Purple-throated Woodstar. Colombia - November 2025

This female Purple-throated Woodstar (Philodice mitchellii) was gathering nectar from the flowers in the garden of the Hotel Kumanday on the edge of the village of La Florida, a popular place for those visiting the Otún Quimbaya reserve on the western side of the Cordillera Central of Colombia. The village is at 1,670 metres (5,480 ft).

The bird occurs from 700-2,200 metres along the chain of the Andrews from Colombia into Ecuador. There is what appears to be an isolated population in southern Panama. 

Barely 3 inches long with their flight resembling a bee, this one spent a great deal of time keeping its energy supply up - for all that flying and hovering. Their demand for sugar and they way their body bodies handle that sugar to keep up with demand can really be appreciated by seeing and watching hummingbirds in the wild.

Western Bluebird: a colour plate from 1937

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 24th in the series.

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The plate is by Roland Green (1890-1972) a well-known bird and mammal artist who lived in Norfolk. He was the son of a taxidermist. He illustrated a number of books, including one of his own.

The author of the accompanying text was the well-known aviculturist and very wealthy, Alfred Ezra (1872-1955). He understood that the bird had never been imported into Britain before those brought by Jean Delacour. A pair bred in one of Ezra’s aviaries.

The Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) is from western North America and Mexico.

Avicultural Magazine September 1937

A Comma in the garden

Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. 1 August 2026

It is difficult to imagine the look on a 1950s lepidopterist’s face had she or he been told a Comma butterfly had been spotted in Ayrshire. Even in England the butterfly then had a limited distribution in the south, although it was spreading back to earlier haunts as the 1951 edition of that classic The Observer’s Book of British Butterflies explained:

Up to about 1924 this butterfly had been gradually disappearing from all its old localities, and was more or less confined to Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Monmouthshire. Since then there has been a remarkable increase in its numbers, and it has been reported from the southern, western, and midland counties and even the London district*.

The Butterfly Conservation website takes up the story:

…the most remarkable feature of the Comma has been its severe decline in the twentieth century and subsequent comeback. It has spread northwards through England and is now widespread in south-east and central Scotland and its range is expanding.

Over the past years there have been a number of reports of Commas in Ayrshire and this one is the second we have seen in the garden.

The Comma, Polygonia c-album, has an unusual specific name in that it it hyphenated. However, that was the one given to it by Linnaeus himself and the Comma was a species with which he would have been familiar since it occurs throughout Europe and into western Asia.

Informative studies have been made on the genetics of the food preferences of the Comma caterpillar. At present in Britain the preferred food plant is common nettle with hops, elms, currants and willows following on behind. The great decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries was thought to have been caused by a major reduction in the cultivation of hops. If that decline was responsible then the shift to nettles and subsequent recovery could have been an event as significant as industrial melanism and its reversal in the Peppered Moth.

The underside shows how well the butterfly is camouflaged when its wings are closed
The white marking is in the shape of a comma; hence the name

*The Oxford comma (no pun intended) was alive and well in this Observer’s Book. Described as the compiler of the book William John Stokoe had drawn the information from The Butterflies of the British Isles by Richard South (also published by Frederick Warne). The first edition of The Observer's Book of British Butterflies book appeared in 1938 when Stokoe was 74; it ran for many editions, some long after the compiler’s death. William John Stokoe was born on 30 July 1864, the son of a railway signalman. In the 1921 Census and the 1939 Register he was living in Finchley with his wife. In 1921 he was art manager for Frederck Warne and in 1939 ‘Book Publisher’s Editor’. Stokoe died on 16 March 1947. His name continued to be associated the the various Observer’s Books he had compiled.