What Are the Chances?

The hot weather over the weekend reduced me to the usual mental and physical torpor. Though the Outer Nige was intermittently active in the world - even labouring heroically in the garden - the Inner Nige might be best imaged as a cartoon Mexican, dozing under his sombrero (Mexico, says Kinky Friedman, is the country to which Jesus said, Do nothing till I come back). However, both Inner and Outer Nige came briefly to life when I went walking in the Surrey Hills on the lookout for butterflies. Reader, I must tell you that, a week almost to the hour after my Derbyshire Dingy Skipper, I saw another one, similarly abask, though in far warmer sun. Had you been present and carrying a feather, you could have knocked me down with it. What's more, I saw not one but two Green Hairstreaks. One was flying fast and eluded me, though there was no mistaking that flash of green. The second was more obliging, settling on a nondescript flower bud on a sunny bank and treating me to a long close-up view of those shimmering emerald-green underwings, delicately lined in reddish brown, with a tiny tail to the hindwing. From the way it was methodically moving about the flowerbud I surmised it was probably laying eggs - she, then, and a most beautiful she... I had been hoping that I might see an Adonis Blue, but I had to be content with large numbers of Common Blues - what am I saying? The Common Blue is a most beautiful butterfly, and would itself fully deserve the name Adonis if its astonishing turquoise-winged relative didn't exist. The wings of the male Common Blue are precisely and perfectly the blue of a sunny early summer sky, and there's even a splash of blue on the beaded underwing, as if the colour was so intense it had soaked through. That's a Common Blue in the picture. On this walk I also saw - No, that's enough butterflies for one post - time to get back under the sombrero...