Cycle ride - Comma Butterfly

I needed to go into York today for some ingredients for the Kimchi we are going to make from cabbages that are pretty much ready to eat in the allotment right now. There's an excellent Oriental supermarket on Rougier Street called Red Chilli (next to the restaurant of the same name) which is fascinating to browse round for the wide selection of interesting foodstuffs you have never heard of! I have never seen a Mooli before today, they look like radishes from hell, size of a rounders bat!
I picked up some Korean red chilli flakes, fish sauce, ginger and rice vinegar for the kimchi and tins of water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and some gluten free soy sauce for the store cupboard.

Anyway, along a lovely quiet road near Bilborough I watched a Whitethroat (Sylvia communis) singing on a telegraph wire, they give a brief burst of slightly scratchy song before moving a short distance to another perch and repeating the song (Lesser Whitethroats, which I haven't seen yet, live more in bushes). There were plenty of Meadow Brown and some Ringlet butterflies and lots of wildflowers in the verges.

On a patch of thistles I discovered this Comma Butterfly (Polygonia c-album) feeding on the flower heads. After severe declines in the 20th century, this butterfly is now quite widespread, we've had them along the path through the allotments from time to time too.
When the thistles go to seed, I'll be picking a few for the wildflower patch I am trying to start in the garden, there's a lot of them flowering on roadsides at the moment and plenty of insect life on them too.