Thursday, 12 June 2025

White-letter Hairstreaks and Flitty Fritillaries

White-letter Hairstreak 

The summer birding doldrums may have arrived but it does now mean that I get to spend the next few weeks looking down at the ground for insects and plants instead of looking up at the sky for birds.

With reports of the White-letter Hairstreaks having emerged at Oreston while I was away in Suffolk I decided to head out there for a look on Sunday 8th June. It was cool and breezy with occassionally sunny spells and I wasn't sure if the conditions would be conducive to seeing finicky Hairstreaks but I thought I'd give it a go. I needn't have worried though as no sooner than I had arrived on site I found one perched in the Elm tree and I eventually managed to see at least 3 of them with some very good views obtained of them too.

White-letter Hairstreak

White-letter Hairstreaks

Dave the Butterfly Guy unexpectedly arrived and we had a good catch up, he had first seen the Hairstreaks on the 2nd, a very early date. Today's date is the earliest I have ever seen them too and presumably due to all the recent dry and sunny weather we have experienced even though the nights were often chilly.

White-letter Hairstreak

After watching the Hairstreaks for a while I then headed over towards The Range to check out the Elm tree there but didn't find any White-letter Hairstreaks although I wasn't on site for long, I did see some nice Bee Orchids and Pyramidal Orchids along the way though.

Bee Orchid

Pyramidal Orchids

We had a walk around Saltram on Monday 9th June and despite it being overcast but warm and humid I only saw 2 butterflies, a Meadow Brown and a Speckled Wood. The tide was low but there were 2 Mute Swans feeding out on the river near the rowing club and on Blaxton Meadow a single Shelduck was fast asleep out on the mud. An interesting sighting was of a presumed male Scarce Chaser buzzing around the duck pond but it never settled for a second while the male Mandarin Ducks here were already beginning their moult into eclipse plumage. The only other sighting of note were 11 Swifts feeding over Saltram House amongst  the House Martins and Swallows.

It was warm, sunny and humid on Wednesday 11th June as I headed up to Dartmoor to look for Fritillaries, it was perfect weather for butterflies but maybe not so much for trying to get a good look at them.

I started off at my usual site but the only butterfly seen here was a Meadow Brown and so I headed over to the nearby new site where I immediately found what I at first thought was a Dark Green Fritillary sat up in the branches of a tree. It actually turned out to be a Silver-washed Fritillary, a butterfly species I wasn't really expecting to see on this visit as it is a little early for them, however with the warm and dry spring we've had this year emergence dates do seem earlier than usual. Sadly it quickly disappeared and was never seen again but I did manage to get a few photos of it.
Silver-washed Fritillary

There were other large Fritillaries dashing about over the bracken, the most I saw at any one time were 4 but there were undoubtedly more than this number present. I managed to confirm the ID's of just 4 of them, 2 Dark Green and 2 High Brown, and with a bit of patience and a lot of luck I managed to get some decent views along with some decent photos although they were extremely flitty and rarely settled for long.

Dark Green Fritillary

High Brown Fritillary - my favourite UK butterfly

High Brown Fritillary

High Brown Fritillary

High Brown Fritillary

High Brown Fritillary

A Large White, 3 Large Skippers, 4 Brimstone (2 males), a Speckled Wood and Meadow Browns were also seen along with Brown Silver-line moths, 2 male Broad-bodied Chasers, a Golden-ringed Dragonfly, 2 Black-and-Yellow Longhorn Beetles and an Orchid Beetle.

Orchid Beetle

Black-and-Yellow Longhorn Beetle

Bird wise singing Chiffchaff, Blackcap and Willow Warbler were heard along with a Goldcrest, a Great Spotted Woodpecker and a Siskin while a Buzzard was seen soaring high overhead and a pair of Bullfinch skulked in the undergrowth.

After getting my fill of the Fritillaries I returned to the original site for another quick look before heading home and was very pleased to find a single High Brown Fritillary here, presumably a separate colony to the other site and good to know they are still present here after last years blank.

High Brown Fritillary - just gorgeous

No comments:

Post a Comment