At Lullingstone there is a good patch of Ragwort and Creeping Thistle between the first woodland clump and the golf course. Today I checked it for butterflies and bumblebees in particular. The first butterflies I saw were Gatekeepers, Pyronia tithonus and Meadow Browns, Maniola jurtina.
On Gatekeepers, the small white spots are found on the darker areas of the underside hind wing and there may be four or five it seems to me. This looks to be fairly sharp across the whole insect, at f/20, but the photo does suffer from noise at ISO 1000, with double sharpening, which seems to be the main cause of the noise problem.
This is a slightly unusual head-on view of the same insect:
And here is one of the Meadow Browns, on a Creeping Thistle flower. Its a male, with two spots on the hind underwing:
And here again is a head-on view, but this time of a different insect, a far more tattered male. It is rather difficult to tell how many spots it has for sure.
and here is a third male, with just a single spot.
As I left the flower patch, I saw a Peacock butterfly, Inachis io, at the back of the patch - It looked huge in relation to the Gatekeepers and Meadow Browns, quite a stunner!
and just about then I was overflown by a Spitfire!
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