Planting in the drizzle

This afternoon, in constant drizzle, I was planting out 50 plug plants of Horseshoe Vetch, Hippocrepis comosa, in the butterfly scrapes we've made on ex-arable fields next to the nature reserve. This plant, found in close-grazed chalk grassland, is the food plant of the Chalkhill Blue butterfly, a species we hope to attract from a precariously smasll population nearby. It's a wonderful project to be involved in, transforming a group of almost sterile fields into an important patch of species-rich chalk grassland which adds another key stepping stone for rare butterflies along the Chilterns escarpment. So far we are 13 years into the project and I've just been analysing the data from the butterfly transect I've recorded almost every week through the 2013 season - 22 different species seen.