Marbled White

Tilly's field has finally produced a reasonable number of butterflies, including about half a dozen Marbled Whites. Because of this year's dearth of wild flowers, though, there's quite steep competition for food among all the nectar-feeding insects, and the black horehound, plus the few common thistles that have just come into flower, are especially popular.

My main image is a female Marbled White feeding on a thistle. Her sex is very obvious from the relatively brown colour of her underwing patterns, the male's markings being much closer to black. My second photo shows a pair in cop - a fidgety performance that must have used up quite a bit of the energy they'd gleaned from the thistles and horehound, because they were changing their perch every few seconds even before I noticed them and set off in pursuit. This restlessness appeared to be driven by the female, uppermost in this shot, who repeatedly hauled her partner off to a different section of the meadow.