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

I intended looking for chalkhill blues and others as advertised on the SOS website in the region of the Hood Monument and Butleigh Wootton today but didn't quite get far enough.  However, there was more than enough to keep me amused with common blues including some stunning views of males with their wings open in the sunshine.  Other buttlerflies, assuming I have the ids right included small heath, meadow brown and others I couldn't get close enough to photograph.

Having had only distant shots of the little bitterns over th last week and determined that they were too far and too fast for a photo, I did what all good photographers do and gave up!  Instead, tired of walking past the abundant insect life without my macro gear, I went out specifically to photograph them this weekend.   Almost all of the photographs below were taken around the marsh opposite the first viewing platform at RSPB Ham Wall.  All shots were taken with the Canon 7D and Sigma 150mm macro held on a monopod topped with a medium ballhead.  I used manual with fill-flash for about half of the pictures and AV mode for the remainder and all were shot at either ISO 200 or 400.