Dolomites: Scenery and Unidentified Flying Objects

Some leftovers and afterthoughts on my recent holiday...

Firstly it wouldn't be fair to finish without some sort of tribute to the fantastic scenery, so here's a little sequence of different views we  experienced over the week.  One of the slides is of the Marmolade glacier. where there had been a recent unfortunate tragedy leading to several fatalities:

Obviously this isn't a scientific journal but I do try to identify species as accurately as possible and no doubt get things wrong from time to time.  Here is a selection of items that, for whatever reason, I didn't manage to name with any certainty:

Please feel free to add a comment below if you have any of the answers, or disagree with ant of the identifications I have made on other posts over the last couple of weeks.   I'm sure I should have done better with the butterflies at least.

Still to sort out are the moths we saw in the moth trap on days one and two as I'm going to move on to other themes just now.  I imagine myself going through all the moths later on a winter's day but maybe it needs to be sooner than that before I forget...

In the Dolomites

Having heard one last cuckoo calling on 3rd  July (remarkably late for up here surely?) I braved the possibility of rail strikes and flight cancellations I set off for Gatwick Airport on the Tuesday to join a Naturetrek holiday "Butterflies of the Dolomites" the day after.  It didn't start too well as a three hour flight delay meant we didn't arrive at our hotel in the Fassa Valley until 11.00 p.m. local time.  However numerous rewarding sightings followed over the six active days that followed and at times the profusion of things to observe was almost overwhelming.

In spite of the holiday title, there was also a strong focus on wild flowers, a good number of bird sightings and a moth trap at the hotel.  One thing that surprised me was the relative lack of bees given there were so many flowers in the alpine meadows, but there were hoverflies and grasshoppers everywhere and some interesting bugs.  Perhaps due to the dry weather during the day apart from one brief shower, we didn't see many dragonflies and another factor was that many watercourses had dried up completely (global warming) and still water levels were low.

It's the photographs that tell the story best so I've arranged them in slide shows with brief commentaries.  However, I've left the contents of the moth trap to another time as it will take me a good while to identify all the species.

And it wasn't all clambering around and identifying obscurities either:

Resting at a rifugio