I’m crouched in a grassy hollow, chatting to my friend Steve about the ethics of watching a pair of dingy skippers in flagrante, when a visitor arrives out of the blue, distracting us from our moral quandary.
Light as blossom, dark as coffee, a minuscule butterfly settles on the strap of Steve’s rucksack, opening dusky brown wings flecked with sky-blue glitter. We’re here to spot butterflies, but we weren’t expecting such a rare treasure to seek us out. It is a male small blue, the UK’s tiniest resident butterfly, with a wingspan barely bigger than my thumbnail. Once known as the Bedford blue on account of a large population near that town, its Latin name – Cupido minimus – is surely the most endearing of binomials. When this littlest love closes its wings, it reveals a frosted underside similar to that of a holly blue, with a freckling of black dots almost too minute to discern with the naked eye.
