大象传媒

There's a reed warbler chuntering away, but there鈥檚 something else around here a lot more unusual and much less conspicuous. This rather nice feathery plant here is milk parsley which is a speciality of this area and right on the end of this leaf - that tiny little thing is an egg. That will hatch into a weeny little caterpillar but at that point it will look like a sort of bird dropping, which is very useful because it means that real birds won鈥檛 eat it. Eventually of course the caterpillar will turn into a cocoon, and the cocoon will hatch out into what's arguably Britain鈥檚 most beautiful and certainly its largest butterfly - the swallowtail. Normally you just see them zipping over the reeds. But every now and again you get a really cracking view. Those wings always remind Bill Oddie of stained glass windows, and those little streamers - that's the swallowtail bit - what a beauty!