A tale of moths and men.
It was my great-niece Connie who spotted it - a Red Admiral strangely poised in mid-air, like a kestrel but without its wings moving. Upside-down as well. We crept up, looked more closely and saw what we had feared: it had been trapped by a spider in a large but scarcely visible web.
I have had plenty of excellent moth surprises since we moved from Leeds in 2013 and I re-lit the lamp to shine just north of Oxford. New hawk moths, abundant middle-range species and the glorious arrival of the Clifden Nonpareil. But I never expected the same thing to happen in the very much smaller world of UK butterflies.