Day 3 was again spent at altitude on longish walk to a refugio in the Rosengarten area. By contrast Day 4 was at lower level in the Eggental valley. The sightings are in alphabetical order but I can tell you where each were seen if you request it in a comment.
A first sighting for me was the provencal short-tailed blue plus pretty much all the moths and more exotic bugs but it was the chequered blue and the rosey footman that were thought by the guides to be obvious rarities. The one that got away was meleager's blue, seen only by our Italian guide, Luca.
People in the group were most excited about the scarce swallowtail and the white admiral plus the standard swallowtail that eluded my camera but I had seen all these before at other locations, notably Bulgaria. The same is true of the valezina variation of the silver-washed fritillary. The more normal version was also around the Eggental, nectaring on buddleia. White admirals were all over the place there, flattering through the riverside trees, but it took a visit to the field of a (rather annoyed-looking) farmer to find one that settled nicely on a flower.
I found it tricky to spot identify the mountain green-veined whites which didn't look very green at all.
Although common here in the UK, we saw only a couple of commas and one small copper during the whole holiday. If you look carefully at the small copper, you will see it has a number of blue spots on the upper hind-wing. Apparently, this means it was a third brood specimen.
It was ironic that we saw both purple and white-letter hairstreak, both species I was thinking of tracking down in my return home, as Luca revealed that neither species had been seen on any of his previous tours to the area. Incidentally, the purple hairstreak, best seen here in oak trees towards dusk was happily eating honeydew on sallows at midday.
Indeed we discussed several examples of wildlife behaving differently from country to country.
