Venues covered were Tamion where we were staying, the Costalunga Pass, San Pellegrino Pass and the Passa Valles. My photographs throughout the trip concentrated mainly on butterflies:
Without cross-checking to previous sightings in Sri Lanka and Bulgaria, I reckoned that almond-eyed ringlet, alpine heath, geranium argus, large ringlet, olive skipper, silver-spotted skipper, sooty ringlet and tatania's fritillary were all first sightings for me.
One we didn't get a photograph of was a large blue that appeared towards the top of the San Pellegrino Pass. Our group leader Luca commented that he'd never seen one there before.
Alpine Heath and Mazarine Blue were to prove the most common of the smaller butterflies throughout the trip, though even they were considerably outnumbered by the chimney sweeper moth.
The marsh fritillary was the glaciegenita variant found in the Alps and much smaller that the ones I saw in Bulgaria.
The olive skipper is the most common of the greyish skippers, which are often hard to distinguish. The number of spots on the lower hind wing can give a strong clue.
One butterfly we couldn't track down was the scarce copper in spite of the abundance of its food plant.
The bees were slightly differently coloured than expected. The red-tailed bumblebee had faded to orange-tailed whereas the carder bee was as ginger as a tawny mining bee.
Incidentally, the nutcracker shot was the best I have so far managed.
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