The Long Weekend.

 It was an Easter weekend of contemplation, sorrow, reflection and fortunately lots of wonderful wildlife.

Good Friday marked the year since I lost Penny and was a day I was dreading to be honest, but with the sun shining and light winds I was able to get out on the South Downs and see some delights to take my mind off things.

Before I left home I had my first Holly Blue of the year in the garden, and near the beginning of my walk I also had my first Wall Brown and Grizzled Skipper. I wasn't too worried about taking photographs as it was just so good to be out of the house and seeing these brilliant butterflies. However, I have taken more photos as the weekend progressed. This included a near perfect male Wall Brown this morning that somehow forgot that his species just do not sit still for photography!!

Male Wall Brown.

One of the highlights of the walk was finding that one of my Small Eggar egg clusters had started to hatch and this enabled me to photograph something that has almost certainly not been photographed in Sussex before as the young larvae crawled over the hairy egg cluster. I also saw 2 Vapourer Moth egg clusters also hatch out and today I found a batch of Lackey larvae, so it certainly seems to be a baby boom going on.

Small Eggar newly hatched 15/4/2022.

Small Eggar larvae already growing. 18/4/2022.

Lackey larvae.

On the subject of larva I did come across a few Marbled White larvae over the past few days and this is one I managed to photograph on Monday.

Marbled White larva.

Other delights over the weekend was finding a much better condition Green Hairstreak. It didn't give me many opportunities but a couple of photos were reasonable.

Green Hairstreak.

There is an area of my patch that I felt could possibly hold the Nationally scarce Barred Tooth-striped moth. There are a few colonies in the area, and although I have searched for this moth a few times I have always been unsuccessful until yesterday when I found 4 of these moths. Yet another rarity now on my patch.

Barred Tooth-striped.

Today I saw my first Dingy Skipper of 2022 and this species takes me to 15 butterfly species for the year. So although it was a really sad long weekend nature came to the rescue yet again!!