Attitude

I had an unexpectedly successful mini-beast safari around the garden this morning. Pickings have been decidedly thin lately, but today there were all kinds of invertebrates flaunting themselves around the flowers and foliage and I didn't have to work for my shots at all, until I tripped over this fresh and skittish Painted Lady on a low patch of red valerian in the front garden, and put it to flight. These are big, strong butterflies with quite a lot of attitude, and this one was doubly engaged in avoiding me and chasing all the other nectar feeders away from the valerian, so for the next few minutes it fluttered hither and yon, while I played Grandmother's Footsteps around it, trying to get the best angle I could.

The Painted Lady is said to be the most widely distributed butterfly in the world, but in the UK we don't tend to see very many of them, except in summers when the weather is particularly favourable to their migration from mainland Europe. Some years they don't appear in the West Midlands at all, so in spite of the performance involved in capturing it on camera, I was very happy to see this one. I've written quite a lot in the past about the extraordinary rolling migration undertaken by this species, so if you'd like to know more about it I'll just refer you to this post, if I may, rather than repeating all the information here.

But for the arrival of the Painted Lady, it's likely that this post would have featured the nice pair of Hawthorn Shieldbug nymphs I'd found a little earlier down in the wild garden. I don't see too many Hawthorn Shieldbug nymphs, and I think this is the first time I've come across two together, at different stages of development. I've posted them to my Facebook page, if you'd care to take a look.