Hollybrook Cemetery

Hollybrook Cemetery is behind our back garden, and if the weather is nice late afternoon, we tend to take a walk across it after work. Especially the slightly more overgrown parts of the cemetery are nice places to look for butterflies! Rather than blogging each time we go there, I thought it would make more sense to combine everything into one blog post. 

We saw a total of ten butterfly species at the cemetery this summer, the commonest of which were small skippers, meadow browns and marbled whites. 

Now there are lots of big oak trees scattered around the cemetery, and we made sure to bring binoculars when the weather was particularly nice and scan the tops of those oak trees. Didn't take us long to see the silvery undersides of the wings of purple hairstreaks! New species for us then, even though we did see one at Abbotts Wood later.

And we did see a dragonfly once: a black-tailed skimmer female landed on a gravestone, but took off again before I could take a picture.

Here the end-of-blog-post tables, indicating the highest number we saw on a single visit (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):