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Admiral

 

The spelling of this  migrant butterfly’s name has remained ”admiral” in Estonian, probably from French, but so it also is in  Finnish and English …*

 

We wrote about its migrating relative, the painted lady, in the beginning of June when the first ones could be seen in the warm days at the end of May:

http://www.looduskalender.ee/en/node/17066

 

Admirals appeared in North Estonia only a week ago, or maybe our paths had not crossed earlier. At the end of the  black stork ringing on Monday an individual showed itself in the web camera and was caught in the video presented on Wednesday.While in the video it was sitting on the trampled nest bottom then in a home garden admirals can be encountered at compost heaps.

 

They fly at forest verges, meadows, open landscapes or fields and gardens. The migrants move singly, and a mate is always found locally. In Central Europethe distances that admirals may cover in an hour have been studied – it is some more than ten kilometres, so we have not to do with particularly swift fliers. The specimens that reach us have a rather worn appearance.

 

The wing span of the large and eye-catching butterfly is up to one and a half centimetres more than that of the small tortoiseshell described yesterday, or around 7 centimetres.

 

The female lays its eggs, as is the habit of its relatives the tortoiseshells, on stinging nettles (U. dioica)  or small nettles (U. urens), and there is much work with this because the eggs are attached one at a time, and they may be around a hundred. In a week the caterpillars hatch, and devote themselves only to gobbling for 2-3 weeks. After this the caterpillar rolls itself into a leaf and becomes a cocoon. At the end of August, and in September we will see the generation hatched here in their full glory. A rare migrant some twenty years ago, it  has become quite common In Estonia today, but an encounter is always a joy all the same, 

 

*Translators note:

Amiral, the older spelling in English and other languages,  would be nearer to the Arabic origin, amîr al-mâ, amîr al-bahr:  " commander of the waters" , "commander of the sea".

Admirable is of  Latin origin.

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