Most co-operatively, as I had specifically gone looking for it, my 22nd butterfly species for 2026 appeared flitting up and down among the long grasses and wildflowers of a local meadow on Sunday 7 June, a breezy day but warm enough in sheltered places. And then another appeared, and a third, and, more distantly, a fourth, though I only managed to get this one photo. As with many butterfly species, the males emerge before the females and then spend their time racing madly around looking for females to mate with and sprinkling their pheromones on to the vegetation. This is, of course, a Meadow brown (Maniola jurtina).