The Skippers are always a little tricky to identify correctly. I am relatively happy with the large Skipper Id, but I would not say 100%. It is the too smaller commoner species that cause the most problems. The Small and the Essex. Despite the latter’s name it is widespread across Southern England as is the Small which also ventures further north.

I came across many Skippers in the wood yesterday and I am going to take a stab at the latter two shown below in the photos. I know the main Id feature between Essex and Small is the colour of the antennae tips underside. The Essex having dark as opposed to the orange/buff on the common. The only snag with this is that when you look at a lot of the literature and images on various websites there always seems some crossover. I.e. Essex shown with what I would call less than dark etc. Anyway I will let you decide, and please contact me if you believe I am stringing them. I am going for images 1 and 2 to be Small and images 3 and 4 to be Essex.

1

2

3

4

Steve Copsey