Start by standing still

The single most useful skill in butterfly watching is not identification, it is patience. Most people see a flicker of colour over a hedge, stride after it, and watch it disappear. Stand still for two or three minutes instead, ideally with the sun behind you, and the odds change completely. Butterflies are creatures of habit: a peacock will return to the same warm patch of bramble, a speckled wood will patrol the same sunlit gap in a wood, and a meadow brown will settle again on the same clump of grass.

You need very little kit. Binoculars with a close focus of two metres or less are far more useful than powerful ones, because most of your views will be at arm's length to five metres. A notebook, a hand lens if you have one, and a rough idea of the season will carry you a long way.

The browns: meadow browns, ringlets and speckled woods

Brown butterflies are where most beginners lose confidence, because at a glance they all look like small fluttering shadows. Slow down and they separate neatly.

• Meadow brown: our commonest grassland butterfly, on the wing from June to September. Look for a soft brown insect with a single dark eyespot near the tip of the forewing, containing a tiny white dot. Females are brighter and more orange than males. It flies low and lolloping over long grass and rarely settles with wings open.
• Ringlet: darker, velvety, and usually seen with wings closed. The underside is covered in small circles with white centres, like a string of tiny targets. It loves damp, tall, grassy meadows and often flies on dull days when others stay put.
• Speckled wood: the woodland edge specialist, cream and brown blotches on a chocolate background. It sits in dappled light with a habit of sunbathing on leaves, and males chase each other in spiralling flights.
• Gatekeeper: smaller and more orange than a meadow brown, with two white pupils in its eyespot, hence its old country name, the hedge brown. It hugs bramble and hedgerow margins.

The showy four: peacock, red admiral, small tortoiseshell and painted lady

These are the garden and buddleia butterflies, and they are reassuringly easy.

• Peacock: unmistakable when open, with four bold eyespots on rich red. When closed it is almost invisible, a dark, bark-like underside. It overwinters as an adult, often in sheds and hollow trees, so a warm February day can produce a surprising sighting.
• Red admiral: blackish wings crossed by a red-orange band, with white spots near the tips. It is a strong migrant, arriving from the continent in spring and early summer, and increasingly overwintering here in mild years.
• Small tortoiseshell: bright orange with black spots and a blue-black border dotted with cream. Its caterpillars feed in webs on stinging nettles, which is a good reason to leave a scruffy nettle patch in a sunny corner.
• Painted lady: a paler, more washed-out orange with black wingtips and white spots. Some years it arrives in vast numbers, and in others you may see only a handful.

Whites, blues and the ones that fool you

Whites cause more arguments than any other group. Large whites are the biggest, with a black tip to the forewing; small whites have greyish, dusted tips; green-veined whites show green-grey veins underneath, especially in spring. The brimstone, which is the first butterfly of the year for many of us, is a soft lemon-yellow, and when it lands with wings closed it looks exactly like a pale leaf.

Blues reward a steady hand. The common blue is the usual one in rough grassland, while the holly blue appears in gardens and hedgerows in spring and again in late summer, often quite high up. The male orange-tip is white with bright orange wingtips and a beautifully mottled green underside, and it is unmissable in April and May along verges and canal banks.

Getting a closer look without causing harm

Fieldcraft matters more than identification, and a few habits protect both the insect and your own patience.

• Approach from the shaded side so your shadow does not fall across the butterfly, and move in slow, deliberate steps rather than darting.
• Never chase, net or touch. Chasing costs a butterfly energy it needs for flight, courtship and egg-laying, and a disturbed insect is harder to identify anyway.
• Watch what it is doing. A female searching nettles or bird's-foot trefoil is likely looking for somewhere to lay, and holding back lets you see the full behaviour.
• Keep dogs on a lead in flower-rich meadows, and stick to paths in hay meadows between May and July, when eggs and caterpillars are on the stems.
• Record what you see, when and roughly where. Even a simple garden list builds a picture of how your local countryside is faring.

Making it a habit through the year

Butterfly watching in Britain has a rhythm. March and April bring brimstones, orange-tips and the first holly blues. May and June are the peak of the meadow species. High summer belongs to the browns, gatekeepers and second broods, and late August to September brings red admirals and commas to overripe fruit and ivy flowers. Even winter has its rewards, as a peacock or small tortoiseshell waking in a shed reminds you what the year will bring.

Pick one short, familiar walk and visit it weekly if you can. The same ten metres of hedge will teach you more than a dozen new sites, because you will begin to recognise individual patches and notice the small shifts of weather and season that bring the butterflies out. That is the real pleasure of it, not ticking off a list, but learning a place well enough that you notice when something changes.