Butterflywatch: bumper summer looks set to continue

There are plenty of large whites and red admirals still around - and some unexpected new arrivals

Lots of people have commented on all the butterflies this summer and it certainly feels like a return to the good old days of, say, 1995, rather than recent years when late-summer flowers were depressingly bereft of butterflies.

The Big Butterfly Count results support these perceptions with sightings of 1.1m of the most common five species combined, compared with 660,000 in 2018.