{"id":1140,"date":"2013-09-16T13:50:39","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T14:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/?p=1140"},"modified":"2013-09-16T14:23:38","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T15:23:38","slug":"a-wonderful-year-for-butterflies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/?p=1140","title":{"rendered":"A wonderful year for butterflies!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The small Tortoiseshell is the most common butterfly in Scotland this year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s official.\u00a0 It HAS been a wonderful year for butterfies.\u00a0 Day after day of sunny weather brought out the butterflies to gorge themselves on the buddleia in my garden. I remember there being lots of butterflies when I was a boy, but recently there just don’t seem to have been so many about.\u00a0\u00a0 And that was certainly my impression earlier this year [See Flower Portraits<\/a>] But eve;rything has changed!<\/p>\n

The annual survey carried out by the the charity Butterfly Conservation<\/a> has confirmed my casual observations – the numbers in Scotland up by nearly two thirds on 2012.\u00a0 The official result for Scotland lists the small tortoiseshell as the most common followed by the small white.\u00a0 That is certainly true for Hatton.<\/p>\n

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Tortoiseshell in my garden in Hatton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Getting up close with my camera to these delightful little creatures has been quite easy.\u00a0 And taking photographs has made me look much more closely at them than I had done before.\u00a0\u00a0 My star posers<\/em> are the tortoiseshells who spread out their wings as they feed.\u00a0 The small whites are much more coy, closing their wings as they land on a flower – not such a pleasing subject to photograph.<\/p>\n

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The summer sun illuminates the closed wings of the small white. (My garden in Hatton)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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A somewhat ragged white on some thistles on the old railway line at Hatton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Small White in Anglesea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One exotic in my garden, or so one of my neighbours thought, is a huge blue butterly.\u00a0 He could see it fluttering on the white cosmos blooms near my front door, a most unusual and unexpected butterfly for Cruden Country.\u00a0\u00a0 But I had to let him into a secret….it is solar powered and its fluttering is all the result of a little wire and an electric motor.<\/p>\n

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A blue “exotic”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The arrival of the butterflies made me do some research to try to identify the species.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I discovered that for 60 years I have been calling the tortoiseshells “Red Admirals”, never thinking to check.\u00a0 However I did manage to photograph a true Red Admiral when I was spendning a few days in Angelsey this summer.\u00a0 Again the lucious buddleia, a true butterfly friendly plant, drew him in and click went my camera.<\/p>\n

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A Red Admiral in Anglesea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s official.\u00a0 It HAS been a wonderful year for butterfies.\u00a0 Day after day of sunny weather brought out the butterflies to gorge themselves on the buddleia in my garden. I remember there being lots of butterflies when I was a boy, but recently there just don’t seem to have been so many about.\u00a0\u00a0 And that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crudencountry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.couttsweb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}