16 WILD BIRDS 



rather quickly and very insignificantly from perching 

 spot to perching spot among the bugle flowers ; 

 and like all the other English butterflies I have 

 noticed, gets its back to the sun and falls into the 

 trance of warmth. 



It would be idle to point out the grizzled skipper 

 to any one who had not an eye and fancy for the 

 very small and sober-coloured things in Nature 

 he will never notice it again. But the sun brings 

 out a large hatch of butterflies which, seen in repose 

 for a few seconds, must appeal to any one who cares 

 for what is very lovely in Nature. It brings out 

 the orange-tip butterflies in large numbers in the 

 fields as well as the hazel and oak coppices, and it 

 brings out the two pearl-bordered fritillaries. 



These fritillaries appeared so suddenly, I think 

 they must have hatched by thousands in a single 

 hour one afternoon. At about two or three o'clock 

 I found myself in the brown of them. The tint 

 of the wings is, in neither of these woodland butter- 

 flies, so deep, so red-brown, as in the Duke of Bur- 

 gundy fritillary ; but there is much more of it, and 

 on the wings of some of the larger pearl-bordered 

 fritillaries it is bright as brown can be. It may 

 have been a mistake to name them the pearl-bordered 

 and the small pearl-bordered fritillaries, because 

 between the smaller specimens of the first and the 

 ordinary ones of the second there is virtually no 

 difference in size ; and at most the difference in size 

 between the two species is barely measurable by the 

 eye. We know them apart only through long 



