Madeira Day 3

This was the day that I had allocated to visit the Biological Gardens and the Monte Palace Tropical Garden at Monte north of Funchal Centre. In the event, transport complications and lack of time meant I only went to the latter, which a German guy on yesterday's Butterfly Tour suggested would be better for butterflies.

Having failed to find the relevant bus stop and missed the hourly bus connection to the Tropical Garden I decided to take the cable car.  It cost more time and money but I thought well worth it as it offered good views over the whole area.  The cable car passes quite close over the houses whose owners can do nothing about it if a certain overhead distance is observed. Perhaps in protest, one man immediately below was tending his garden completely naked, provoking an ecstatic reaction from an Asian lady in the same car as me.

Arriving at the garden, I headed straight at the Lauressilva trees optimistically hoping for another Cleopatra but the downward path of broken grey stone was quite tricky and so spent most of the time looking at my own feet.

I wasn't overall quite sure what to make of the Tropical Garden.  It's certainly informative and well-resourced with plenty of trees and flowers but I felt overall a bit unnatural and disappointing.  It certainly didn't produce any interesting butterflies as speckled woods were all I saw.

One thing I started to notice on them though is the variation of the depth of background colour of the forewing.  In this example, it is particularly dark:

Speckled Wood

I guess the lighter versions have been on the wing longer.

As throughout the rest of my stay in Madeira, the only bees seen were buff-tailed bumblebees and honey bees.  Perhaps more appropriate to the tropical theme was this oriental darter, doing its best  to imitate a twig.

Island Darter

Otherwise it all had a bit of a zoo-like feel.  There was a few ponds in the oriental garden, one with masses of koi carp and another with masses of croaking frogs.

Koi Carp

Croaking Frogs

A big hit with the visitors was this small pond full of flamingos, amusingly tossing their heads almost in synchrony as they expressed apparent verbal displeasure.

Flamingos

Presumably they've had their wings clipped to prevent them from flying away.

More interesting was another small pond containing a couple of ducks I couldn't recognise. These are wood ducks, a rare American migrant to Madeira and perhaps therefore also not entirely there by choice.

Male Wood Duck

Just before leaving I was reminded of reading that robins abroad are much shier than in the UK when this wee one turned up so close I could almost have caught it.

Robin

While waiting 30 minutes for the service bus back to Funchal, I did see a white butterfly at distance.  As the Madeiran Large White is extinct and the African migrant is a rarity, I'm 98% certain it must have been a small white.

As if by habit I made again for the Municipal Garden.  Once again the Monarch was in evidence except at this time there were at least four of them.  From time to time they performed the speckled wood habit of spiralling aggressively upwards, this time flying around to the background noise of a prolonged religious ceremony.

Monarchs

And just to prove they're not always completely elusive, I snapped a buff-tailed bumblebee on a nice flower

Buff-tailed Bumblebee

Tuesday 29th April

Fishing trip to Brooms but unfortunately Alex elected to fish the square which seems to have become a small fish haven and some of the bait was not up to standard.  Soon gave up with prawn but stuck on large baits through a series of pathetic bites to capture one skimmer and one small roach.  Not much movement in margins but Alex did see a couple of 'ghosts' (white koi).

Wednesday 16th May

Fishing trip to Brooms FI to test before Malcolm comes up next week as weather has been so chilly this month.

Margin fishing was disrupted by swan eating bait off the bottom and sport slow.  Did manage a koi and a common (latter on very short rigged half hooker) and turned the whole thing round a bit by getting a nice barbel of about 4lb from the swim the swan had disturbed on a worm, which was a good piece of thinking.  Saw splendid fox with huge brush tail on other side of F1.