This female orange tip butterfly was just yards away from the male featured in a post yesterday. For me, proximity to one or more males is the easy way of telling the female from one of the whites.
I think that the green tinge shown on the underwing here is because it is being lit by light reflected off the leaves – the darker green pattern normally shows against a white background.
Red (or perhaps more accurately pink) dead nettle flowering, for comparison with the white dead nettle which featured the day before yesterday.
Like them, this one was growing by the verge of one of the quiet lanes between Wolverhampton and Bridgnorth.
Orange tip butterflies are one of the commoner hedgerow butterflies around April / May, when their preferred food plant, jack by the hedge, is heading for the flowering season.
Only the males have the distinctive orange tip to the wing.
Umbellifer on the edge of Church Pool at Badger when its floret was just about to open.
Swan sailing on the West Park lake. Its wings are raised, and the neck held back against the body: a threat posture.
Dead nettles are plants with a general shape and leaves which look rather similar to nettles. But they aren’t related, and don’t sting – that’s why they’re “dead”.
Their flowers always come in a contrasting colour to the rest of the plant, unlike true nettles. Some are red, some, like these, white.