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Sat 06 Jun 2009Painted lady show creates a dazzling butterfly effect
ANOTHER LIFE:IT WAS, as her e-mail said, “snowing butterflies – hundreds of butterflies swaying and darting in between the trees and shrubs, flying merrily on – to where?”
Eithne Heneghan, writing from Mayo’s Turlough country, was, like so many watchers in the west last weekend, mesmerised by the phenomenal flow of painted lady butterflies. Fluttering on an easterly breeze, they reached my garden at the coast and accumulated in dozens, sunbathing at the tops of trees, probing for nectar at buttercups and bramble blossom and joining the bumblebees at garden flowers. By evening, a mating pair were twirling up through the branches of an ash, gilded in the late bank holiday sun.
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