I found a little more time one afternoon to get back to the the Poldens in search of the species I hadn't picked up from the SOS post here.  In contrast to my last outing which started cloudy and ended sunny, the weather pattern was reversed.  This allowed me to firm up on my earlier observation, obvious when you think about it, that butterflies are much more active when the sun is out.  Nowhere was this solar warming behaviour more obvious than in Coombe Hill Wood where large silver-washed fritillaries

flitted about on brambles and occasionally sought out a sunny spot to recharge their batteries before returning to the hunt for nectar.  On my way back through the wood when the sun was hidden, I saw no butterflies at all.

Once out of the wood I set off across a field of short grass on the edge of the chalk escarpment towards the Hood Monument.  This was in fact most productive spot for both common and chalkhill blues and yielded in addition a wall butterfly and a small heath at the edge of the next patch of woodland.  Another remarkable feature of this stretch was the vast number of cocoons on grass stems which I believe belonged to burnet moths.  You will see below a picture of a common blue posing near one for all the world as if he owned it.  The next downward slope of meadow before the monument contained a greater concentration of burnet moths than I have ever seen before.  They all appeared to be the 6-spot variety and were in various stages of freshness.  In the strong winds that were buffeting the food plants and moths alike, the older ones were showing signs of having lost a lot of their wing scales and the tattiest of all had almost none left on their now vitually transparent wings.  If there is another reason for the appearance and I'm missing something obvious, please let me know!

Around the Hood Monument itself, there was little to see on this occasion although there were glimpses of larger butterflies at the woodland edges.

The return journey yielded a marbled white sitting disconsolate on a food plant waiting for the sun to return. It had a minimum of 4 small red mites adherent to its torso - I believe these are trombidium breei and are not thought to harm their hosts.  I have also seen them on red soldier beetles and burnet moths.

So, I am still missing several species mentioned in the SOS posting but for someone who has previously largely ignored butterflies, I've had a great time.

Coombe Hill Butterflies - click to enlarge pictures