On a sunny walk in the wood on Monday morning I saw what I thought was a pair of White Admiral butterflies flitting about on the Bunny Walk. I took a good photo of one and then noticed that the other was slightly different as it had ‘eyes’ on its rear wings so managed to get a rather poor photo to examine more closely. After consulting a friend who is a butterfly expert he has confirmed that it is a female Purple Emperor (not so purple as its male counterpart), which is a relatively rare species. The fact that I saw it on a dog poo reinforces its identity as I understand that they generally live high in the treetops but descend to feed avoiding flowers preferring rotting animal corpses, faeces or mud puddles! Maybe this is the one positive aspect of the dog poo!! It’s great to know there are Purple Emperors in our lovely local wood!.
