Bordeaux Day 3

With day time temperatures scheduled to hit a maximum of 36C I was a bit cautious about my plan of heading towards the sea at Lacanau and reckoned to do about half of the approximately 120km round trip.  In the event, thanks to an early start and a good day in the saddle I managed about three-quarters of it, turning back a good way past St Helene.

It was quite a long way to the National Park I wanted to suss out and the main thing I noticed meanwhile was the abundance of some yellow flowers on the outskirts of Bordeaux.

Common Evening Primrose?

Suggestions by AI favour Common Evening Primrose, though this sighting was actually timed at 8.31 a.m. Hmmm?

Meanwhile also a sign advertised the presence of a rare mammal, the 'genet commune' in the Parc des Jalles  Apparently it's totally nocturnal so i didn't look for it.

Anyway there was an early success on reaching the Park when I came across one of the target species - a pearly heath, not a great discovery but it's as near to the UK as I've ever seen one. 

Pearly Heath

Other heaths seen were decidedly common.

After that things frankly got a bit frustrating.  I stopped at a promising looking spot a few miles South of Salaunes, where there was clearly a lot of action.  A number of brown butterflies were fluttering around and arguing with some speckled wood but they refused to settle properly.  I wondered distantly about gatekeeper but could not prove my hunch.  After a while an impressive marbled white spent a long time working the path edges but without landing at all.

So the only ones things I captured on camera were small skippers and, a bit later on, some burnet moths.

Small Skipper

? spot Burnet Moth

I think all the several skippers I saw on the day were small.

From this point on it got even more frustrating.  I notice that the photos I tried to take tended to be poorly focused just as the butterflies' behaviour got extremely skittish and now wonder if these factors were the result of the increasing heat which duly exceeded the 35C mark as promised.

Having just passed Salaunes (where there was thankfully a water pump) I noticed a number of blues zooming around but couldn't manage to get anything like a decent view.  They definitely weren't commons, having a brighter shade of upper wing and dark spots on the underwing.  I wondered about nazarine blue but I think they were smaller than that.

So I rode on thinking to stop at St Helene, seeing continued brimstone, the odd clouded yellow and occasional annoying marbled white until I could smell the sea air and eventually realised I'd overshot the turnaround point.

It was worth it though as my last stop was for another group of fast-flying blues.  After much patience, 

I finally did see one settle for several minutes.  So I managed to identify it as I sat sprawled in the roadside grass with the thing virtually between my feet!  

In the end it was nothing special or new - a short-tailed blue and my only disappointment now was that I didn't get a better shot of it.

Short-tailed Blue

So mystery solved - always assuming that they were the same as the ones at Salaunes! We will never know.