What have you seen

Used to see them quite regularly near my Spanish apartment. Haven't seen any for a couple of years.

It's true that you can see Swallowtails in many parts of Europe but the Norfolk Swallowtails are the largest resident butterfly in the UK. They are a member of the Papilionidae family, which is one of the largest butterfly families in the world. The British race is the subspecies Britannicus which is confined to the fens of the Norfolk Broads in East Norfolk. 

We see them mainly at two locations, RSPB Strumpshaw and at NWT Hickling Broad.  Interestingly they often make two  appearances a year, end of May/June and Often in August as well.

That's a good pic Oneputt. The one below (if I have managed to upload it ) was taken in SW France but it doesn't have the red dots that yours has. Is it a slightly different species perhaps or maybe the female ?

Try again !

Ours is a sub species and resident in Norfolk.  I have another photo showing a swallowtail with a chunk taken out of the tail.  Predators (birds) take the red dots as eyes and attack that end of the butterfly.  

I took this photo yesterday, shows a swallowtail with part of the tail bitten off, just shows that the red spots worked in this case.  The butterfly didn't appear distress and flew around with no proble

Thanks once more OP, seeing things I can't see in my part of the UK.

Soooo excited, sitting in the garden watching the bird feeders fledgling blue tits, sparrows and Dunnet helping themselves, parents closeby. Robins feeding another brood and then WOW male goldfinch and offspring. I know lots of you have loads of these delightful birds but we haven't had any. I'm so pleased and delighted with what our garden attracts in the way of wildlife 😆😆😆. The speed at which fat balls and the seed feeders are going down suggests lots of new broods too. Good job we've got cover for feeding the birds whilst we're away 😉 

Same here. Wonderful to see such things I'm good at just missing them 😭😭.

Walking round Clumber park lake today we saw what we thought were Oyster Catchers on an area of grass, pulling out bugs with their long beak. We could not get close enough for me to get a photo with the phone and I didn't take my camera with the zoom lense. The beak was orange and about the right length, the top half dark and the bottom half white. Although the top half was only dark grey not black, like the photos on my bird app. We have never seen these particular birds at Clumber before and we are 70 miles from the sea. I can't find anything else they can be though.