Today has been a miserable wet day (the perfect excuse for not weeding!), but it’s given me the chance to sort through some of the photos we took doing a couple of Big Butterfly Counts out and about yesterday. After a cloudy start, the sun did eventually shine down on the righteous and we saw loads of butterflies. We even managed to spot the only two moths included in The Count – the resident Six Spot Burnett and the migrant Silver Y. Both species fly by day and are easy to identify – the Burnett with 6 distinctive red spots on a black background and the Silver Y with a white mark on its wings that’s supposed to look like the letter Y (although unless you have scruffy handwriting like mine, this may not be so obvious).

We also saw two of my favourite butterflies; the Marbled White and the Small Copper. Unless your garden has sweeping grasslands, you are unlikely to get these at home, but they’re worth looking out for in the countryside. Last year we spent ages traipsing about looking for our first glimpse of a Marbled White; this year we’ve found a colony of them on a roadside about 5 minutes from home!