01 Saturday May 2021
I think you’ll agree this female Orange-tip butterfly has nailed this camouflage scenario.
She kept completely and utterly still, even when I got within a couple of inches of her for some macro photos. Amazing effort!
14 Wednesday Apr 2021
Tags
British butterflies, Green-veined white, Lavernock Nature Reserve, Orange-tip butterfly, Orange-tip male, spring butterflies
With the help of a little warm sunshine, Lavernock Nature Reserve came up trumps for me yesterday, as I found my first Orange-tip and Green-veined white butterflies for 2021, two of each. So beautiful, so lucky!
05 Tuesday May 2020
I know I already posted about seeing my first Orange-tip butterfly of the year (The ostentatious Orange-tip, 15 April) but, for those not familiar with this lovely springtime butterfly, I thought it might be useful to see a bit more detail. So, here is a typical male Orange-tip, from the top and the side. The speckling on the lower wings looks green but that’s an optical illusion – the colours are actually yellow and black.
And here’s a female from both angles. If you only see her from the top, you might confuse her with one of the other white butterflies, though the dark patches are different in all the whites, and the Orange-tip also has a distinctive wing shape.
I managed to find several eggs during a recent walk – the newly laid eggs are white but turn orange very quickly. You’ll find them on the caterpillar food plants: Cuckooflower, Garlic mustard and Honesty are three wildflowers this butterfly favours. And, for the first time ever, I found a caterpillar. This is a 2nd instar (i.e. stage) – the larvae proceed through 5 instars, progressively growing larger, until they are ready to pupate.
You might be wondering why I gave this post the title of ‘the Lady of the Woods’. Well, according to Peter Eeles’s superb publication Life Cycles of British & Irish Butterflies (every home should have one!), this is the name given to the Orange-tip by Benjamin Wilkes in his Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies, published in 1742.
15 Wednesday Apr 2020
Tags
Anthocharis cardamines, British butterflies, butterfly, Orange-tip, Orange-tip butterfly, spring butterflies
If there is one butterfly whose male makes a truly conspicuous effort to impress the female of the species, then it must surely be the Orange-tip (Anthocharis cardamines). Those vivid orange wing tips are hard to miss, even when the males are speeding past at a hundred miles an hour. Today, at last, I saw my first Orange-tip for 2020 – in fact, I spotted four of these handsome chaps and, after following a couple back and forth along their chosen territories, I finally managed a single photo of one as it was refuelling.
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in 365DaysWildin2019, flowers, insects, nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
#365DaysWild, British butterflies, Cuckooflower, Orange-tip butterfly, Orange-tip egg, Orange-tip female, Orange-tip male
A sequence of events that unfolded before me this afternoon….
A male Orange-tip butterfly feeding on one of its favourite flowers, and the host plant for its caterpillars, the Cuckooflower.
Finished feeding on that flower, the male flies on and suddenly smells a female. Woohoo!
Sadly for him, this female has already mated, which is why she’s holding her body in that odd upright manner. He remains hopeful for a moment or two, then gets the message and flies off.
I follow the female who flies to another flower. She’s not eating so what’s she’s doing, I wonder.
Aha! Can you spot the single egg attached to the flower stalk, in the very centre of the picture? I’ll have to go back in a week or so and see if I can spot any caterpillars on these flowers.
07 Sunday Apr 2019
Posted in 365DaysWildin2019, insects, nature, spring
Tags
Brimstone butterfly, British butterflies, butterfly, Grangemoor Park, Green-veined white butterfly, Orange-tip butterfly, Peacock butterfly
I took myself along to Grangemoor Park today, hoping its central hillock would block the cool north-easterly winds so that I might find some butterflies on the warmer, sheltered, river side … and I did. The three Orange-tips – all males – were my first of the year, as was the single Green-veined white (at least, I think it’s a Green-veined white – I do find the whites can be a little confusing).
The four Peacocks were mostly too zippy to photograph, until I caught one enjoying the sunshine on a wooden railing. And the two Brimstones were also speeding along the edge of the pathways, until one stopped to refuel and I managed to grab a couple of snaps of it. I love butterflies!
27 Sunday May 2018
The various white butterflies can be difficult to tell apart but the Orange-tips (Anthocharis cardamines) are a little easier to spot. The male sports the orange tips on its wings that give the species its common name and which are, according to the UK Butterflies website, caused by an accumulation of the mustard oils that were ingested when it was a caterpillar.
The female Orange-tip doesn’t have those bright wing tips but she does share with the male the equally characteristic mottled green pattern on her underwings.
The female lays a single egg – the caterpillars will devour other eggs and fellow caterpillars given the chance, hence the single egg – on one of the preferred larval food plants, their favourites being Cuckooflower (Cardamine pratensis) and Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata). Eggs are white when first laid, changing to orange as they near maturity, a process that takes a week or two.
I haven’t yet found a caterpillar but, in the next week or so, I will be re-checking the places where I found these eggs. If you want to read more about Orange-tips, you can check the Butterfly Conservation website here.
03 Thursday May 2018
Tags
Brimstone butterfly, British butterflies, butterflies, Comma, Cosmeston, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, Orange-tip butterfly, Peacock, Speckled wood
I think it’s fair to say it’s not been much of a Spring so far, weather wise at least. It’s often been cool, frequently wet, and the sun has been elusive. I’m hoping Monday, the last day of April, was a hint of days to come – though there was a cool wind, the skies were mostly blue and it was warm in sheltered spots. Those conditions at Cosmeston persuaded the butterflies to come out to play, and I saw the highest numbers so far this year: 7 Brimstones, 2 Orange-tips, 2 Speckled woods, 2 Commas and 4 Peacocks. And it was such fun to be cavorting like a crazy woman again, flitting across fields and dancing along hedgerows to try to get photographs.
24 Monday Apr 2017
Tags
Barry, Crab spider, Dock bug, Garden snails, Glamorgan Botany Group, Grene shieldbug, hoverflies, insects, ladybirds, Orange-tip butterfly, slow-worm
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I spent a wonderful day on Saturday exploring and examining some of the town of Barry’s wilder green spaces with members of the Glamorgan Botany Group. But, of course, you can’t spend a whole day looking at plants without also seeing an awful lot of the critters that live on those plants and I admit to being a trifle distracted at times … by a sunshine-yellow Crab spider, by fluttering butterflies and buzzing hoverflies, by plentiful dock and shield bugs, by the sad sight of a dead Slow-worm. Some of the lovely old stone houses and churches we passed were pretty cool too!
24 Friday Jun 2016
Tags
Anthocharis cardamines, British butterflies, butterfly, Celastrina argiolus, Common blue butterfly, Holly blue butterfly, Large skipper butterfly, Ochlodes sylvanus, Orange-tip butterfly, Polyommatus icarus
Though summer is well underway here in Britain, I’m not seeing a huge number of butterflies. Here are some I have seen fluttering by in recent weeks.
There are several small blue butterflies in Britain and they can be difficult to tell apart but the Common blue (Polyommatus icarus) is, as its name implies, the most common. As is often the way with wildlife, the males are bright blue, whereas the females can be quite a drab brown.
The Holly blue (Celastrina argiolus) looks quite similar to the Common Blue, especially in flight. The trick to identifying it is in the small black dots on the underwings. It is also the blue butterfly that emerges first from its winter hibernation so look for it near holly plants in early spring, then fluttering about ivy in the summertime.
If this is an Orange-tip butterfly (Anthocharis cardamines), where’s the orange colour? Turns out this is a female and only the males have bright orange wing tips. Still, she’s a very pretty little thing, even if she did seem a bit shy and hid her head behind a leaf.
Though it’s called the Large skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus), this butterfly is relatively small, its wingspan just a couple of millimetres more than the Small skipper, so you need to look for the mottled brown markings on its upper wings to tell the two apart.
