Butterfly House, Portsmouth

A truly autumnal day today, wet and windy, so we decided to go butterflying! Not as crazy as it sounds: today's butterflying was indoors ...

Portsmouth's Butterfly House provided us with a wealth of tropical American butterflies! Variable crackers, malachites, blue-frosted banners, owl butterflies, swallowtails, several species of longwings, ...

... and even a morpho, even though quite tattered!

But my absolute favourite was the smallest, and, you could argue, least-coloured species: glasswings. There were maybe 40-50 of them flitting about, and I totally fell in love with them. So please indulge me when I include just a few of the many pictures I took of these exquisite little jewels.

I even had a few land on my hand!!

Crockford Bottom

We went back to Crockford Bottom today with a very clear target in mind: search the drier parts of the heathland for grayling. But of course, there is no way we could ignore the stream itself. And that stream basically gave us all the usual suspects, among which were beautiful demoiselle, southern damselfly, small red damselfly and golden-ringed dragonfly.

On to the heathland, and we were welcomed by a small copper.

And then a grayling, doing what a grayling does best: fly up, land and then become almost totally invisible ... But mission achieved!

Here are today's tables (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):

Ober Water

We set out for Ober Water with two specific species to target: white-legged damselfly and small red damselfly, neither species we had seen so far this year. 

Roaming the boggy heathland, it didn't take us long to see our first white-legged damsels, both females:

Following a few more females, we also saw a male:

So first target species done!

But no such luck with small damsels, even though we saw many in this area last year. We scoured the heather and bog myrtle for hours, but no small red damsels .... 

We had resigned ourselves to not seeing one as we walked back to the car, but just as we reached the car park, I spotted a small piece of suitable habitat: boggy heathland with plenty of bog myrtle. Worth checking out? We did, and saw no small red damsels. Until the very last bush of bog myrtle, at the edge of the boggy heathland. 

First one, then a second, and then another one: three female small red damsels!

They really made us work for it today, but that made it feel like a real reward! Despite the focus being on these two damsels, we also recorded the butterflies we saw, but nothing special there. Here are today's tables (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):

Houghton Lodge Gardens

For some reason, we'd never visited Houghton Lodge Gardens, even though it's only about half an hour drive from home. Time to remedy that!

In terms of butterflies, the planted borders were very attractive to them.

We saw masses of red admirals, peacocks and commas.

The Japanese-style pond gave us our first golden-ringed dragonfly of the year ...

... and walking along the river Test, we saw loads and loads of banded demoiselles.

Throughout the day, there was a bit of a contest in terms of numbers of butterfly species and damseldragonfly species, but the butterflies were victorious in the end: 14 vs 11. Here are the tables (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):

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+):