May 28th was a very good day for wildlife spotting. Prior to seeing My first Four-spotted chaser of 2026, as I walked around the mostly people-less (this was the school half-term holiday so anywhere people-less was hard to find and a godsend!) outer fields at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, I checked the locations where I had previously found Brown argus (Aricia agestis), and I was lucky in both places to spot my first and second specimens of the year.

These are gorgeous butterflies but quite tiny so, when they flit up in front of you, you need to watch them closely to see where they land. Many’s the time my eye’s been distracted by another butterfly, or other insect, I’ve lost sight of the Brown argus and not managed to re-find it, so canny is the wee beastie when it comes to disappearing in among the long grass and wildflowers. Fortunately, I’ve learnt that lesson quite well, and these two neither escaped my eye nor my camera lens.

In his magnificent publication Life Cycles of British & Irish Butterflies, Peter Eeles quotes the words of James Tutt, from his 1906 work A Natural History of British Lepidoptera, about the flight pattern of the beautiful Brown argus (Aricia agestis)

This species may be called the ‘zigzagger’, for it darts swiftly to and fro in flight, showing first its grey underside and then its black upperside, so that one can hardly follow it with the eye.

Tutt describes the Brown argus’s movement perfectly. If you take your eye off this tiny butterfly for a second, it disappears, and I’ve spent many a minute, or ten, waiting patiently for it to move again before being able to get a good enough view first to identify the butterfly and then to edge close enough for photos. It’s certainly worth the wait though.

The Brown argus butterfly (Aricia agestis) usually has two broods each year, the first adults flying during May and June, the second brood appearing in late July and fading away in late September. Somehow, I missed the first brood this year so, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been systematically checking the spots of every female Common blue (at a glance, they look quite similar to Brown argus – see my July 2018 blog Flying on the wings of confusion for tips on how to differentiate the two species). Finally, last Friday, this beautiful Brown argus flitted into my field of vision. I didn’t quite do a happy dance but there was a not-too-loud ‘Whoop’!