Purple Emperor in my garden!

When I started to look at butterflies (2006), Purple Emperor was a hard to see species, confined to the very south of Sweden exclusively. I remember going there with my family and a bag of rotting bananas soaked in wine (accidentally) to lure it down from the canopies. We succeeded and the butterfly came flying past our faces very close, but I never managed to take any pictures. Since then I´ve seen it many times abroad, but always with the feeling it is a great butterfly to see and photograph. During the last ten years it has made a remarkable expansion of it´s range in Sweden and is now found up to the north of the county Upland, some 650 km north of it´s former core area. In Västmanland it was first sighted 3 years ago, and with a couple more records every year since then, it has been on every butterfly-watchers want-to-see-list locally. I baited my garden for weeks and now suddenly there it sat! On some fermenting pieces of melon. He´s imperial high-ness…the Purple Emperor! In my own garden!