Little devils

There are only a few days left of the summer holidays, so I took the kids for a walk around Yoesden. It's always a brilliant place to see butterflies and they love hunting around for bugs, but now is also the perfect time to see the devil's-bit scabious that flowers in a part of the reserve known as the hole in the woods.  A carpet of purple pincushions, covered in bees and butterflies, is such an amazing sight!

I took two cameras with me and almost as soon as we arrived the kids took one each, leaving me with no camera! Bug Mad Girl headed off to try and get pictures of the little blue butterflies that were all over the slope.

Using stealth tactics to creep up on the butterflies

There were definitely Adonis blues still flying, but many were very old and tattered, so it was hard to tell them apart from the common blues. She got some nice photos, but often seemed to have trouble with a stray blade of grass in the way (I know that problem well!)

Male adonis blue

Female Adonis blue

There were lots of other butterflies flying, including small tortoiseshells, speckled woods, commas, small heaths, red admirals and a beautiful, newly emerged brimstone. She got a lovely photograph of a male brimstone on a devil's-bit scabious flower.

She also took this photo of a bee with its head stuck into a gentian flower.

Her little brother took my other camera and took several hundred out of focus photos of everything, including his hand, the sky, grass, butterflies etc. Landscapes seem to be his thing though and he took a nice photo of the view from the top of the slope.

I showed him how to get the camera in focus and he managed to photograph a comma on some blackberries, which he took by balancing the camera on a fence post to keep it steady.

I finally wrestled one of the cameras off the kids and took some photos myself. The devil's-bit scabious was as wonderful as I'd hoped and I even found some white flowers, which seems quite unusual.

A single flower is beautiful, but the expression "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" definitely applies here and the flowers are most spectacular when viewed en masse (especially with a couple of bug hunters buried in the middle of them!).

I love that they both seem keen to take some photos, but I'm really going to have to make sure we all have a camera each!