Recap of 2021

On a walk last weekend, with the weather sunny, but quite cold, I saw a red admiral and a speckled wood. And those two may well be the last butterflies I'll see this season .... 

So it's time to recap the 2021 season!

Let's first look at the garden. Our garden list from last year had a total of 16 butterfly species and a single damselfly. How did we do this year? Despite planting more butterfly-friendly plants, we did not see more species. Fewer in fact: 13 in total, and no species that we hadn't seen last year. 

On to damsels and dragons, last year we only had a single individual in the garden: a large red damselfly. This year, we saw a total of five species! 

And the golden-ringed dragonfly even entered the house .....

At the start of the year, I drew up target lists of species we wanted to see this season. This because we only started looking for them quite late in the season last year (especially for odo's), so missed quite a few relatively common species that are active earlier in the year. Quite ambitious target lists: 10 new butterfly species, and 10 new damsel/dragonfly species. So how did we do?

Of the 10 target butterfly species, we saw nine, plus two species I had seen in the dim and distant past, but Irma hadn't. In order of first time seen this year: grizzled skipper, small blue, large skipper, silver-studded blue, purple hairstreak, small skipper, purple emperor, white admiral, brown hairstreak. Plus green hairstreak and dark green fritillary. The only target species we did not see was essex skipper. We may have seen it, though, as we couldn't identify every single 'smessex skipper', but we never had a positive identification of an essex skipper.

And then damselflies and dragonflies. Again a target list of 10 species, and we saw them all, plus five more! Again, in order of first time seen: broad-bodies chaser, four-spotted chaser, beautiful demoiselle, southern damselfly, azure damselfly, hairy dragonfly, downy emerald, black-tailed skimmer, small red damselfly, red-eyed damselfly, brown hawker, emerald damselfly, small red-eyed damselfly, black darter, lesser emperor. 

So 24 new butterdamseldragon species in total this year. It was so much fun seeing so many new species! We'll never have another year like that, of course; next year will be different, enjoying seeing the different species become active again, and still hoping for a few new ones. 

Bring on 2022!