (we didn't count the numbers but it was in the region of 40-50 with around a dozen photographed at close quarters we walked everywhere and took hundreds of pictures. Fabulous. Absolutely amazing scale of plentiful abundance...
Here are a few shots.
But, for me, the highlight of the day was at lunchtime, we'd walked back towards the gate where I'd parked the car and within 50 metres of the car I saw an amazing butterfly. It was a 'what the ...' moment. Having not too long ago been in Croatia my mind went into overdrive...all I could do was hit the shutter button a few times. I called out to Dennis and calmed enough to check the camera and turned the dial to engage 20 fps mode on the camera. This was most unusual for me as I don't like huge numbers of similar, unplanned, shots. But it was my salvation as the butterfly was fluttering in a very bright, very hot place and the first shots were rubbish. The butterfly was there for less than a minute and I had enough pictures to be able to see an underside and several good topsides and about 50 shots in all. It was clearly a very nice Small Tortoiseshell aberration. The first I'd ever seen and hugely exciting
I did post the picture here for any help in identifying the name of the aberration as well as sending it to our county recorder. In the view of the recorder (and an expert friend he shared it with) it was very similar to ab. seminigra (Frohawk, 1938). And if 'seminigra' was good enough for Frohawk that will do for me - I don't expect to be seeing another
. I can say was it was an exceptional, wonderful feeling and I had some fun reading about stress related aberrations here and elsewhere. Plus I then ordered a very nice book on butterfly variations for my birthday.
Little did I know that I would be seeing several more aberrations during the summer (not Torts). But that is a spoiler to parts of the diary yet to be written. So more anon.
