Glowing

I didn't actually need to leave the homestead today to photograph something interesting: a morning walk around the garden had netted me a few nice invertebrates, including two female Common Darters. But I had to go to Evesham anyway, to collect a parcel and refuel the car, so I thought I might as well drive an extra few miles and take another walk around Tiddesley Wood.

It was hot by the time I arrived, and the woodland, orchard, and meadow were all seething with warm and flighty insects. I was standing on the sunny side of an oak tree, watching Purple Hairstreaks bickering high up in the foliage, and hoping that one of them might stomp off in a huff and land somewhere low down where I could take its photo, when a dog walker came up to me and asked what I was looking at. I explained, and she smiled and told me that two men higher up the main ride had asked her to leave them her bag of dog poo. "Ah," I said. "They're after Purple Emperors - the other end of the size spectrum to these. Had they found one?" She said she thought they might have, so I thanked her and hot-footed it up the slope, but when I arrived, crimson and panting, it turned out that "found" was a bit of an overstatement. They thought they could see some Emperors flying around a couple of oaks about a hundred metres away, but at that distance the fluttering shapes could equally well have been White Admirals, or to be honest pretty much anything else with a decent wingspan.

I hung around for a while (after all, they did have ripe dog poo, which according to legend is irresistible to the Purple Emperor), but nothing happened, and eventually I got bored and decided to walk on. I made it almost to the end of the main ride, but decided against doing the final slope down to the Defford Road gate, on the grounds that if I went down I'd only have to walk back up again. I was meandering back towards the poo guys, and had probably got about half way, when a large dark shape flew past my left knee and landed a few feet in front of me. Because it wasn't purple I jumped to the conclusion that it must be a White Admiral, but after a second look I gave myself a bit of a talking to: this is in fact a female Purple Emperor.

Unlike the males, whose wing scales refract light at certain angles to produce a vibrant purple sheen, female Purple Emperors are deep chocolate brown with white markings, which means that they do superficially resemble White Admirals. They're much bigger though - maybe 8cm across the wings, versus around 6cm for the White Admiral - and they have orange highlights on the wing edges and orange-ringed eye spots on the hindwings that the Admiral doesn't have. This specimen was fresh, and her highlights seemed to glow in the strong sunshine - so even though she wasn't purple, she was very far from drab. She may have come to ground to evade the males up in the tree canopy rather than to take up salts from the path, because she was extremely skittish, fluttering back and forth in a way that had me squeaking with frustration, and within two minutes of first landing she took off again, and zoomed away into the depths of the wood.

On my way back towards the car park I did see a Purple Hairstreak on low vegetation, but it was old and tatty, and not really worth photographing - which is a shame, because it would have been nice to have posted the big and small Purples together. (Another day, maybe.) It was at this point that another dog walker approached me, and told me he'd just seen a butterfly he didn't recognise on the Defford Road slope, and wondered if I could identify it from this description: large, and sort of triangular; bright yellow with black markings; and with little sort of tail things at the ends of its wings. I looked at him as if he was trying to sell me cryptocurrency, and said "That sounds like a Swallowtail - but we don't have them here. If you want to see Swallowtails you have to go to Norfolk." He vowed - hand on heart, almost - that a butterfly like that had come down in front of him, on the path I'd decided against walking, at what must have been almost the same time. His dogs had chased it up, he said, but it had come down again a few yards further on. When they put it up again, it had flown up into the trees, and he'd lost sight of it.

I won't pretend that I didn't think about going back up the hill to check. But even assuming that I wasn't being sold cryptocurrency, it didn't seem likely that I'd be able to find a butterfly that had already been scared off the ground twice today. Instead, I told the story to every other butterfly fancier I met on the way back to my car, and suggested that they keep a keen eye out for what would definitely be the Worcestershire butterfly of the year, if proven. The story was greeted with almost universal derision, but please remember, if it turns out to be true, that you heard it here first.