Irish Trip for the Cryptic Wood White

Date: 29th May - 31st May 2017

Location: Belfast and Dublin, Ireland

Weather: Light Rain, Cloudy, Sunny Intervals

Observation: After returning from Majorca, we had booked to fly to Ireland for Dad (Wayne) to add the Cryptic Wood White to his list. We flew into Dublin Airport and hired a car for our 2 days there.

We drove straight up to Belfast as we had booked to stay the night there first. We stopped in Tesco’s just outside the Airport to grab some lunch and as we pulled in we spotted a single Hooded Crow feeding with some Wood Pigeon’s.

We quickly parked up and grabbed our camera’s to get a few shots.

Light was poor at this point but happy to improve from previous shots of this.

Once we got to Belfast we planned to do a recce as the weather wasn’t great for the butterfly at Craigavon. After a quick visit there were no signs of any so we moved on hoping for the weather to improve. We headed on up to Giant’s Causeway stopping at Dark Hedges Road on the way through.

Dark Hedges Road is busy with coaches and cars driving up and down and loads of people always in shot for the pictures, but a great place to visit and free!

Here’s some pictures from Giant Hedges Road:

We arrived to Giant’s Causeway at around 3pm and parked in the Train car park for £6 (a lot cheaper than parking in the National Trust car park at £10 each!) We walked to Giant’s Causeway avoiding the Visitor Centre and saving £24 total between us!

The weather not improving and very low cloud still clinging on, this didn’t stop the crowds of people!

Here’s some pictures from Giant’s Causeway:

As it was getting late and we still had an hour’s drive back to Belfast, we headed back to the hotel and after dinner went for a short walk along the river, we waited for it to get dark and done some night pictures.

The next morning, we woke up to blue skies; the weather was looking promising for the Cryptic Wood Whites!

We walked down to the Titanic Quarter and took some more pictures and also seen 3 Black Guillemots along the river, 2 of which sat on the river wall which allowed us to get pretty close without disturbing them. was also some Common Terns on a nesting raft , brilliant to see terns racing across the River Lagan.

As we were still early and waiting for the weather to warm up, we visited the Castle at Carrickfergus. The skies had clouded after and the rain started, we still moved on and headed onto Craigavon in the off-chance. 

About 10 miles from here the sun slowly came out and by the time we arrived the sky was almost clear and the sun was shining. As we parked up within minutes the first Cryptic Wood White was spotted and settled in the grass, after around 20 minutes we had counted the following butterflies:

25+ Cryptic Wood White 

3 Common Blue 

2 Small White 

5+ Small Heath 

1 Speckled Wood

Dad did have video’s the mating dance from the Cryptic Wood Whites, but wiped his card before taking these off… there's always next year!

Even got some Cryptic Wood White in their mating dance..

A big thanks to Butterfly Conservation and Ian Rippey, Rose Cremin, Marcus Malley, Catherine Bertrand.

Plenty of damselflies about also. There were also Reed Bunting, Mute Swan, Common Terns and 2 Willow Warbler (one of which posed nicely!)

As we found the butterfly so quickly we were ahead of schedule so headed back to Dublin for our final day and arrived around 5pm, enough time for a wander and some more landscapes pictures.

As we were walking from the car park, a Hooded Crow was feeding on the grass so through the fence we got some more shots (too close for 400mm!)

As we had the first flight out of Dublin, we packed up and went back to the hotel ready for the morning.

A very successful trip and some bonuses in there aswell. Butterfly Conservation at interested in doing a press release with us, so when this goes ahead we will share the article from this.

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