Martin Down

May bank holiday and a beautiful weekend forecast, so off to a new (for us) site to do some proper butterflying: Martin Down!

Information on the interweb suggested the best area to see butterflies is Bokerley Ditch, so that's where we headed upon arrival, and we walked back and forth along the ditch for several hours. Diversity in terms of flowers was certainly higher there, which was promising. 

Even before we got to the ditch, we'd already seen several skippers, and both dingy and grizzled skippers proved to be very common.

Plenty of brimstones wherever we looked.

Also, our first green hairstreaks of the year!

Staying with lycaenids, common blues and small blues were busy making sure there would be more of them in the future; blues porn?

We really love small blues: such dainty little butterflies! And we were happy to see a few 1st generation adonis blues among the common blues. 

And then the butterfly we were really hoping to see: marsh fritillary, a new species for us!

So that's the second new species of the year, another fritillary, after we saw a pearl-bordered fritillary in Bentley Wood a few weeks ago.

Pretty good day, with twelve species in total! Here's today's table (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):