Red admiral butterflies are still flying about where there is some warm sunshine. They are taking nectar from the rosettes of greenish-white ivy flowers, which are a major source of food for insects in late autumn, including bluebottles and wasps. The red admirals are brilliant butterflies with their scarlet, white and black upperwings, but their underwings are dark, and when they wheel about rapidly in the air they can look like flying shadows.

They migrate here in large numbers from the Continent in summer, and produce a new brood while the days are still long, but in the past nearly all of them died before the winter. Now, in warm winters, some of them hibernate and come out again in the spring, just as the peacocks and small tortoiseshells do. Other individuals lay eggs in the autumn, and the caterpillars manage to survive the winter, but the butterflies that emerge from this brood in spring are generally smaller than the others.