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, three came along at once.A green-veined white, Pieris napi, was the first to appear, fluttering down to examine the mock orange flowers. This is probably the most widespread of the ‘cabbage’ whites, since it occurs commonly throughout the British Isles

, as a quilt of whiteness. But the deepening gloom as the sun goes down is not as empty as it might first appear. There are things out, but they are moving slowly and cautiously.A pair of magpies cough their way through the Leyland cypress a few doors

A short while ago I was driving past Peckham Rye, when my eye was caught by a series of white halos on the grass under some of the trees. It looked as if several small snow storms had targeted some of the larger and more handsome specimens across

My 2010 garden tally of butterfly species is now up to six. We've had single visits from large white, comma, peacock and small tortoiseshell. They obviously didn't find much of interest in my garden, so dipped down, bustled about one circuit

the better photographs elsewhere on the web, the bug is much larger than the common British brown leafbug, Coreus marginatus, which reaches only 15mm, it has a distinctive white zig-zag mark across its middle and, with its broad hind legs, it looks as if it

and dropped to the floor. And yesterday the cats brought in a huge black and grey moth - the old lady, Mormo maura - which fluttered around the kitchen ceiling until rescued.Wednesday also brought the first large cabbage white butterfly of the year. I don

savoury plant in the beds, it also grows very well in cracks in the old concrete path.Later, while I'm admiring the constant nectaring business, I see there are several species. The red-tailed, Bombus lapidarius, is there in numbers, as too is the white

was solved a couple of days later when I watched a bird delicately pick bright red berries from an ornamental shrub down in Purley. I made a few notes: grey head, dark cheek patch, reddish brown wings, pale grey breast, brownish bib, white side flecks, pale

wing-tip to wing-tip is striped orange and white and quite pretty under a lens.It had been spreading across Europe from its first discovery in Macedonia in the middle of the 20th century and arrived in the UK in Wimbledon in 2002. I first noticed

everywhere. A few years ago I cleared out the small window boxes of the dead and dying plants that were clearly not doing very well. All I found, instead of roots, were lots of these small (7-8mm) creamy white maggots — vine weevil grubs.The adult weevils