Joy

This morning R and I went to Charlecote, where we had a pleasant walk, drank good coffee and ate tasty cheese scones, and I took some truly pitiful photographs. There was one reasonable one in the entire set, but even that was trumped by pretty much everything I captured on a late afternoon stroll around the village. Just when you think you're getting pretty competent at photographing wildlife, along comes a day like this to remind you that you've still got plenty to learn.

Anyway, if I'd done as well as I should have done this morning, I probably wouldn't have felt the need to go out this afternoon, in which case I'd have missed seeing several nice insects - so, swings and roundabouts. My second photo today shows a lovely fresh Chrysotoxum festivum, which is the first of its kind I've seen this year. All the Chrysotoxum hoverflies are large and very smart wasp mimics, with long antennae, but this one, with the paired, downturned bars on its abdomen and striking orange legs, is pretty unmistakeable. 

The hoverfly would almost certainly have made it to top spot tonight, if my determined chase along the hedgerow after an uncooperative Southern Hawker hadn't brought me to this patch of traveller's joy (Clematis vitalba), and the unexpected sight of a second brood Common Blue butterfly. Unexpected, because it's only the third specimen I've seen this year: over the past few years a butterfly that used to live up to its name has become really quite uncommon. From what I hear in local wildlife groups, 2024 has been quite a poor year for many butterfly species around the Midlands, but the Common Blue is often mentioned particularly - in fact, I bumped into someone at Grafton Wood yesterday who'd made a special trip there to look for one, but with no success. So I think my accidental discovery of this fresh male today is something worth celebrating.