Bulgaria Day 2

It was suggested that a forage around the hotel area before breakfast might be fruitful and several of the group ventured forth for a look. Hotel Orfei lies in a deep gorge so it was too early for butterflies but someone heard a black redstart calling and I managed to pick out the silhouette on the rock face, though I would never have managed to identify it. A black woodpecker flew over the valley briefly, plus a couple of other sightings.

Probably the main wildlife feature of Bulgaria is the large amount of unspoilt meadow land.  Things really started to take off at our first destination, following a path through just such country.  I wasted a fair bit of time trying to get a clouded yellow to settle but in the end I settled for a video as it fluttered around incessantly:

The species count quickly began to mount. We saw some of the rarer blues, including chapman's, alcon and

Apollo

amanda's. I enjoyed my first glimpse of a balkan copper as well as my first sightings of green hairstreak, grizzled and tufted marble skippers plus heath and marsh fritillaries.

We saw woodland and bright-eyed ringlets, both of which were new to me and got nice views of the red-backed shrike, often to reappear on succeeding days.

A particular star was the apollo.  After a few sightings of them, one was finally netted and persuaded to settle on a rock.

Looking back, I am a bit disappointed with some of my photographic efforts during the session, but here are a few further impressions I managed to capture, rolled into a video Nb there is a correction.  Simeon our group leader has identified that the one captioned as grizzled skipper is in fact a tufted marbled skipper.  I f you pause the video and look closely, you can see the two white hair tufts.:

Later in the day, we visited a roadside lake where we saw a number of dragonflies, including azure damselfly, white-legged damselfly and blue emperor.  Here we also saw a black-tailed skipper, of which I unfortunately have no memory, southern small white and some crag martins - amongst others it has to be stressed.