Butterflies in our Llanfairfechan garden

Rather poor this year. The buddleias are fully out but today all we've got is 2 Large Whites, 2 Commas, a Red Admiral and a Peacock. One Painted Lady has put in an appearance and a Hummingbird Hawkmoth was a regular visitor in July but has now departed.

We have had one new species for the garden - a Grayling on July 24th. We see these on the rocky heathland on the edge of the Penmaenmawr quarry, not far as the crow (or chough) flies but 200m higher up than our garden at 100m.

Last year we had a few more exciting species in the garden, including a Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary and a White-letter Hairstreak (see photo). The former is a fast flier which could have come some distance from the nearest colony (wherever that is), while the Hairstreak is unlikely to have flown further than the elm trees across the road - elm is the food plant for this species. The white-letter is the W on the closed wings (hairstreaks at rest always have their wings closed).

We also record butterflies up the road, through Nant y Coed (our local Nature Reserve) and out onto rough grazing above. We do these weekly transects from April to September for Butterfly Conservation. The most exciting sighting this year has been a Dark Green Fritillary, a larger and even faster flier than the Small P-b species. On the debit side, I have failed to spot another species of hairstreak - the Purple, which lays eggs on oak leaves and also visits ash trees to feed on aphid honeydew. In previous years we've always seen these in July and August, but so far in 2011 not even a flash of purple.

Heaven On Earth!

What better place is there to be, than a Welsh sessile oakwood in late April – on a sunny day of course? The young oak leaves are just beginning to emerge but the sun still gets down to the woodland floor. The celandines and wood sorrel are in full flower and the bluebells are just coming out. Speckled wood and orange-tip butterflies flit about over the fallen oak leaves. You can hear a full hand of summer migrants in song – pied flycatchers, redstarts and the first few wood warblers. Actually, the redstarts prefer the old ash trees further up the valley, near the falls. I look inside one nest-box and see an almost complete flycatcher nest. All it needs is a lining and 7-8 blue eggs.
Various questions come into my head – will the first egg date be even earlier this year? Will the looper caterpillars be ready at just the right time to be fed to young flycatchers (and young tits)? After several years of low predation rates, will a rogue weasel get into the boxes and cause havoc again? Maybe you can detect my priorities here – caterpillars are for birds to eat, but a weasel that eats birds is ‘rogue’!
Just in case you are wondering – my sessile oakwood is Coedydd Aber NNR, near Bangor; Kate and I live about two miles away. Others are even more fortunate – Natur Cymru blogmeister Huw Jenkins lives in a sessile oakwood (Coedydd Maentwrog, also an NNR, near Porthmadog).
So, get yourself to your nearest sessile oakwood as soon as you can. Galapagos? Antarctica? Ngorongoro? Seen them all on the TV, don’t need to go there. Heaven on earth is right here, in Wales.