Painted Lady (photograph by Jim Asher, courtesy of Butterfly Conservation)
Do you have a garden? Or have you been walking in one of the parks recently? If so you may well have seen a Painted Lady, or indeed several of these large and colourful butterflies.
They are abundant at the moment and there seem to be more every day. I saw seven on one bush on Saturday.
The Painted Lady is a migrant, and generally the ones we see have arrived from North Africa and stay for the summer. They breed here and there may be two broods, the last of which will fly back to Africa in late summer. What a journey for such a small creature! This year’s immigration is one of the most numerous on record, so your chances of seeing a Painted Lady are good.
Our butterflies are a great treasure and many are sadly in danger. But we can all help preserve them, by offering them the right plants to breed and feed on. And you should see not only Painted Ladies at the moment, but also the Small White, Large White, Speckled Wood and Holly Blue butterflies and perhaps others. Keep your eyes open!
And of course there are Painted Ladies in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. But these don’t fly.
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2 Comments
Thank you for your confirmation that our Painted Ladies I have seen a lot of this year fly from Africa ! Hardly believable.
Let me know when you have spotted a Camberwell Beauty of the winged kind !
Lx
I have seen a Camberwell Beauty twice, once in Poland, and once in
Hungary. I remember both encounters vividly. I record all my sightings
and have two volumes of records.