Only the male carries the orange; the female is white-tipped black and is constantly mistaken for a different species
Orange-tip — the most strongly sexually dimorphic of Britain's common whites.
Nature · Insects & other invertebrates
Orange-tip
Single brood, April–June · wingspan 40–52 mm
Anthocharis cardamines — Pieridae (whites and yellows)
The herald of the British spring and one of the few butterflies whose sexes look like different species. The male is white with a broad orange patch filling each forewing tip; the female has no orange at all and is routinely written off as a small white. Both share the real clincher: a hindwing underside mottled mossy green, perfect camouflage on a head of cow parsley. It has a single generation a year and lays single eggs on cuckooflower and garlic mustard.
How to spot them
- ▸Male: white with a solid orange patch across each forewing tip and a grey-black apex spot
- ▸Female: white with black wingtips only — no orange; easily passed over as a small white
- ▸Both sexes: hindwing underside marbled mossy green and white, invisible on cow parsley
- ▸One brood only, flying April to June; a sighting in August is something else
- ▸Single spindle-shaped eggs, white turning bright orange, glued to a flower stalk of cuckooflower or garlic mustard
How to know it
Hindwing underside marbled mossy green and white, so a roosting butterfly vanishes on a head of cow parsley
Orange-tip; the green is an optical mix of black and yellow scales.
A single spindle-shaped egg, laid white and turning hot orange, glued upright to the flower stalk of a cuckooflower
Orange-tip — females detect and avoid stalks already carrying an egg.
Its caterpillars are cannibals, which is why the female lays only one egg per plant
Orange-tip — larvae eat rivals as well as the developing seed pods.
One brood only, on the wing from April to June, making it a true herald of spring
Orange-tip, which overwinters as a pupa.
Its generic name means 'flower grace' and its epithet points to a cress that flowers in the cuckoo's month
Orange-tip — Anthocharis cardamines, from Cardamine, the cuckooflower or lady's-smock.
Quick-fire facts
- •Anthocharis cardamines: Anthocharis from Greek anthos (flower) and charis (grace); cardamines from Cardamine, the cuckooflower
- •Chief larval foodplants are cuckooflower (lady's-smock, Cardamine pratensis) and garlic mustard (Jack-by-the-hedge, Alliaria petiolata)
- •Larvae feed on the developing seed pods rather than the leaves, and are strongly cannibalistic
- •Butterfly Conservation records a long-term expansion: it has spread north and east in Britain in recent decades
- •It overwinters as a pupa attached to a plant stem, which it closely resembles
- •The green of the underside is not a green pigment: black and yellow scales are intermixed and read as green
- •The male's orange tips carry a mustard-oil-derived bitterness making him distasteful to birds
- •It belongs to the Pieridae, the family of the large white, small white and brimstone
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Butterfly Conservation — Orange-tip
- Paul D. Brock — Britain's Insects: A Field Guide to the Insects of Great Britain and Ireland