The birds and the... butterflies?

After a few years of threatening in a gently relaxed way that I would get into butterflies it's the summer of 2026 that tipped me into a more serious quest to see some butterflies beyond what come to the buddleia on my front garden.  Like many people I can identify the obvious and common species, the Red Admirals, Orange-tips (males!), the Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells.  I can pick out a Brimstone and I've seen my share of Clouded Yellows while birding.  I can recognise Ringlet, but until this summer I wasn't aware of seeing any hairstreaks (except Green, which have a couple of days every year where they fairly boil out of the banks of a ditch up on the moors within my 10km circle and are hard to miss).  I had no clue about fritillaries, or heaths, or browns, and I couldn't have told you the difference between Large and Small White, or Common, Small and Holly Blue.  I didn't even know that some of these butterflies existed.  

It's rare to go into a new hobby or aspect of a hobby already partly skilled in the things that will help you to enjoy it, but this summers' butterflying has at its base the same set of skills that I use in birding.  My birding skills have no transferable use if I took up sailing, or pickleball, or God forbid, golf.  I suppose in some ways butterflying is a close cousin to birding.  Am I just substituting one set of flying, beautiful wildlife for another?

I've wondered about butterflies and moths and dragonflies for a few years now.  A lot of my friends are ecologists, women and men who have enormous bases of knowledge of the ecosystems in which I spend my time birding, and it has felt for a long time that when I go out birding, I'm ignoring or ignorant of 90% of the wildlife I see.  I wander through plantscapes I have almost no knowledge of, past vast numbers of insects that I have basically regarded as food for birds, with a passing interest in the furry and cute mammals I might encounter.  I have felt like I was skimming the surface for a long time, without any roots in the wider wild world.  I suspect it's common enough.  We love birds for their ubiquitous-ness, their obvious presence everywhere, their variety and movement and behaviour.  Birds are the easiest entry point to an interest in the wildlife of Britain, but why do so many of us stop there and never really develop an interest in other aspects?

Why is it that I'm so drawn to birds as opposed to moths?  They both fly, they're both beautifully coloured and varied, they require a high base level of skill to enjoy with knowledge.  Maybe a large part of it for me is that birding was embedded in me at a young age, while the rest of the natural world wasn't as much of a focus.  I admire, but could not be like, the naturalists who are aware of their surroundings moment by moment, who can (and do) point out the plants, the bugs, the interactions, the importance of all the features of the wild landscape; my brain just doesn't work like that.  The question I have had in my mind this summer is, is it possible for me to expand my horizons as wide as a narrow slice of butterflies (and maybe the odd dragon)?  Does my bird fever allow me space to have a little butterfly ague on the side, or does it crowd out all other passions?  Can I learn anything from butterfly watching that might apply to birding, or is it just the obvious?  

What have I learned from my summer of butterflies?  Where is it different from birding?

My search for butterflies started in May when I found myself at Gait Barrows (again) after a largely sleepless night filled with stress.  I walked around my usual loop, not seeing a great deal in the way of birds, my mind really in other places.  There was no focus.  The calls of Spotted Flycatcher and Marsh Tit washed over me without getting the usual reaction; I didn't even spend time searching to see them.  What did bring me up short was a spiralling dog fight between two butterflies on the very edge of a sunny glade of trees on the top edge of the limestone pavement.  At the time I couldn't remember seeing such an invested battle between such small and delicate animals.  Something about them was different, and I decided to sit down and see them better.  I completely missed the older woman in a bright pink bucket hat appear beside me and say out loud, "There they are!  We're so lucky to have the Duke here, aren't we?"  I jumped a foot.  After my pulse returned to something approaching normal, I asked, "Duke of Burgundy?" because there had been a noticeboard and I can't walk past one without skimming it.  She explained that this was two male Dukes fighting over a glade edge territory.  My first unusual butterfly was one that was very hard to see, and I'd stumbled upon it by accident.  

I reflected that it wasn't the rarity or status of the butterfly that had captured my attention - I've seen a range of birds in 2026 that have fed the hunger for "rares".  It was a behaviour that I found interesting.  Why did the butterflies want the glade edge?  What's so important about that?  With birds I instinctively know why they're in the habitat they're occupying, most of the time.  I realised that I knew virtually nothing about butterflies.  Even the ones I can identify might as well have been wallpaper for all I knew of them and their secret lives.

So I bought some books.  I love a nature "quest", so I opted for Patrick Barkham's "The Butterfly Isles" and I picked up a beautiful fieldguide.  I read them both in two days, cover to cover, and then largely forgot all about butterflies in a funk of depression.  It was a chance comment by one of the incredibly knowledgeable guys who watch wildlife on the mosses that reignited my interest.  He mentioned that we have Purple Hairstreak butterflies on the moss and I was surprised.  I didn't expect that we had enough mature oak growth to support them, and then realised that I must have absorbed some of the knowledge from the books I'd read.  He gave me the general area and I headed there that same evening.  

I'm used to standing still and looking for birds in dense habitat, but in all honesty that paled in comparison to this.  I was looking for a shape the size a medium coin at the top of a 30 foot oak covered in leaves and they weren't going to make any noise.  Just how reliant I am on hearing to find birds gave me stark pause here.  I wasn't going to be able to disconnect my vision from the search and have a break, using my ears to stay alert.  Lesson one: I would have to be visually present every moment of my search.  Three hours in, slowly searching my fourth oak, I caught sight of an erratic silver-grey movement high up and across the front of a vertical branch.  No way I was getting my eyes back on it.  Binoculars up and looking, scanning as though for a bird I must have scanned over the Purple Hairstreak half a dozen times before I clocked it lift off and simply vanish.  Sometimes they seem to teleport, be in one place and then another with no coverage of the distance between.  Quantum movement aside, I was pretty sure I was onto the right animal.  Now, the hard part: using a camera set up optimised for birding, with a prime lens and no zoom capability, I was trying to get photos of the butterfly to finally confirm to myself I was right.  

In 90 minutes of swearing and almost in focus pictures I managed three or four that showed the distinctive white lines on the underwing.  Purple Hairstreak.  I was elated, and also a little shocked at how hard this was.  Nearly five hours for some poor photos of a species that most butterfly people regard as nice but nothing major.  

I should say here that almost none of the butterflies I've seen this summer are ones I've found myself.  Standing on the shoulders of patch birders is common in birding, but I would have been absolutely lost without the sightings pages of Butterfly Conservation.  Looking at this page I saw that the Large Heath (or it's alternate and better name, the Manchester Argus) was on the wing at Foulshaw Moss.  It's easy to persuade me to go to the area between Arnside and the South Lakes, so I drove an hour north and spent a morning seeing dozens of Manchester Argus.  I hope the reintroduction scheme on Astley Moss works; I need to see them again in order to get a picture in focus... The challenge here wasn't seeing the butterfly; rather it was trying to see them well enough to enjoy the pattern and colouration of a beautiful creature.  Birds are fairly predictable (within reason).  I know enough about their behaviour to know where they might land, where they might go if I lose them, which direction their flight would take them.  With butterflies, this instinct is largely useless.  They're so mobile, so small, and so easy to lose against the landscape that any attempt to pre-empt them with binoculars or camera is futile.  Lesson two: the logic of visual scanning in birding and butterflying is very different.

Having seen Lesser Emperor dragonfly at Brockholes and missed White-letter Hairstreak, I decided to follow advice from Butterfly Conservation and try for the stand of elm at Leftwich, a little patch of green between a housing estate and the A556.  I'm thankful for the lady who was there when I arrived, armed only with her mobile phone (while I was laden with binoculars and heavy camera).  She'd found the little triangle of grass and the mature elm behind it, and had found a male WLHS on a fern frond and it sat for a few minutes docile in the early morning while we took photos.  She was in a gentle competition with her twin brother to see the most species of butterflies in a year.  White-letter was her 34th.  I hope she wins.  She left and I kept walking, looking for more just because I wanted more after a 40 minute drive.  Seeing the butterfly within 3 minutes of arriving seemed a cheat, and I wanted to sharpen my skills.  Three despondent hours later, I had a sore neck from checking elms and seeing nothing but gatekeepers floating past on every breeze.  I was almost back at the car, and passing through the area where they'd been reported most frequently when I clocked a Holly Blue go past.  I wanted a photograph, so I chased it straight off the path and into a little patch of bare ground surrounded by privet hedge and Himalayan Balsam.  It was here, on the ground, crawling around on leaves 8 feet from me that I found five White-letter Hairstreaks.  Lesson three: you have to be in the landscape; you don't see so many butterflies from the path!  While in birding, we often stick to the paths because birds are obvious and mobile.  Butterflies can be concealed by single flowers, leaves, so your search will take you off the path sometimes.

I've based my butterfly adventures within an hour of home, which is limiting for me.  Most of the butterflies in the UK live in the lower third of England, preferring the climate and habitat there.  In the cold and wet north west (though not this year, with everything on fire in a heatwave) there is much less variety of butterfly.  However, the area around Arnside Knott and the mosses of the south Lakes is an outpost and the focus of the butterfly lodestone for us in the northwest.  I aimed north with the fanciful notion of picking up a fistful of fritillaries and the specialist butterflies of the north in one morning.  I had dreams of picking out High Brown from Dark Green Fritillary, while easily seeing Pearl-bordered and Small Pearl-bordered, chancing upon Wall Brown and Northern Brown Argus and returning home with glorious photos to show for my endeavour.  What seems like (and is) foolish naivety is tempered by some measure of success.  

I arrived at Whitbarrow, at White Scar, and immediately walked the wrong way.  The buddleia that the fritillaries visit (and the only time they're still at all) is mostly located just to the right and one level above the car park.  I walked left, scaled the limestone pavement and walked the quarry to the top.  On the way I picked out Small Tortoiseshell, Peacocks and Red Admirals by the dozens. Comma and Speckled Wood in the glades on the slopes, Painted Lady, Ringlet, Meadow Brown whipped past me.  Large White, Green-veined White, Common and Holly Blue, Small White (as pointed out by an experienced butterflyer) while Small Heath sat and took minerals from the mud of a dried up stream and Grayling suddenly were everywhere, basking on limestone.  At least three Hummingbird Hawkmoths were buzzing round the flowers and then suddenly there was a big, confident, powerful orange butterfly.  A fritillary!  Such an appropriate name - flitting, easily frit (Lancashire for scared), frantic and active, never away from the dogfights of Red Admirals and feisty Small Tortoiseshells, the only time the fritillaries ever stopped was when they located a buddleia frond of their own, where they could eat in peace.  I fired off a dozen over exposed shots.  Surely I hadn't found High Brown Fritillary already?  I was excited, but had to wait for it to land again and get my settings right.  Three more pictures.  Clear underwing.  Dark Green.  I was still elated; I'd never seen one of these before.  

Another hour watching the buddleia and four more fritillaries visit.  All Dark Green.  I decided to walk the woodland glades and see if I could find the Pearly versions, and just as I was about to leave I saw one more orange butterfly and fired off a few shots.  I didn't even check them, just assumed it would be Dark Green and walked away.  Half an hour later when I checked through the photos and saw the characteristic red/brown colour between the spots on the underwing I said out loud, "bloody hell, I had a High Brown!".  I couldn't believe it.  I couldn't count that - I wasn't even aware of seeing it.  I huffed and puffed back to the buddleia and sat down to wait.  Happily two High Browns reappeared and I had a content half an hour watching them feed and dash.  Lesson four: pay attention, butterflies don't always give you a second chance to see them.

A short drive and back to Gait Barrows, where I had the most fruitless walk of my life, bar two important standouts.  I looped around the coppiced areas, ducked under yews, walked the limestone and staked out patches of wildflowers.  I checked glade edges, walked through habitat and I could not stamp up a single Pearl-bordered or Small Pearl-bordered.  I don't know if I got the flight times wrong, or the time of day wrong, or missed a key habitat, but by the time I sat down on a limestone rock in the centre of the reserve I was dehydrated, worn out, and ready to give up.  Just then, a Clouded Yellow floated past me.  It was the 21st species of the day, I worked out after including the Skipper species other (better) butterfly finders had pointed out to me today, and the Small Copper I'd found and a woman who might have been 120 years old had identified.  Hope a little restored, I plodded the rest of the way but my heart was no longer in it.  I'd given up, and was hoping to get to Warton Crag for Northern Brown Argus (I went but failed to see them).  I hobbled as quickly as I could the rest of the way, and disturbed a large orange butterfly in a clearing on the path.  Snatching a series of rubbish photos I couldn't work out what I was looking at.  It wasn't Dark Green or High Brown.  It didn't look like either Pearl-bordered.  I was drawing a blank.  I ticked through other butterflies it could be and was laughing at myself for thinking of Glanville's Fritillary (which is only found FAR to the south), Marsh Fritillary (only found FAR to the north and looks nothing like this) when I wondered if it could be Silver-washed.  A tense half hour with field guide and back of camera shot and I had tentatively convinced myself it was Silver-washed, a butterfly so far off my radar for the area that I'd forgotten they existed.  Lesson five: be thorough.  Know what you might see, so you can identify what you do see.

Butterflies are great to watch, beautiful, full of character and idiosyncrasies.  They're a simple group to get to grips with in one way, with there only being about 60 species in the UK. The big lesson I'm learning is that they add to my enjoyment of birds, with some cross over in terms of skill and they extend my senses in ways that I hadn't expected forcing me to think in different ways.  I don't think they'll ever replace birding for me, and replace might be the wrong word; perhaps it's better to say they won't ever be my main focus, but for this one glorious summer (and maybe more in the future), they're a welcome addition to the birding fever.