Slovenia - Day 1

Another year, another summer so obviously time for another butterfly holiday, this time to Slovenia with Greenwings  which is where I was last week.

By way of a prelude, I think all the group I was with were impressed with the cleanliness and friendliness of Slovenia.  Although a small country, it contains large tracts of natural countryside attractive to those of many forms of wildlife.  The locations we visited were in the West and North West of Slovenia.

Day 1

The first few days were spent near the town of Rakov.  We got in a reasonable session  at a meadow near our hotel but the rains came down while looking round a second area by the River Reka, so we ended up settling for a birdwatching session near a farm.

It wasn't all about butterflies anyway.  By the river there were numerous damselflies, of which the banded demoiselle tends to catch the attention.

Banded Demoiselle

White-legged Damselfly

On the pm birdwatch, a good number of species turned up, including whinchat, white crane, fieldfare, spotted flycatcher, tree sparrow, and black redstart.  Awaiting eye test, I didn't manage to photograph all that was seen.

Spotted Flycatcher

Black Redstart

Fieldfare

Tree Sparrows

We scored well on butterflies in the first field, but not so well by the river, which at the time we attributed to deteriorating weather conditions.  As often the case on my nature trips abroad, there are so many I made them into a short video, including a couple of moths:

I hope I haven't misidentified anything.  My notes suggest we also saw marbled and twin spot fritillaries.

A couple of specimens I struggled with were one bee I couldn't get anywhere with - possibly some sort of mining bee but could be a lot of things - and this cricket that could perhaps be a dark bush cricket.

Mining Bee?

Dark Bush Crcket?

Bulgaria Day 8

The last day of the holiday threatened to be a total rainoff.

We set off along another upland track similar to the one on Day 3 but it only lasted for half an hour or so. We had seen a sombre tit and a lesser spotted woodpecker and I got a photo of a brown argus before the heavens opened.

A strange butterfly

It looked like it would be in for the day and so we headed for the nearest town to do a little sightseeing instead.  We did see one butterfly there, though not of the kind we had been looking out for.  One of the group needed some dental treatment so we had lunch in town too, which all took a while.

Out of nowhere it then brightened up and so we headed off again, scouring some roadside meadows.  The butterfly sightings started to come slowly but surely and when we entered a small meadow near a river, there was half an hour when they were turning up in almost the same quantities we had experienced during the middle of the week.

We moved on to another couple of meadows towards the end of the day, but things were already quietening down somewhat.

Most were things we had already seen but there were some additions, notably idas blue, sloe hairstreak and eastern baton blue.  I think though the joy at seeing a good number of butterflies on the wing again that was more important than hunting down new species.

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: