Everything’s happening! The first piece of news is that yesterday I saw 30 Ringlets in one field in Glencairn Park, near my house in Belfast! That’s my 15th butterfly species – and I thought I’d caught up with Richella Duggan (www.butterflyblog2011.com) until I looked today and saw she’d grabbed 4 more species!
In other news, I have about 4 caterpillar projects going on at the minute, some of which I mentioned in a previous entry:
- My two Garden Tiger caterpillars (Ferrari and Maclaren) are still gorging themselves on dandelion leaves…
- My Ruby Tiger (Ron) pupated on Wednesday, 3 days after spinning the cocoon…
- My Cinnabar eggs have all hatched this morning!!! There’s at least 20 of them – I won’t be alble to count them properly until they’ve grown a bit as they’re so tiny that I can’t handle them…
- And on top of all that there’s an egg on my apple sapling (Seth) that looks about to hatch. The brown head of the caterpillar is visible through the eggshell, so it could well be Diurnea fagella, like the pupa I overwintered recently.
And today (or tomorrow) I’m off to Murlough to try and find a Common Blue and a Meadow Brown and with an extreme amount of good fortune, our regular migrants The Admiral And Lady. My dad (God bless him) got me a new camera since my old one packed in, so I’ll be trying it out this weekend.
I’ve got some BEAUTIFUL photos of the Cinnabar eggs so I’ll be updating this blog as soon as I can get them on the computer.
2011 BUTTERFLIES: 15
UPDATE: Foties!!!!
Species study 2, project B: Ruby Tiger (Phragmatobia fuliginosa)
Species study 5, project B: Garden Tiger (Arctia caja)
Species study 15, project A: Cinnabar (Tyria jacobaeae)
The Caterpillar 
Hi Samuel – I’m looking forward to seeing photos taken with your new camera of your various caterpillar projects. Are you on facebook? I sometimes upload photos to the Facebook pages of the Irish Butterly Monitoring Scheme, Dragonfly Ireland and Ireland’s Wildlife. There’s a nice communitiy of amateur naturalists out there all sharing photos and info. Birdwatch Ireland’s Facebook page is also great. Get those Cinnabar egg photos up!
Cinnabar eggies coming up!
No, I don’t have Facebook as I know for a lot of my friends it’s a serious distraction from schoolwork – but then it’s summer so I might join. The amateur naturalist community out there sounds exciting.
Thanks for all your encouragement!!!
You are absolutely right – it’s a HUGE life-swallowing distraction if you are not careful. Be warned!
It seems you kill more than you release. Why don’t you leave the caterpillars and eggs in the wild where they belong. My children always ask if they can keep insects and the obvious answer is no, look but put them back where you found them. Nature is a gift for everyone, stop putting it in jars and killing it please.
I agree. Nature is an amazing gift. But if we’re going to preserve that gift for future generations then we need to understand it. For many of us that starts with rearing insects.