The Small Tortoiseshell is a familiar and much-loved garden butterfly, with bright orange-red wings patterned with black and yellow blocks along the forewing and a border of blue crescents along the wing edges. It is a common sight almost everywhere in Britain, from gardens and parks to farmland and mountainsides, and is one of the first butterflies to appear on warm days in early spring, having overwintered as an adult. It feeds readily on a wide range of garden flowers and, like its close relatives, relies on common nettle as its foodplant.

Females lay large clusters of eggs on the underside of young, sunlit nettle leaves, and the caterpillars live and feed gregariously within a communal silk web for their early stages before dispersing to feed and pupate separately as they grow larger; they are black and speckled with yellow markings and covered in branching spines. There are typically two generations between spring and autumn in most of Britain, with the summer brood’s adults feeding up on nectar before seeking out sheds, log piles, or house eaves in which to hibernate over winter.