We moved to this house in the Scottish Borders at the start of 2020 and since then I have been mostly working from home. During my lunch hours I tend to take the dogs for a walk around more or less the same route and I keep a note of the butterflies I see. I then keep a record of the highest number of each species I see each week. So, I now have four years' worth of butterfly records to compare. Each year the weather has been quite different and that has had an impact on butterfly numbers.  The weather was not great in 2023 with a lot of easterly winds. Spring started quite late but dry ..read more

Continuing on from my previous post.. The first Small Heath was seen on the 17th May. They weren't seen in high numbers in 2023, possibly because not as many people were recording along the coast where they are most commonly seen. Apparently, there are two generations a year, but it is difficult to separate the generations because they overlap and vary according to each site along the coast and in the hills. 2023 could certainly not be described as a Painted Lady year. I only received 46 records and it was the first year, since I started recording butterflies in the 1990s that I didn't see o ..read more

Just to update my previous post. The Comma chrysalis that I found on the outside of my study window emerged on the 11th October. It had been lovely and sunny, but only 10 degrees Celsius and by the time it had fully unfurled its wings and dried out the sun was no longer shining on it. Eventually, it turned head down and settled down for the night roosting on its chrysalis. That night the temperature dipped to 1 degree Celsius and we had our first frost of the year, but luckily it was sunny again the next day. The sun was low in the sky and it took until 10.30 before the sun reached the Com ..read more

The number of Commas I have seen here has been increasing year on year. This year I haven't seen quite as many as I did last year, but it seems there may be more to come! On 21 July I was distracted again, when I was working in my study, by a Comma butterfly flitting about on the nettles outside my window. I realised it was laying eggs, so made a mental note of where I had seen it and at lunchtime I checked out a particular nettle stem. There I found an egg in the centre of the underside of a leaf. I picked the stem and kept it in a jar of water next to my desk to watch it develop. On the ..read more

I am lucky enough to have a large floor-to-ceiling window in my study, which overlooks a weedy area of our woodland. I am often distracted from my work by a butterfly fluttering past and on quite a few occasions I have seen butterflies laying eggs there. On the 1st July I spied a Red Admiral flitting about from nettle to nettle. I made a mental note of one nettle where it had landed and sure enough, when I looked later there was an egg. I picked the nettle and popped it in a jar of water. The hole in the lid was only just large enough for the stem to fit through, so that the caterpillar can ..read more

I have mentioned the Holly Blue in many of my annual round-ups, but think it deserves a post of its own! Since I started collating the butterfly records for East Lothian in 2007 there has been the odd record each year of a Holly Blue. When I was working as a Countryside Ranger in the late ‘90s there was an established colony of Holly Blues on the western boundary of East Lothian at Newhailes and Brunstane. They were more or less unheard of anywhere else in Scotland at the time and there was a bit of suspicion about how they had arrived there. Despite the knowledge that they were regularly se ..read more

The pictures on this post were all taken with my phone, so apologies for a little fuzziness! Last year, much to my wife’s annoyance, I found a number of Small White caterpillars feeding on some Rocket plants that she was growing. As they grew larger and started to destroy the plant, I put the pot in a mesh butterfly cage and fed the caterpillars with cauliflower leaves. The caterpillars grew quickly and started forming chrysalises around the cage and under the rim of the plant pot saucer. A couple of days before they form a chrysalis they chose a spot and weave a small silk pad. They then ..read more

We had a week’s break in Tenerife at the start of June. It wasn’t planned with butterflies in mind, but more of a week’s relaxation in the sun. We stayed at a lovely hotel in Costa Adeje, which was kept immaculately clean. Sadly, that meant that there was very little biodiversity and I only counted ten different creatures there in the seven days! Costa Adeje is a bit of an urban sprawl in a very dry part of the island, so there weren’t many opportunities locally to wander off to look for butterflies. I went for a longer-than-expected walk on the first day to locate the car hire office and saw ..read more

I had a week off work this week, so on Tuesdays I nipped over to the Berwickshire coast to look for Small Blue butterflies. There are a few small colonies of these lovely little butterflies along the coastal slopes, where their food plant, Kidney Vetch, grows. I visited a little earlier in the year than I have done previously, so there were fewer butterflies around, but I was delighted to find a few Small Blues all in lovely condition. The Kidney Vetch wasn't very apparent this year and I assume it will grow quite quickly and come into flower, to provide somewhere for the butterflies to la ..read more

 Continued from my previous post: I received a record of a Clouded Yellow just outside Haddington on 9th August. These are rare migrants in Scotland, but more commonly seen in the south of England. The exciting news was that in August Purple Hairstreaks were seen at Dunglass Dean and Woodhall Dean. These are interesting little butterflies that usually fly high up in Oak trees and they tend to fly in the early evening, rather than earlier in the day. This behaviour may explain why the butterflies haven't been recorded previously in East Lothian, although a lot of effort has been put into s ..read more