Late entrant

This female Holly Blue was resting on the laurel hedge in the secret garden at lunch time, and obligingly opened her wings enough for me to see her diagnostic black forewing marking. Apart from a couple of nicks out of the left hindwing, she looked surprisingly fresh for late May - there was another female on the aucuba at around the same time who'd lost virtually all of her white wing fringes, and many of her blue scales. I even wondered if this one might be a second brood adult, but having checked the species life-cycle in my field guide and on UK Butterflies, this seems unlikely: both have June as the summer month when you're least likely to see an imago, and both say that in second brood females the black upper wing marking is more extensive than this. So she must just be a late spring starter.

I gave myself a quiet day today, but still crashed this afternoon and had to go and have a sleep before dinner. Thus far R and I have avoided going down with the Boy Wonder's lurgy, but we don't consider ourselves to be out of the danger zone quite yet. Re the Boy, we hear that he slept for nearly thirteen hours last night, and this morning said that he was happy - which I think is toddler for "not feeling sick any longer". I spoke to him briefly this evening on the phone, mainly about our hoverfly, and he sounded absolutely fine.