Pale salmon-orange, white-spotted black wingtips, and no blue crescents at all around the wing margin
Painted lady — the blue crescents are the small tortoiseshell's giveaway.
Nature · Insects & other invertebrates
Painted lady
Migrant, May–October · wingspan 58–74 mm
Vanessa cardui — Nymphalidae
A pale salmon-orange butterfly with black wingtips spotted white, and one of the world's great insect migrants. It cannot survive a British winter at any stage: every individual seen here is the descendant of butterflies that left North Africa or the Sahel that spring. In some years — 1996, 2009, 2019 — it arrives in millions, and in others it is scarce. Its caterpillars eat thistles, which gives it its scientific name and its old name of thistle butterfly.
How to spot them
- ▸Pale salmon- or apricot-orange ground, much paler than a small tortoiseshell's hot orange
- ▸Black forewing tips carrying clean white spots; a row of small black spots across the hindwing
- ▸No blue crescents round the wing margins (the small tortoiseshell has a full row)
- ▸Underside marbled grey-buff and white with four small eyespots on the hindwing
- ▸Restless, fast, low flight; flops onto thistles and buddleia and opens flat to the sun
How to know it
Not one individual survives the British winter; every year's population is freshly immigrant from North Africa and the Sahel
Painted lady, unique among Britain's common nymphalids in having no overwintering stage here.
Its specific epithet is the Latin for thistle, the plant its caterpillars eat
Painted lady — Vanessa cardui; the old English name was the thistle butterfly.
Arrived in Britain in tens of millions in 1996, 2009 and 2019, in a cycle of roughly ten years
Painted lady irruption years, tracked by Butterfly Conservation's Big Butterfly Count.
Radar has shown its autumn return flight is made high above the ground rather than at hedge height
Painted lady — the return leg was long missed because it happens hundreds of metres up.
Its caterpillars live singly in silk tents spun among thistle leaves
Painted lady, whose larval tent is a folded, silked-down thistle leaf.
Found on every continent except South America and Antarctica, making it one of the most widespread of all butterflies
Painted lady — sometimes called the cosmopolitan.
Quick-fire facts
- •Vanessa cardui: cardui is the genitive of Latin carduus, a thistle
- •Butterfly Conservation records it as a migrant in Britain every year, in numbers ranging from a handful to tens of millions
- •The full migratory circuit is completed by a succession of generations, not by single individuals, and covers thousands of kilometres between Africa and northern Europe
- •Larval foodplants are thistles above all, also mallows, common nettle and viper's-bugloss
- •The 2009 influx was estimated at around 11 million butterflies entering Britain
- •Radar studies by Rothamsted Research showed autumn emigrants flying at altitude, resolving the long-standing puzzle of the missing return migration
- •It is called the cosmopolitan in older British and in American usage
- •Unlike the peacock, small tortoiseshell and red admiral, it does not hibernate in Britain in any form
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Butterfly Conservation — Painted Lady
- Paul D. Brock — Britain's Insects: A Field Guide to the Insects of Great Britain and Ireland