Organisms may adopt different behavioural strategies to find particular resources like food or a mate: sit-and-wait or search. In visually cued insects like butterflies, both basic strategies for locating a mate by males have been referred to as perching and patrolling, respectively. Some species show only one behavioural strategy, whereas in others the strategies co-occur. The speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria) is such an example. We study condition-dependent costs and benefits of territorial perching versus non-territorial patrolling in this species. This empirical study includes work both in the field and in the laboratory, but also in outdoor cages.