Madeira Day 6 and Evaluation

"So what happened  to Madeira Day 5?" you might understandably ask.  The simple answer is I had a day off on the sun lounger and in the swimming pool!

Day 6 was my last day in Madeira but an evening flight left me time for another short walk.

My original intention was to walk the road to Quinte Grande for a snack but on getting there sooner than expected and not feeling hungry I changed plan. It wasn't far to get to Campanario, so I decided to revisit briefly the Levada do Norte and make my way back to Cabo Girao via the Vereda das Fumas instead of through the tunnel.

Although I only spent half an hour on the levada, it was pretty productive although the wagtails were no longer around.  

There were firstly a couple of hoverflies I wasn't sure about and still haven't identified.

Hoverfly

Hoverfly

There was a suggestion that the one on the left is a marmalade hoverfly but I'm not convinced - it's plainer in pattern, darker and has a different body shape to ones I have seen.

 Near the area where I saw the painted lady two days ago a small white flew over and settled on the other side of the levada.

Small White

What is interesting here is the paucity of markings. Presumably a male, the spot is very pale and there is a complete lack of making on the edge of the upper forewing.

Of course there was a profusion of speckled woods and this one is an example where the background colour of the upper wing is a bit paler than the one I saw in the Tropical Garden.

Speckled Wood

Also settling very briefly was a butterfly that was clearly a blue but on checking the hurried photograph, clearly not the common blue I first expected.

Long-tailed Blue

In fact it is a long-tailed blue, known locally as pea blue, but the poor focus makes it hard to see the underwing pattern and of course the tails are not in view.

Crossing the road onto the lower section of the levada, a red admiral was for a change obliging enough to pose for the camera.

Red Admiral

However the next stretch, which is partially shaded by a rocky skyline, was less productive until the very end of the Vereda das Fumas.  Here there was a brownfield area with plenty of flowers that was attracting the attention of several clouded yellow.  I thought one I saw might be a female and spent some time trying to chase it down.  In fact I think they were all males.

Clouded Yellow

I like the detail on the head anyway. Today I had the feeling that the butterflies were just starting to get really active after a week of good weather.

After an ice cream at the tourist trap, I took a last brief walk up to the capella but saw nothing there of interest and it was time to head for home.

_______________________________________

In terms of overall comments, Madeira has to be mainly about the flowers.  I was really struck on flying in from the sands of Fuertaventura how green the island is. Anyone who loves flowers will be delighted by the immense variety.

In that respect it is perhaps puzzling, given the vast number of species of flowers how few pollinators there are - only 18 species of butterfly and one diurnal moth and around 20 species of bee, less than the number of bumblebees alone in the UK.  

Presumably wasps, flies and hoverflies make up some of the numbers but I still find myself wondering how so many flowers get pollinated.  One plant I never saw was buddleia and I idly speculated that its introduction might lead to an explosion of butterfly numbers.

One explanation for the lack of species variety of course is that Madeira is an isolated island so some of the species that are there have been imported accidentally or otherwise.  However some butterflies clearly make it on the wing from Africa and the Canary islands. There are also a number of obvious inconsistencies.  Madeira has small tortoiseshell, red admiral and painted lady so why not peacock? How come the large white died out when it is so plentiful elsewhere? How does the relatively even temperature on the island affect the development of butterflies and bees that flourish in other places where there is much greater seasonal variation in temperature?

These are just the thoughts that ran through my mind rather than any attempt to find a scientific explanation. I'm certainly glad I went and enjoyed what I found.

Canal du Midi - Part 2

The third day on the road was devoted to a round trip to Minerve, one of the oldest villages in France.  However I was at least as much interested in the huge gorge that stretches out to the West, as I reckoned there was a chance of seeing some wallcreepers, a bird I have wanted to see for a long time but isn't too predictable and varies its nesting sites.

It wasn't to be.  In spite of extensive work with the binoculars, all I could see apart from a few crows and other hirondelles was a good number of crag martins flying around the gorge, plus a fleeting sighting of a red-rumped swallow.  Notably the River Cesse was totally dry, so one suspects this may have had an effect. The absence of birds of prey was disappointing as some quite exotic species have been seen here in the past.

I got a bit distracted into looking at butterflies again in a flower meadow, where a wall brown, a grayling and another brown argus were to be seen.  The latter is interesting in that the black spot on the upper wing is encircled by white. This is normally a characterstic of the French version of Spanish Argus but other aspects of this worn specimen don't suggest any further similarity.

Wall Brown

Grayling

Brown Argus

After still not seeing interesting birdlife in Minerve itself, I managed to catch up with a couple of chalkhill blues 'at it' by the roadside. Again there are several subspecies to choose from but I think they were pretty much the standard offering.

Chalkhill Blue

After that the wind got up and I headed for the swimming pool in the B&B at Olonzac.

Long-tailed Blues

Day 3 was another canalside run through to Narbonne, some delightful scenery breaking up some of the more monotonous sections. Again the butterflies got active once the afternoon was underway, and there were a few nice common blues on the hook in the Canal just past Paraza. Then, on passing a lock just after Le Somail, I noticed some faster flying blues homing in on a single plant. They didn't settle very long so photographs were hard to get but the distinctive underwing pattern shows that they were long-tailed blues - even though one was hard put to see the actual tail, which is basically just a bristle.

A little later I managed to identify at least one bird, a black redstart.  It was surprising not to see more of them in the wine producing areas which are common around here.

Riding past a woodland area next top the canal, I then caught sight of a swallowtail which didn't settle.  At first I thought it wasn't the stadard variety as it was flying rather delicately.  Past the Port de la Robine, I followed another for ages without it settling before I finally got a shot of a delapidated specimen, clearly a standard swallowtail.  Something similar was happening with coppers, as I thought, but when I got one to settle on the path, also just past the Port de la Robine, it proved to be, as far as I could determine, a sparsely marked spotted fritillary.

Swallowtail

Spotted Fritillary

Following a cross country diversion away from the Canal, I managed to see a couple of decent-sized fish, probably dace or carp but they bolted under a bridge as soon as they saw me and couldn't be induced to re-emerge by flicking a few sundry titbits into the water.