Today we visited a number of meadows, a small river valley and did an upland forest walk mainly for those interested in orchids.
At one point a number of large birds turned up flying high above the crags- short-toed eagle, honey buzzard and black stork.
In the meadows it was business as usual chasing the fritillaries and blues. The black-veined white was increasingly abundant. In one of the meadows, an elderly lady was seemingly out collecting herbs, though I wasn't quite clear what for. In some areas herbs are cultivated to make herb teas. Sometimes it was hard to get good shots of the butterflies. However I rather like this one of a fritillary below, which makes the butterfly look some kind of weird early aeroplane with a massive wingspan.
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| Heath Fritillary |
The second wee valley was interesting as there were mostly small shrubs next to the stream. here the white admiral came into its own and we saw several. We also caught up with southern small white, comma, green-veined white.
By now I had decided to play it quiet on the flowers to avoid confusing myself even further but tagged along on the orchid walk as I was starting to get quite bad hay fever. I thought I'd look out for birds but there was nothing much of note apart from some red-rumped swallows. We did see a ghost orchid but I thought the red helleborine more attractive. A signpost indicated the existence of wildcats and apparently they are far from extinction in Bulgaria.
As yesterday, I've left a couple of gaps in the slide show for you to guess at because I'm not sure of them:
With more help from Bulgaria, the unidentified items near the beginning of the video have been identified as marsh fritillary and pearl-bordered fritillary. The two near the end were both chequered skipper.
ReplyDeleteThere was also one misidentification as the southern small white was in fact a wood white.