Turn Your Wildlife Photos Into Citizen Science

iNaturalist is a Citizen Science platform to record sightings of flora and fauna - anything from an amoeba to a whale - to build a biodiversity database for use by the research community. For the past decade I have been photographing at New Ferry Butterfly Park and over the past five years I have been converting the images into wildlife observations. Initially I used the iRecord platform but now I almost exclusively use iNaturalist. I am not alone. There are currently over 2000 observations of nearly 500 species from the Butterfly Park on iNaturalist posted by 54 observers, which may be seen at:

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new-ferry-butterfly-park-howell-road-new-ferry-bebington-wirral-uk

An increasing number of people are taking photographs of the wildlife at the butterfly park, and it would be great to see the resulting images developed into wildlife observations. To facilitate this, I’ll now describe how I convert my photographs into iNaturalist observations.

After a photo session, I download the image files from the camera onto a computer and go through them deleting anything substandard. The remainder, usually about a third, are processed using Photoshop. Conversion to observations requires logging into the iNaturalist website (https://www.inaturalist.org) which opens at the ‘Dashboard’ page.

The dashboard page on the iNaturalist website

Pressing the ‘Upload’ tab on the top right of the page opens the ‘Drag & drop some photos or sounds’ page onto which one or more image files for each observation may be copied. If there are multiple images for an observation they may be merged by dragging them onto the master image.

Drag & drop some photos or sounds

The next job is to populate the ‘Species Name’ and ‘Location’ fields for each observation, adding any plaintext you wish to the ‘Notes’ fields. Clicking in the ‘Species Name’ box offers a range of possible names using iNaturalist’s AI-based analysis of the image. If you see the correct name then select it. Otherwise, choose the suggestion at the top of the list (probably a genus) to provide a starting point. If your camera has GPS then the ‘Location’ field may have been automatically populated from the EXIF data. If not, click inside the box to open an interactive map window.

Select the location of your observation using the interactive map

I usually enter ‘New Ferry Butterfly Park’ into the ‘Search Location’ field which zooms the map into the area of interest. Click the map where you took your photo and make the resulting circle larger or smaller to set the spatial accuracy. By default, the Geoprivacy is set to ‘Open’. Please don’t change this or your observation will be useless to science. I also standardise the ‘Locality notes’ field to ‘New Ferry Butterfly Park’ to make it easier to discover observations from the reserve. Press ‘Update Observations’ when all the required information has been entered.

Once all the observations have had their names and locations populated the ‘Submit observations’ button is pressed to upload and publish them. This opens an ‘Edit Observations’ Page, which may be used to document the observations with annotations.

The Edit Observations Page on iNaturalist

Whilst this is optional it increases the scientific value of the records. For example, it provides a mechanism for researchers interested in butterflies from getting caterpillar observations. Clicking on an observation species name, such as ‘Common Crimson-and-gold Moth’, opens that observation in edit mode.

A view of the page for one of Roy's observations

I usually populate the ‘Alive or Dead’, ‘Life Stage’, and (if I know it) ‘Sex’ attributes. The ‘Life Stage’ attribute is particularly important for insects as it allows separation of larvae observations from adult observations. Once populated (there’s no save to be pressed) the next observation can be selected using the green circular arrow symbols or the ‘Dashboard’ can be reached using the circular button to the right of ‘Upload’.

A published observation will be viewed by many ‘iNatters’, some of whom join the community identification process by commenting on, changing or refining the ID field. This process usually works very well with prompt, constructive input from experienced identifiers significantly enhancing the observations. Sometimes, nothing happens because there are no experienced identifiers for the species observed and occasionally, things can go awry when people identify beyond their competence and get it wrong. In my experience other members of the community help when this happens. Once two members of the community have confirmed the identification the observation is elevated to ‘Research Grade’ and made available to researchers.

This blog post describes the way that I work and is intended to provide an initial pathway for camera - as opposed to phone - users who wish to start wildlife recording using iNaturalist. It is not intended to be a users’ manual. There are many features that I haven’t mentioned and no doubt many other ways to do what I do that others may prefer once they get to know the package. For phone camera users iNaturalist provides an App but I can’t help with this as I have never used it. The Cheshire Local Environmental Record Centre, Record LRC, run field days giving practical training using the App. These are usually in the weeks before the City Nature Challenge bioblitz in April or May and are advertised on the Record web site.

Roy Lowry

From Hong Kong to New Ferry Butterfly Park

Wirral Chinese Christian Church members on an outing to the Butterfly Park

On 24th July 2026, New Ferry Butterfly Park received a group of visitors with Chinese heritage background, 15 adults and 3 children, from Wirral Chinese Christian Church (WCCC). They came from Hong Kong about 4 or 5 years ago and have settled down and started their new life in Wirral and other parts of the country.

It was their first time visiting the Park. They were amazed with the history of this urban nature reserve, the wildlife it supports and the time many volunteers have invested in it. They were curious about butterflies in the UK. Each time they saw a butterfly, they would look at the butterfly identification chart and learn its name. One of the visitors also shared her photo of a beautiful moth from Hong Kong.

A gatekeeper spotted during the group's visit

The life in the UK can be different in many ways from that in urban Hong Kong where they had spent most of their adult life. They are adjusting to their new life well, thanks to the support from the WCCC and other local community groups. Still there are many things that they are trying to make sense of; what should I do with my garden, would my neighbour take me to court if I don’t mow the lawn regularly enough, do foxes attack people… and how come the toilet in the Park is not smelly, nor having flies without using water!

Speckled wood also made the sightings list

They were delighted to hear about Plantlife’s conservation campaign “No Mow May” and “Let It Bloom June” for supporting wildlife, as well as taking off the pressure of mowing! Being environmentally friendly in gardens was generally agreed, and the group was keen on learning how to make this happen.

Due to the gloomy weather, we only manged to see Gatekeepers, Speckled Woods, Green-veined White, and Holly Blues. Most importantly, the visit was enjoyed by all, and one individual instantly express her interest in becoming a volunteer to the Park!

A green-veined white, looking a bit worse for wear

Yan Wang, New Ferry Butterfly Park volunteer

Quintessentially English: Open Garden Event at Poulton Hall

The herbaceous border at Poulton Hall

Caroline and Scirard Lancelyn Green of Poulton Hall, Bebington, hosted an open walled garden and parkland event on 4th July to allow others to see the gardens with their quirky features and a biodiverse meadow. The meadow is enclosed by a species rich hedge which was laid by Wirral Countryside Volunteers. This was a National Gardens event which benefits many charities including Wirral Wildlife and New Ferry Butterfly Park. This is the fifth time that this event has been assisted by Wirral Wildlife and the best so far, as the event grows a little each year.

The Oriental Garden

There were the customary attractions of the walled garden, honeybee demonstrations, have-a- go at hedge laying, making newspaper pots and sowing seeds, tours of the meadow, storytelling, and Samaritan plant sales, all delightfully topped off with a cream tea served on china crockery.

Crowds at the Wirral Countryside Volunteer stall

Wirral Beekeepers

The Wirral Countryside Volunteers stall was much improved with their own branded gazebo, giving a very professional look, so guests could see what the stall was about at a distance. Wirral Archaeology CIC came with fascinating finds, all found within three miles of Poulton Hall. They had found a small knife blade which they thought Roman but turned out to be much older, being from the Bronze Age. The Wirral Wildlife and New Ferry Butterfly Park joint stall were making pretty patterns from flowers hammered on to a white folded sheet. There were strolling archers, Maid Marian and Robin Hood, and witches to welcome you into the magical world of the walled garden via the wardrobe.

Making pretty patterns from flowers on the Wirral Wildlife and Butterfly Park stall

The Story Garden

A carved figure in the garden

Additional attractions were the Wirral Barn Owl Trust and the Cheshire Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, along with Maypole dancing. The Wirral Barn Owl Trust had a very impressive display and a large team of volunteers. They have installed a barn owl box on the edge of the meadow outside the hall, the meadow providing a valuable hunting ground for the barn owls. The Cheshire Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers were spinning and weaving from various natural and manufactured materials. You were encouraged to feel all the different materials from a source sample to finished product. There was the fun of Maypole dancing complete with band and caller.

Cheshire Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers stall

Wirral Barn Owl Trust stall

Two volunteers were going round with a wheelbarrow with a tea pot to bring hot drinks and homemade cake for all the volunteers on the stalls and parking duties, it took an hour to get round them all.

Car park attendants enjoying a refreshment break

Thanks to Caroline and Scirard Lancelyn-Green, the Poulton Hall Estate Team and the twenty volunteers who supported this event on the day, those who worked behind the scenes transporting gazebos and woody materials or baking cakes for the volunteers and those who came tidying up on the Monday. With all these attractions it does make a great afternoon out. Look out for more of these garden openings on the Poulton Hall web page

The gazebo assembly team

New Ferry Butterfly Park Skippers

There are four species of ‘skipper’ (Family Hesperiidae) butterflies that may be found in New Ferry Butterfly Park. This aim of this blog post is to catalogue them and provide enough information for the visitors to identify them.

Dingy skipper (Erynnis tages)

The first to appear is the dingy skipper (Erynnis tages) which flies from early May until mid-June. The species was first recorded in the butterfly park in 2022, the first iRecord observation on the Wirral since 2017 (Royden Park) and before that 2014 (Wirral Way, Caldy). It was confirmed as breeding in the butterfly park in 2023 and has been seen every year since. It has also been recorded recently in Prenton Dell Claypit and Port Sunlight River Park. Some rare good news on the butterfly population dynamics front.

By butterfly standards it is very plain with a spotted brown colour scheme giving rise to its common name. Identification is relatively straightforward as there is virtually nothing else that looks like it in the reserve. The only species I can think of that could possibly be confused with the dingy skipper is the burnet companion moth (Euclidia glyphica) that does fly at about the same time. However, it is a very different shape providing the butterfly opens its wings.

Burnet companion moth (Euclidia glyphica),
which could possibly be confused with the dingy skipper

The second species of skipper to appear is the large skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus) which flies from early June until as late as early September. It is a common butterfly throughout England and Wales and has been seen in the butterfly park for as long as I can remember.

The hooked antennae of a large skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus)

The name ‘large’ skipper is something of a misnomer. It might be slightly bigger than a small skipper but it’s a small butterfly compared to species like the meadow brown and speckled wood. Identification involves distinguishing large skippers from small or Essex skippers and is based on two characteristics. First, the large skipper antennae have obvious hooked tips. Good eyesight can pick this up in the field but a pair of binoculars (or a telephoto lens) help. Secondly, the wings tend to be more heavily marked with pale spots and dark patches than the other two species. However, a word of warning is required as the markings of all three of the ‘orange’ skippers can be very variable. The photo shows a male. Gender can be distinguished by the shape of the abdomen (females are more pointed at the tip) and by the black sex brands running across his wings.

A male large skipper

The other two orange skipper species are the small skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) and the Essex skipper (Thymelicus lineola) that fly from July to late August. These have very different histories in the butterfly park. The small skipper, like the large skipper, has been there for as long as I can remember. However, the Essex skipper is one of many insect species migrating northwards as the climate warms. It is a little uncertain when it was first recorded in the reserve. My first record was in June 2023, but I think Chloe Aldridge saw one in 2022 and they may have been around in 2021. The uncertainty is because telling the two species apart is challenging and it takes a little while to convince people that Essex skippers have arrived in sites where they had not been recorded before.

Small skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris)

Essex skipper (Thymelicus lineola)

There are two characteristics that I’m comfortable using plus a third that I’m unsure about so I’m not going to describe it. The first is the sex brand. Small skipper males have bold sex brands that can be curved or wavy running obliquely across the forewings and are unmistakeable on fresh specimens as in this picture. Trouble is butterflies have a hard life and they can become faint or even disappear after a few dozen rounds of aerial combat, but if they’re clearly visible then the butterfly is undoubtedly a small skipper.

Essex skipper sex brands are shorter, fainter, straight and run parallel to the forewing leading edge. I sometimes use their presence for identification if the specimen is fresh and I’m sure it’s a male from abdomen shape but I’m never totally confident.

The second characteristic is the colour of the antenna nudum, which is orange for a small skipper and black for an Essex skipper. The first challenge is understanding what the antenna nudum is. I was amazed at how poorly documented it is on the internet. I expected to find annotated diagrams or photographs but could find neither. This has led to a riot of confusion with attempts to use antenna colour for skipper identification. Some say ‘use the colour of the front of the antenna’. Others say ‘use the colour of the antenna tip’. Both are half right as the nudum is a small bare patch on the tip of the front of the antenna. The small skipper in the photo above is displaying an orange nudum, which is the minute bright orange dot at the very end of its left antenna. This can be seen more clearly in the enlarged image. The colours of the rest of the antenna are highly variable. I’ve even seen one small skipper where the antenna was all black except for the orange nudum.

The orange nudum on the antenna of a small skipper

Knowing what nudum means is only part of the problem for identification. One has to both see the nudum and then find a way to show it to others in an identification record. Once again, binoculars become a most helpful tool for field identifications. Getting the nudum in a photograph involves taking a view from below or a face shot such as this Essex skipper photo which clearly shows the black nudum of each antenna. Getting these shots isn’t too difficult. All that’s required is a little patience because the insects tend to go around in circles when feeding on a flower.

Getting the right angle to photograph the black nudum
on an Essex skipper

Blog post and photos - Roy Lowry

June at New Ferry Butterfly Park

Almost every day, on the New Ferry Butterfly Park Facebook page, we feature amazing photographs taken by Roy Lowry on his regular visits.

We know that not everyone uses Facebook so we have selected some of the images he has taken and shared with us in June.

Here are two busy bumblebees photographed at the beginning of the month.

Red tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius)

Common carder bee (Bombus pascorum)

However life will be less easy if they are spotted by a ferruginous bee-grabber. This fly lives up to its name by grabbing hold of bumble and honey bees to lay an egg from which a larva emerges and proceeds to eat the host alive.

Ferruginous bee-grabber on a bramble flower

Close up of Sicus ferrugineus - the ferruginous bee-grabber

On most sunny day visits to the Butterfly Park Roy will photograph butterflies.

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus)

Green veined white (Pieris napi)

Both photographs show how the underside of the wings differs from the upper surface.

Recent star of the butterflies for Roy Lowry was a dingy skipper that posed on the lime waste. This was the first he had managed to photograph since 2023.

Say hello to the dingy skipper!

Dingy skipper (Erynnis tages)

Also present at the Butterfly Park this month - small coppers, speckled woods and brimstone caterpillars.

Small copper (Lycaena phlaeas)

Speckled wood (Pararge aegeria)

Caterpillar of the brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni)

Day flying moths are good to build a story around. Roy reported “The narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths were in a frisky mood in Saturday’s warm weather”.

Two's company for the narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths

Three’s a crowd...

But four?????

The pond is a good place to find dragonflies and damselflies. Here are paired azure damselflies expertly photographed egg-laying in the pond.

Male and female azure damselflies (Coenagrion puella)

The male azure damselfly is blue and the female is green

Roy also photographed two male broad bodied chaser dragonflies on the pond.

They had distinctively different markings - one had much more brown colouration on the thorax and base of the abdomen, but this might change as it ages.

Broad bodied chaser dragonfly (Libellula depressa)

A Broad bodied chaser dragonfly with more brown colouration

Here’s a hairy shieldbug.

Dolycoris baccarum - or the hairy shieldbug

As the name suggests, they're covered in tiny hairs - though you may have to look closely to spot them! They are also known as sloe shieldbugs, because they're often found around blackthorns, where they use their piercing mouthparts to feed on the fruits - called sloes. They also feed on the leaves, seeds and fruits of a wide range of other plants.

Hairy shieldbugs spend the winter as an adult, emerging in spring to mate. Females lay clumps of brownish, barrel-shaped eggs that stick firmly to the chosen plant. The young, known as nymphs, are smaller and rounder than the adults, but still covered in pale hairs. They go through several stages of growth, before maturing into their adult form in late summer or early autumn.

Dock bugs - a northerly migrating species - are now very well established.

Dock bug (Coreus marginatus)

The trivial plant bug is a Mediterranean species that was introduced into the London area on imported plants and has now got this far north. Roy first saw them last year.

Trivial plant bug (Closterotomus trivialis)

This year they are joined by the cabbage bug which Roy had not seen on the Wirral before.

Cabbage bug (Eurydema oleracea)

Roy’s favourite subjects are hoverflies, especially Chrysotoxum festivum (hook-barred spearhorn).

These are specialists with larvae feeding on ant-attended root aphids. He noticed a couple of males - one had territory on the path to the lime waste and the other on the path about halfway along the lime waste, and both territories were being defended.

The territory along the lime waste was also defended last year.

Hook-barred spearhorn (Chrysotoxum festivum)

Here’s Melangyna sexguttata sensu lato which he doesn't see very often.

This name is much longer than the actual hoverfly!

Melangyna sexguttata sensu lato

These mating craneflies make an interesting image.

Cranefly courtship

Not everyone likes spiders but here’s a zebra jumping spider with its prey. 

Zebra jumping spider (Salticus scenicus)

Visitors to New Ferry Butterfly Park can also look out for beetles.

Roy photographed thick-legged flower beetles plus several spotted longhorn beetles. These were flying around the bramble flowers looking a bit like self-propelled aliens.

 Thick-legged flower beetle (Oedemera nobilis)

Spotted longhorn beetle (Rupeta maculata)

June is a good time to admire flowers at the Butterfly Park, with the red poppies and marsh orchids being particularly eye-catching.

Poppies in the wild flower strip

A marsh orchid in the limewaste

New Ferry Butterfly Park is extremely lucky to have someone of Roy’s photographic and identification skills creating a monthly visual record of its wildlife.