Lots of people have commented on all the butterflies this summer and it certainly feels like a return to the good old days of, say, 1995, rather than recent years when late-summer flowers were depressingly bereft of butterflies.
The Big Butterfly Count results support these perceptions with sightings of 1.1m of the most common five species combined, compared with 660,000 in 2018.
Excitingly, it is not over yet. There are still some extremely sizable large whites floating around (they must’ve fed exceedingly well on someone’s brassicas), and plenty of red admirals feeding on fallen fruit. There should also be a late generation of long-tailed blues emerging in the next month – this energetic, Mediterranean butterfly cannot survive our winters but its arrival is a sign of climate change.
Another new arrival is the glamorous star of this year’s Moth Night, held on Friday and Saturday night, with people urged to submit any moth sightings to www.mothnight.info. The Clifden Nonpareil, a beige moth with a 12cm wingspan and a brilliant blue stripe across its black hindwing, is resident again after a 40-year absence, and has been spotted across the south, East Anglia, the Midlands, and in Ceredigion and Monmouthshire.
