iRecord Butterflies is a free app for your smartphone that will help you identify and record any butterfly that you see in your garden while you are in lockdown. Your sighting will be logged by Butterfly Conservation and added to their records.
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Last year’s record breaking summer was an excellent year for butterflies, with more than half of Britain’s species increasing their numbers.
Continue reading “Butterfly numbers”
by Ian Bushell
I took my permitted exercise at the park over lunchtime. There were just eight cars when I arrived at noon and only fifteen when I left an hour later. People were well spaced all around the park; everybody seems to be taking the new regulations seriously.
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Report from a park user yesterday:
I saw two butterflies in Sleepers Field this morning – a brimstone and a peacock.
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While rummaging through our species lists looking for ammunition to throw in the direction of Planning Application 20/00379/OUT, we found a 2018 record of a small heath (Coenonympha pamphilus) hidden in the Lepidoptera section. The small heath is the park’s third UK BAP Priority Species of butterfly.
Continue reading “Small heath”
While exploring in our species lists, we found a report of a white letter hairstreak butterfly (Satyrium w-album), reported in 2017 by an expert observer. This is a real rarity, a UK Biodiversity Action Plan priority species.
Continue reading “White letter hairstreak”
We are going to use the last few days of 2019 to review the year’s new entrants to our species lists.
Continue reading “2019 review – part 1”
Of the 21 species of butterfly identified in the park this summer, two do not overwinter here: the painted lady (Vanessa cardui) and the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta)
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Almost all of the 21 species of butterfly that have been seen in the park this summer, will overwinter here. Butterflies can hibernate in all four of the stages of their development.
Britain has fifty eight species of butterfly, and nine of these species spend the winter as an egg, thirty two spend it as a caterpillar, eleven as a pupa, and six as an adult.
Here are some examples:
Pictures of a peacock butterfly taken by DKG during the summer.
A speckled wood (Pararge aegeriais) on hawthorn berries photographed last weekend by DKG.
Continue reading “Speckled wood”
The disappearance of the wall brown (Lasiommata megera) from areas of southern England has mystified conservationists for two decades.
Continue reading “Wall”
Ian Bushell, Hugh Wright and Mark Bushell conducted a Butterfly Transect in the park on Wednesday.
Continue reading “Butterfly Transect”
The Big Butterfly Count 2019 ended last weekend on August 11th. Citizen scientists made an amazing 104,294 counts and logged their finding on Butterfly Conservation’s website. Here is a link to the RESULTS MAP.
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Skippers are a family of Hesperiidae in the order of Lepidoptera; because they are diurnal, we generally called them butterflies but many authorities class them as a group intermediate between butterflies and moths. They are called skippers because of their rapid and darting flight.
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A peacock butterfly on bramble, by DKG.
And the underwings of a common blue that DKG found this morning in Lambrok Meadow.
A lucky speckled wood that just got away at the cost of a more than half of one of its four wings.
The picture is by DKG
Yesterday was the first day of the Big Butterfly Count. Here are some of the park’s butterflies to encourage you to sign up.
Southwick Country Park’s BUTTERFLIES 2019 list
by Ian Bushell
There was a Common Blue butterfly just emerged in the old pond at the end of Lambrok Meadow and, after a long chase, I got a picture of a female Southern Hawker (see above) near the carved Wheel close to the Picnic area.
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