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mad turns and wild spirals it landed at breakneck speed in a neighbouring tree.'Butterfly' he announced. The division between butterflies and moths is wholly artificial so I couldn't fault his identification: a beautiful scale-winged creature flying

, can spread to the rest of the fence, when one of the girls, who was helping by playing on the step ladder, pointed out what she thought was a butterfly flying by. It landed on the decorative painted brickwork over the front door, completely

My father, from whom I get my interest in wildlife, often bemoans the fact that there is nothing left in the countryside these days. He fondly remembers fields awash with butterflies and heavens full of skylarks. But he's never one bit surprised

' thoracic legs near the head, and lacks the fat gripping prolegs and claspers towards the tail end, which moth and butterfly caterpillars use to grip the leaf.Despite textbook assurances that the insect is quite common and widespread, this is only the first

it does not flit from flower to flower like a butterfly. But it flies readily if disturbed from its not-very-camouflaged position on a leaf, wall, fence, window, car, no-parking sign, bollard or brightly coloured plastic bin full of winter salt/grit mix

easily have been in part of the Weald. But the wildlife reflected its slightly more southerly location, the Departement Mayenne between Normandy and the Loire.There were plenty of painted lady and clouded yellow butterflies, the speckled woods were

, tingling limbs, nausea and vomiting if combined with alcohol, even after two or three days. I gave up alcohol a couple of years ago, and I'd try them now, but I've not seen the ink caps recently.The last few Septembers have been glorious for butterflies

, not much helped by examination of dictionaries or spell-checkers. Originally there were hover-flies, snipe-flies, house-flies and blow-flies, which were all flies, and dragonflies and butterflies which were not. Now the hoverfly people use one word along

size, and are perhaps even more artificial than any distinctions between moth and butterfly.One of my favourites is the twenty-plume moth, Alucita hexadactyla (pictured above). Although in a different family from the other plumes, it has the same

Friday, Saturday and Sunday just past were fabulous, and as the sun burned down it was a thrill to see so many insects still about. A very late speckled wood butterfly was fluttering about the allotment, along with a last few large whites. A huge