Beguiled by blues
Butterfly expert Alan Sumnall offers a thorough guide to one of our most enchanting groups of butterflies – the blues.
Butterfly expert Alan Sumnall offers a thorough guide to one of our most enchanting groups of butterflies – the blues.
One of the UK’s rarest marine species, this giant of the rocky shore is a very special fish.
Considered Britain's most threatened butterfly, the high brown fritillary can be only be found in a few areas of England and Wales.
The Marsh helleborine is a beautiful orchid of fens, wet grassland and dune slacks. Growing in profusion in places, look for reddish stems and white-and-pink flowers.
The green hairstreak is the UK's only green butterfly. Look out for the vibrant, metallic sheen of the undersides of its wings on grassland and moorland, and along woodland rides.
Often found basking on tall grasses, or buzzing between stems, the small skipper is a small, orange butterfly. It prefers rough grassland, verges and woodland edges.
This beautiful orange and brown butterfly is now a rare sight in the UK
Nudibranchs, also known as sea slugs, are much like their land-based relatives that you may spot in your garden. But, unlike your regular garden slug, the nudibranch can incorporate the stinging…
A tall orchid of woodland and scrub, the broad-leaved helleborine has greenish, purple-tinged flowers that look a little 'drooping'. Strongly veined, oval leaves spiral around its stem…
Despite its name, the large blue is a fairly small butterfly, but the largest of our blues. It was declared extinct in 1979, but reintroduced in the 1980s and now survives in southern England.
Buddleia is a familiar shrub, well-known for its attractiveness to butterflies. It is actually an introduced species, however, that has become naturalised on waste ground, railway cuttings and in…
The white-letter hairstreak gets its name from the white lines that form a 'W' shape on its underside. It is an elusive butterfly, spending much of its time in the treetops.