Chequered Skippers are on Skye!

A couple of months ago I found a colony of Rannoch Brindled Beauties here on Skye, a new moth for me. I spread the word via a local WhatsApp and FB page and a few fellow nature nuts duly visited the spot and saw them too. The following day I found two further colonies, I suspect they are quite widely distributed across suitable habitat on the Sleat Peninsular. I've heard the adult females described as belly button fluff on legs, and it's actually a pretty accurate description! Anyway, local birder Martin Benson was one of the chaps who was keen to see the moth and he thanked me for the gen and that was that. Happy days. 

Rannoch Brindled Belly Button Fluff - wingless female

Rannoch Brindled Beauty -  winged male

Fast forward another week or so and Martin announced that he was keen to branch out into the world of moths, butterflies and dragonflies and would appreciate any hints, tips and general guidance from anyone more clued up than he in these things. Somebody must have mentioned a few sites to try and pretty soon afterwards he started sharing images of the various moths and butterflies he'd encountered. So far so good.

Then, on 15th May, Martin made a very significant discovery

HOLY CRAP!!!

Understandably this caused something of a stir amongst we Skye naturalists. I have recently relocated from Broadford to another part of Skye, meaning that the site in question is now over a 90 minute drive away from me rather than 20 minutes. Bugger. At the time I was working a minimum of six days per week, which was causing some rather intense gnashing of teeth on my part. But finally my next day off rolled around and it was gloriously sunny and calm. I quickly jumped into The Gibstermobile and headed down to Sleat...

The distant wooded slope on the right is the area in question

My good friend Ghostie is a paid professional lepidopterist with many years of knowledge and experience to his name. His initial reaction (other than "Bloody Hell!") was to ask if Chequered Skipper had been illicitly introduced at the site. Well, it is possible. But seeing as the species wasn't discovered in Scotland until the 1940s (!) and given that not many entomologists visit the Hebrides in May, and that many new sites were discovered during a Buttterfly Conservation mapping scheme a few years back, my own belief is that they have simply been overlooked until now. The site is hardly a tourist hotspot, being down a particularly remote road, then a couple more miles down a track that essentially leads nowhere. However, it is a particularly rewarding area for invertebrates and holds the only known populations of Beautiful Demoiselle on Skye, is one of the few Skye sites for Keeled Skimmer and is botanically rich too. Tripping over Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries and Small Heaths, I hurried towards the wooded slopes with high hopes of seeing Scotland's only known population of Chequered Skipper away from the Fort William/Spean Bridge complex of woodlands.

The green dot is the newly-discovered Skye population

Distribution-wise the Skye colony isn't too far removed from the known mainland populations. Yes, Skye is an island that has been separated from the mainland for a very long time. But we have a healthy invertebrate assemblage (maybe a tad too healthy when it comes to various biting flies...) including many moth and butterfly species. Small White has recently colonised and Purple Hairstreak searches are planned for this summer, seeing as it's been marching ever northwards through Scotland these past few years. It's probably already here; we have a few oakwoods in mind and if we fail to find the adults we may have more luck finding the overwintering eggs. 

So anyway, enough of the waffle. Did I manage to find myself a Chequered Skipper I hear you ask

Record shot of my first Skye Chequered Skipper

The first of three that I encountered on the slopes

One of the local guys who visited the site before I did had provided me with a map of where he found his four skippers. Two of mine were in roughly the same spots, but one was quite a way further uphill. I've never seen Chequered Skippers away from Bluebells. Killiechonate Wood at Spean Bridge has by far and away the largest populations I've seen of the butterfly and Bluebells are the main feature wherever they occur there. With this in mind, I headed to the slopes and kept an eye open for Bluebells. Sure enough, that's where the skippers were. One large open clearing in full sunshine did hold healthy numbers of Bluebells, but they were largely gone over and wilted. No skippers there at all (though thirty plus Small Pearl-bordered Frits kind of made up for it). I wandered the area for quite a while, but topped out at just three individuals. The highest count here so far has been five, so hardly a bustling colony. I've plotted a map of everyone's sightings (well, those that I know of at least) in an attempt to figure the extent of the colony. 

Heading back along the track I stopped to rest at a small waterfall, watching a pair of Beautiful Demoiselles sally out from rocks to snatch small aerial prey. As near as dammit I was half a mile from the skipper colony. We've had over a month of zero rainfall on Skye and the waterfall was much depleted, with large patches of dead and dying Greater Water-moss strewn across the flat rocks. To my utter amazement, a butterfly flitted in front of my nose, momentarily landed on the browned water-moss, then disappeared back in the direction from which it had appeared, no more than ten feet from where I sat. It was a Chequered Skipper. Good grief! Much wanderings later I concluded that I could not refind it, nor any other skippers for that matter. 

Our plan is to properly survey the site during the coming months, we feel that Pearl-bordered Fritillary should occur (I did see one faded fritillary being chased off by a pristine SPBF, but it was gone almost as soon as I saw it) and we'd love to find Marsh Fritillary on Skye too. Azure Hawker and White-faced Darter, neither with many/any recent Skye records, round up our list of invert targets. This part of Sleat seems to have its own microhabitat which is well suited to warmth loving inverts, who knows what we shall discover there next.