Happy second Friday in June my friends,  

Here’s a little butterfly centred post fluttering its way to you. You might remember that a couple of months ago I posted about rescuing some orange tip butterfly pupae? 

Well recently I’ve been caring for 9 Small tortoiseshell caterpillars, which pupated about ten days ago! It was so exciting. I’ve raised these butterflies before, my newly improved butterfly house involves serval pop-up mesh enclosures and many different types of butterfly friendly plants to simulate the outside world – in an attempt to give them a better start in life.

Butterflies in the UK are declining so quickly that I want to be able to save as many of them as I can to help boost the local populations.

I love it when they ‘colour up’ and you can see the suggestion of wing patterns through the shell.

It took exactly a week for the first one to emerge followed quickly by another 6 of its brothers and sisters in the same day. I missed every single one!! They were a particularly pretty batch of butterflies and are all quite large for Small Torts. A silly thing I noticed was that the Orange tips I released back in April never really left the garden as there’s a lot of Lady’s smock growing, so I’m hoping that if I release these chaps into my Wildspace I’m creating they might stick around long enough to lay eggs on the nettles that I’ve included in the flower bed.

Fun fact – Small tortoiseshell butterflies are scientifically called Aglais urticae and are a medium/large sized butterfly with a wing span of up to 5.5cm, and as far I know there is no way to tell male from female unless you catch it laying eggs.

Its super exciting that all nine of them emerged and I ended up as their temporary guardian, although one emerged and got its chrysalis stuck on its wing and ended up quite deformed (sadly he/she died within 24 hours) but I gave the others a slice of orange to pep them up before releasing them into the big wild world.

Its an amazing feeling to unzip the house and watch them flutter away – although a few wanted to stay on the orange!

They’re just so pretty!!

They even came back later in the day to feed on the thistles, I hope they like what I’ve done with the garden!!

It makes me so happy that I rescued these little creatures from the hazards of the insect world and their apex predators (being the birds) and have been able to give them a safe pace to thrive! 

Sadly out of about every 400 butterfly eggs, only 8 or so live to become adult butterflies. So to have managed 8 out of 9 is a pretty good result.

Which hopefully will help our declining butterfly numbers a little bit. My new goal in life is to rescue, raise and release caterpillars I find in the garden – to be clear though I’m only raising the ones I can identify as eggs/larvae as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species.

Something that was particularly lovely was the next day I saw one sunbathing in the grass (at least I like to think it was one of them anyway!). It puts my current official tally of butterflies raised and released to 12!!

So that’s it for this week…I really hope you enjoyed a little slice of fluttery goodness! I feel super privileged to have been able to raise and protect these chaps. Ever watched the life cycle of a butterfly? As always thank you so much for reading this post and have a great weekend!

P.s the photos were taken with my Nikon camera and iPhone.