Dolomites Days 1 and 2

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.

Bulgaria - Day 5

As it was our last morning in Tehsel, I decided to take an early morning walk down to the village where it was reported that eleonora's falcon was being sighted daily in pursuit of hirundines.  Typically it only appeared briefly and I didn't see it and also only heard the serin that was calling nearby.  Later in the day we were also to hear a cirl bunting calling.

Hirundines were around in plenty, as there were througout the trip.  Crag martin, pallid swift, barn swallow and red-rumped swallow were all seen often and the house martins were certainly not confined to residential areas.  In the mountains, alpine swifts were also to be seen.

 Transferring to a new location took us through the lowlands in splendid weather and resulted in a bonanza of sightings though I did miss the ilex hairstreak, which was quick to fly off and my great banded grayling was

seriously out of focus.  I was happier with the photographs I managed to get, though not with my recording skills which meant there were again some things I couldn't identify and others where identification may be inaccurate.

Of course there is a lot of variability between genders and amount of wear.  I got one shot of the map butterfly that looks nothing like as it should and this black-veined white is a good example - so worn that it has become semi-transparent.                   
The grizzled skipper is  a good example of an identification problem in another way.  In the Balkans there are something like twenty different varieties as opposed to our one, so at times you have to give up unless there is an expert to hand. 

It was a day of headlines and star acts.  There were numerous beautiful scarce coppers in the morning, and even when we settled down for a picnic lunch, there was a giant beetle almost the size of my brown rat scurrying around. Unfortunately I forgot the name but it only occurs within the Southern Balkans in Europe.

We caught up with both eastern festoon and in the afternoon swallowtail, the latter being first recorded on video before it finally came into land:

In one meadow, the elusive large blue was spotted.  It disappeared, hard to track because of its dark pattern, but I hung around and felt quite proud when it reappeared and I managed to follow it for thirty or forty yards before it landed. Just afterwards, we came across a male cardinal fritillary, the biggest fritillary in the Balkans.

This was quite exciting but I think that the best photograph I took at the riverside location was this shot of the beautiful demoiselle as the detail has come out so well:

The whole group was excited when, further upstream, we found a group of whites and blues 'puddling' i.e. absorbing salt from the muddy banks.  As you can see there was a whole mass of them, including some of the rarer species like escher's blue and chapman's blue, all in a great profusion:

Apparently only male butterflies do this.

Then further along, we found a couple of bushes that were swarming with silver-washed fritillaries, including the grey female form (valezina).

It was quite a day indeed: