Butterfly and Dragonfly Survey Paxton

 Definitely lower numbers of Butterflies for our June Survey at Paxton but Dragonflies made up for it with large numbers of Common blue damselflies plus a few Azure and Variable and, mostly strikingly, very large numbers of Emerald damsels and in areas not previously recorded. Here a few images from the day, including male and female Emeralds and Banded Demoiselles, a species of  Potter Wasp, a Red-tipped Clearwing and  Wilke's mining Bee

Paxton Pits May Butterfly and Dragonfly Survey

Although warm and sunny there were worryingly few butterflies around though the Dragonflies made up for them with good sightings of Norfolk Hawkers and a very good year for Banded Demoiselle numbers. A lot of time was spent early on refreshing our ID skills for Variable (narrow or exclamation mark top thorax stripe, spur mark with stem, short amount of blue on S9 and 'bat' mark on tail segment), Azure (wider top stripe on thorax, but less than Common, Spur mark no stem, large amount of blue on S9 and spur-type mark on tip of abdomen) and Common (very blue thorax, wine glass mark, lots of blue on abdomen etc). Other dragonflies photographs are Blue-tailed Damselfly and Four-spot and Scarce Chasers. The highlights of the very few Butterflies were a Small Copper and a Grizzled skipper - the latter in a new area so hopefully they are spreading. I couldn't resist two other subjects that caught my lens - a Sallow Kitten moth caterpillar and some Sawfly larvae.