Butterfly Season

We've noticed a lot of butterflies this year, arriving early, apparently due to the mild winter. There've been a lot of varieties too, but the swallowtails arrived as usual in early June. We saw them several times, fluttering from flower to flower - this one looking a little tattered.

The swallowtail visited these bright red pinks in the scree garden, and just kept coming back until I think it had sampled every blossom. Even so, it was hard to ever get a clean picture, as it fluttered so fast from blossom to blossom.

If you look closely at these two pictures you can actually see the proboscis, a thin black drinking straw in effect, more than an inch long. You could watch the swallowtail plunge this down into each blossom quite noticeably, then pull it out and move on to the next.