Gosh! Respect to all you butterfly/bird/bee spotters. When I go out to look it's there's one, oh it's gone, there's one, no it's a leaf, there's one, can't tell what it's against the sky... How on earth do you identify the things? They flit across one's field of vision for a fraction of a second and disappear or you see seven which may be the same one seven times....
I'm not in the UK so don't count but it's interesting that it's one area, I have a bit more land than most here, but which butterflies I see depend on which area I am in. round the thistles there is a good mix but the buddlia only attracts 3 types, whereas the wild grass/flowers has 10-15 types and a few moths. And of course the broccoli has 3!
How does one only count each butterfly once though that I wonder, I was just out in the middle of my thistle patch (meant to be veg garden) and there's 9 peacocks at the first count, I can't keep an eye on them over 15 minutes and make sure I don't double count or miss a newcomer.
OK I picked the thistle patch, because there was space to put a chair!
Peacock 22
Red Admiral 5
Small Tortoiseshell 6
Skipper (not sure what type) 10
Large white 4
Small white 15
Green-veined white 5
Large copper 1
Painted lady 2
Common blue 6
Gatekeeper 1
Meadow brown 1
Small blue 1
Beautiful golden Y 2
Heart and dart 1
cinnabar moth 5 (I thought this only ate ragwort but I've seen lots of caterpillars on groundsel this year.)
last year my strawberries were entirely pollinated by painted ladies, there must have been a couple of hundred of them, they migrate and I guess they found my strawberries (I have 1600 plants) at just the right time, I've only seen a few each year before or after.
@Skandi Wow! How fantastic to have so many beautiful insects and painted ladies pollinating your strawberries and the numbers. You are so lucky. Painted ladies here are in the handful not hundreds.
Yes it can be tricky, first in being able to identify them and then are you counting the same one again?
Having done this for so many years we can count the number of one species and then if they come back we recount and the highest number counts in the end.
What we haven't seen so far this year and is unusual is a comma. We have these in our garden every year but this year has been so up and down with the weather anything goes.
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