While attending a one-day course run by Suffolk Wildlife Trust on their spotting and identification, it became apparent that there were few historical records of the number and types of butterflies in the area of Suffolk around Laxfield. After discussing this with the course organiser, we suddenly found ourselves appointed official Butterfly Recorders tasked with the job of filling in the "black hole" in the data for central Suffolk! This required us to observe our local lepidoptera more closely in order to count and classify them so we could send in our information to the central co-ordinator. Close observation results in a deeper appreciation of the beauty and variety of nature, which naturally leads on to wishing to capture it "on film" (well - on a memory chip these days!).
We thus set about trying to acquire images of all the different species of butterfly we have recorded visiting Wash Meadow (27 so far, 26 of which have been caught on camera), showing male and female if they are different and including views of both the upper and lower wing-surfaces plus any unusual variations we might come across. This has not proved to be an easy task! Even if they settle in a convenient place and for sufficient time that you can to get close enough to see them properly and find them with the limited field-of-view of a long lens, and then get them in focus, they will probably fly away just as you press the shutter button! And all this does assume you've got the camera with you in the first place, of course. The project is thus something of a "work in progress", beginning in 2015. Not all the species we have seen have been fully documented yet, but hopefully a full set of "definitive images" will eventually be captured.
The links below take you to pages displaying the picture galleries achieved so far, each of which includes descriptive text accompanying the images. The red borders indicate those pages which have had recent updates.
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