The weather forecast seemed perfect for looking for Purple Emperors this morning so I headed over to Bernwood Forest which seems the best local site for finding them. Several have been seen this week so I made the hour's trip over there and arrived at 9 20. The sun was just beginning to break through the clouds as I arrived in the car park which had a few spaces left. As I got out of my car and opened the boot, the occupant of the next car did the same, and took out his insect repellant spray as I did too!!
He was obviously looking for butterflies too, and engaging in conversation with him, he told me he had had a Purple emperor land on his camera earlier in the week. When he told me that, I immediately recognised him as the author of a blog/website which I regularly refer to as he records all his bird, butterfly and dragonfly sightings daily.
We both headed for the main track which is favoured by the PEs and gazed up in the treetops. After a while I thought I saw a large dark butterfly flying around the top but as it didn't settle in sight I couldn't positively identify it. A smaller species was also flying about which I took to be a purple hairstreak but it didn't come lower.
As we were both looking, a lady who we'd spoken to earlier came rushing back up the track towards us and said she'd thought she'd found one but, not being an expert, wanted someone to help her identify it. She said it was sitting down in the grass which seemed unusual but we followed her onto another narrow path and were shown it, it was in fact a purple emperor! It wasn't moving that much and we wondered if it was freshly emerged. My earlier companion encouraged it onto his hand for us to take photos as it had been partly concealed by grass stems. He tried to transfer it to my finger so he could get a photo but the butterfly evidently decided it was time to fly off!
Returning to the main track I saw a couple more purple emperors flying high up but then we saw a couple of people who said they'd found a white admiral, not so common in this wood. We located it in on some leaves then it flew down to the ground.. not a white admiral but another purple emperor! It proceeded to feed on some dog poo before flying around us several times and landing on.... the dog poo bin!! It did this several times, each time landing on the bin, then eventually on the ground in front of it where it posed for us for several minutes before flying back into the trees,
At this point I decided I would return to the car as I wanted to fit in a trip to the nature reserve at Aston Rowant, twenty minutes away to look for dark green hairstreaks which are said to be abundant there at the moment. Once I had parked there I decided to take the higher route along the top of the embankment and I soon found what I was looking for, together with large numbers of marbled whites, also meadow browns, skippers and small heaths. The dark green fritillaries were not settling very often, but eventually I managed to find one fairly close at hand for a couple of record shots.
It has been a successful couple of days butterfly spotting; my next challenge will be the white letter hairstreak but there have been few reports so far.
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