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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 32 1995 - A RECORD YEAR FOR RARE BUTTERFLIES IN SUFFOLK R. G. STEWART
1995 was a record year for sightings of two butterflies, the Camberwell Beauty, Nymphalis antiopa, and the Queen of Spain Fritillary, Argynnis lathonia. The Camberwell Beauty, although a rare migrant, is difficult to confuse with any other European species and consequently several records came from observers readily confessing not to be naturalists. Records for the Camberwell Beauty (39) far outnumbered those for the Queen of Spain Fritillary (6), which is definitely the rarer of the two in Suffolk. Since 1990 only one specimen of the Queen of Spain Fritillary has been recorded, on August 16th 1991, when a male was captured as it fed on Buddleia in a garden at Gorleston-on-Sea (Watsonian Suffolk), as reported in White Admiral (Piotrowski, 1992). Queen of Spain Fritillary The six Suffolk records are part of a national total of 14, the other eight being in the Essex/Cambridgeshire branch of Butterfly Conservation (6) and a singleton in Lincolnshire and in Kent. This national figure falls well short of the 1945 national total of 37 (Mendel & Piotrowski, 1986). The Suffolk records are as follows:
Figure 1: The Queen of Spain Fritillary, Argynnis lathonia, in Suffolk 1995: 6 records from 6 tetrads. August 6th: Scots Hall Cottages, Minsmere, TM462673 - recorded by David Fairhurst (Warden). This was seen by about 25 people, mainly RSPB staff, from
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 32 (1996)