This year, the butterflies have still been there, although it hasn't always been easy to spend time with them.  The monitoring season begins at the start of April, just as we were instructed to lockdown, and only allowed out for exercise.  Well, it so happened that once a week my exercise involved walking the same route through the Latchmore valley, and I took my recording sheet and camera with me.  In the early weeks of Spring we were only supposed to be out for an hour, but I ignored that, and carried on.  Over the year, I counted 2,760 butterflies of 23 different species, the second highest total overall, and 123 fewer than in 2019.  

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The sunny start to Summer brought out record numbers of Silver-studded Blue (913), and everything seemed to be emerging a good fortnight earlier than usual.  After last year's record overall total, this year couldn't keep up the quantities, and there were alarming declines in some species, most notably Meadow Brown (129 seen, down from 220 in 2019) and Speckled Wood (only 28 seen, the lowest annual total so far, and down from 160 in 2018).  The Summer stopped dramatically with a terrific late August storm, and numbers in September were poor.  Even so, the final week produced a rare Clouded Yellow, the second of the year, and the third in all, after a gap of more than five years.  There were no new species this year.