The weather's now doing what we least want it to do...
This means that the start of the 2025 Emperor season is being delayed.
My prediction is that an early male will be seen at Knepp at 2.30pm on June 11th, but that's only because I'm giving a poetry reading in Marlborough then, and we know that some larvae pupated before the weather deteriorated in late May.
Recent weather deems it unlikely that the butterfly will start properly before June 16th at 'early' sites, and June 20th - 21st elsewhere.
This is proving to be a difficult season to predict.
Recent night forays on my patch, using UV torches to detect flourescing larvae and pupae, have been decidedly disappointing - a lot of final instar larvae appear to have gone AWOL, I don't know why... They may have gone walkabout.
However, Neil Hulme & Kat Dahl 'torched' nine larvae and pupae in under an hour at Knepp late last week, suggesting a potentially massive emergence there - weather permitting.
Here's a pupating larva
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