Turns out there’s an upside to this chilly North Easterly wind: butterflies are landing in the garden again.
Landing, that is, rather than flitting endlessly about, as if they’re thinking “here? Or maybe on that flower, or perhaps there, on that nice blade of grass?”. They do it for just long enough that you’re sometimes tempted to get after them with a camera for the moment when they do finally alight. Only to see them go flitting off again, up and over the hedges and houses and far away. Which is pretty much exactly what they’ve been doing in the warm sunny weather we’ve been having here in the South of England for the past few weeks.
There are exceptions: the Peacocks and the Commas seem quite happy to chill out and bask in the sun. The Whites and Brimstones and the Holly Blues, though, hardly ever seem to come to rest in the warm sunny weather.
But now, with the drop in temperatures, and the patchy sunshine, they’re offering photo opportunities again.
Quite a few more Large Whites about than this time last year. They seem as likely to land on foliage as a flower.
Haven’t seen a Small White yet. But there are quite a few female Orange Tips about. And they have a useful habit of landing on the tips of foliage or on isolated flower heads, which means the backgrounds are nicely thrown out of focus.
So, lesson learned about warm sunny weather and some butterflies rarely coming to rest. And the silver lining of a change in the weather to “cooler temperatures, cloudy with some sunny intervals”.
Learning about Photography, Butterflies and the White Rainbow 