Alners Gorse

Alners Gorse is regularly mentioned on several UK Butterfly groups on Facebook, so time we checked it out for ourselves!

The weather throughout the day was sunny with scattered clouds, so we should get a good haul in terms of butterflies.

And we weren't disappointed! Soon after entering the reserve, we spotted a few purple hairstreaks, and they readily posed for pictures.

Few silver-washed fritillaries as well, but sadly not the valezina form, which we were hoping to see (and which was seen by some other butterfly enthusiast today).

And then the highlight of the day for us: brown hairstreak! First a female:

And then, somewhat later in the day, a male:

Definitely a good day butterflying, and we will surely be back again. Although our focus was firmly on butterflies (17 species in all), we did see a few odo's as well. 

The familiar end-of-blogpost tables (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):