JC's Traveblog

We’ve been back from La Belle France for about six weeks now and it seems a little like a distant memory. Despite our suffering worse weather than we’d hoped, we did seem to reuse quite a lot of pixels on our wildlife and nature interests. We were lucky enough to see several species new to us and our catalogues have grown substantially. In that respect, it was a very successful trip.

It’s been a long and laborious process but I’ve finally managed to update our insect web albums. Not wishing to make any single album soporifically large, I’ve now separated butterflies from moths, and dragonflies from damselflies.

Those sharing my love of six-footed friends can see more than these two preview shots in the updated web albums here:

http://www.curdhome.co.uk/photos/Butterflies 

http://www.curdhome.co.uk/photos/Moths 

http://www.curdhome.co.uk/photos/Dragonflies 

http://www.curdhome.co.uk/photos/Damselflies

It’s always quite a thrill when I see a new species of butterfly. I don’t mean a new one to science, of course, just a species that I haven’t personally seen before. The excitement is usually caused by the more colourful species, though. This time in France, I was waxing lyrical about a white, for Darwin’s sake.

We had finally been graced with some brilliantly sunny weather and temperatures were hitting 35°C/95°F where we were staying at Fanjeaux, a little south of Carcassonne. Having been told of an attractive lake – a reservoir, actually, enclosed by a damn – with walks, we decided to go up into the Pyrenees to have a look and cool down a little. Who knows, maybe I’d get lucky and see an Apollo butterfly. [Ed: Dream on.]

It’s about a 90-minute drive up to the reservoir and, as usual, we had not made an early start so we stopped en route for a picnic lunch before hitting the walking trails. We found a delightful picnic area beside a river babbling its way down the mountain. Half way through my sandwich I glanced at a white butterfly feeding on some nearby flowers. I really only glanced at it because I was keeping an eye out for those elusive Apollos. This, of course, was not an Apollo but it did look unusual, not your ubiquitous Large White. The underside of the wings sported a fine tracery of black lines. Vague recollections of something called a Black-veined White surfaced. Butterfly hunting trumps hunger so I exchanged my half sandwich for a whole camera and bounded off to try and snag the delightful creature on pixels.

As usual with whites, the Black-veined White (Aporia crataegi) tends to rest with its wings closed. Not so much of a problem because the underside and topsides match. However, I did manage to get a shot of the topsides as it spread its wings and took off. Freezing a butterfly at take off shows a little of the interesting contortions they go through flying. This also shows the forewings looking near transparent in places so this may be a female – it’s supposedly the females that exhibit this feature. A reasonably successful first encounter.

France is seething with Marbled Whites (Melanargia galathea) so I’ve watched thousands of them flitting about but I hadn’t yet grabbed a decent picture of one; again, generally because they sit with their wings closed. This time I found one that was periodically opening its wings as it fed – well, half-opening, at least. While I was clicking away, though, I did take the underside and only when I looked later did I realize how attractively marked the underside of a Marbled White actually is.

Regrettably still no Apollo but these guys will shortly be added to my butterfly web album/catalogue.

We’re getting there – we’ve nearly waded through all our outstanding photographs from both our recent French trip and from the wedding we attended a week after returning. At least now the photographs are not on real film, I didn’t have to sit scanning hundreds of pictures in.

This year’s trip to France was not great as regards weather but, in my opinion at least, the wildlife helped to make up for it. We didn’t see some of the birds we would normally expect to see at springtime (bee-eaters, golden orioles) but I did manage to add substantially to the contents of my insect catalogues.

I’ve always been captivated by butterflies. Even as a child I collected Brooke Bond PG Tips cards and my favourite collection was the butterflies. As a child in Watford, though, I never seemed to see anything exotic myself; the cards and books were my only contact with much other than the ubiquitous Large White (a.k.a. Cabbage White). As a result, having begun regular pilgrimages to France, my eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to colourful butterflies that I’d never before seen. I was quite likely to slam the brakes on (having checked the rear-view mirror, of course), leap from the car and chase headlong across a field after a fluttering beauty.

Most captivating of all was undoubtedly the so-called Scarce Swallowtail. It really is a strikingly beautiful creature. It is also one of the more cooperative butterflies in that it sits with its wings open at rest. The picture (right) is from the days of real film (50 ASA Fuji Velvia). The Scarce Swallowtail doesn’t visit our shores but, it seemed to me, one didn’t have to go far south in France before the strangely named Scarce Swallowtail became relatively common. Not a French trip went by without my seeing at least one. There is a (regular) Swallowtail which is, apparently, a rare visitor to Britain but I had never  knowingly seen one anywhere. Had I suspected that one was about, I would undoubtedly have checked the rear-view mirror, slammed on the anchors and leapt out excitedly.

At least, that was the case until this year. This year, not only did I not see any Scarce Swallowtails but I finally saw and captured (photographically, that is) a couple of (regular) Swallowtails. The first was flitting about frenetically  on a plateau at about 1400m in the Pyrenees. The second was hungrily feeding in the Gorge de la Frau. Well, if you’re going to flit about frenetically, you have to feed well, I suppose. This time captured digitally (800 ASA pixels), here is what I consider to be my best shot.

Finally, and just because I was lucky enough to snag a Swallow in flight on this year’s trip, here is the bird after which both these fabulous creatures are named. The Scarce Swallowtail has longer “streamers”, more like the bird but, in a beauty contest, it would be hard to  pick a winner, wouldn’t it?

Fortunately, we don’t have to.

We are both a little snowed under with digital images at the moment. One week after returning from a seven week trip around France, we went to a friend’s wedding and banged off several hundred more photos. Consequently, it is taking us a while to filter out the rubbish. However, while Carol works on a wedding album, I am making some progress on our French web album.

With both of us clicking away at critters large and small, some of my progress requires the use of iSpot of which I have become a HUGE fan. We don’t always know precisely what we’ve captured on pixels and wouldn’t want to misreport what we’ve seen. The wonderful folks at iSpot usually clear things up and frequently give more information than is found in our field guides, so another big thank you to them.

As keen as we both are on nature, we do, of course, recognize that it isn’t always pretty. This last trip seemed to produce a larger than usual bag of somewhat macabre sights that we were “privileged” to witness. Of course, for the most part these situations are just nature taking its course with one subsection, the predators, trying to live of another subsection, the prey.

The first instance provides an opportunity to use a picture that is interesting enough but, perhaps, not quite good enough for a trip web album, largely because the subject was too distant, even for TheBeast, and going away (now there’s a surprise). A black kite swooped down on our favourite camp site lake, the sheep farm at Fanjeaux, and is clearly flying off with some hapless victim in its talons. You can see the head down examining its catch. The lake is teeming with thousands of frogs but there are also fish, as we shall shortly see.

Continuing in the less-disturbing vein, on one of farmer Luc’s walks, while I was off chasing very active butterfly prey harmlessly with pixels, Carol spotted a relatively small spider apparently tucking into a butterfly, more specifically a Clouded Yellow. I have no idea what species the spider could be but I may try iSpot to see if the good folks there can enlighten me. Being a fan of butterflies, it isn’t my favourite image but the spider is just doing what comes naturally. Last year we saw a very large Garden Spider tucking into my other favourite, a damselfly.

Now the feint-hearted should, perhaps, look away. In addition to literally thousands of frogs and some fish, our lake (we get very possessive about it) contained at least one water snake. One day we spotted it swimming along with a fish (a perch, I believe) in its mouth. It seemed to be having trouble with the size of its “prey item”. It struggled about over some weed but eventually left the lifeless fish alone, uneaten. What a waste! A day or so later, while stalking dragonflies and damselflies by la digue (the dyke) that retains the lake, we spotted a snake, perhaps the same one, tackling a humongous tadpole. These tadpoles were the Goliaths of tadpoles, being at least 3 ins/9 cms long with v. large heads. Those with a strong enough stomach may be able to see that the poor tadpole, still alive, has a fair sized hole in the top of its head and quite a bit of skin missing. Once again, the snake seemed to give up on its over-sized prey and left it to die a slow death.

Finally to something a little different. This has nothing to do with making a living; it just seemed to be parent brutality. The lake was home to a number of breeding waterfowl, amongst them a family of Coots with seven chicks. After watching them for a week or so we noticed one parent biting the head of one of its chicks, for no readily apparent reason. It happened several times. I assume that it was the same chick but I have no evidence to that effect. I used iSpot and was told that this behaviour is not uncommon with Coots and that they will occasionally pick on a chick until it stops following them around and, presumably, perishes. One comment from iSpot was, “it’s hard to like Coots”. I know what they mean. Maybe this has something to do with clutch size? We don’t know. Both parents were otherwise very attentive and tireless feeders of their brood. Peculiar!

Odonata is the order of insects that includes the dragonflies and damselflies. Today, while Carol was off meeting her genealogical pals, I went off to meet some of my insect pals. Another chap wandered in flashing a new Canon EOS 50D equipped with a 500mm Sigma lens and a close focussing ring. Grrr! I carried on regardless with my EOS 40D and 300mm lens. [Note to self: really should replace our old film SLR close focussing rings with some that are compatible with a digital body.]

The butterflies really had quietened down even though it was quite sunny to begin with. I was trying to find a small white to add the collection but they were either too ragged or too uncooperative, sometimes both. I did, however, manage to grab another shot of a Green-veined White (left) which, given its high-contrast background, seems quite artistic to me. I am, however, a self-confessed artistic numbskull and hardly qualified to judge.

The thistles were, as usual, attracting various bees so I snapped a couple of them for good measure and a new subject. I thought the markings and colours might make them relatively easy to identify. Silly me! I remain clueless as to their identity.

The real gems came down by the side of the pond which seemed to be teeming, relatively speaking, with damselflies and dragonflies of various sorts. It was also teeming with silly folks with 300mm lenses slipping on grass and falling on their backsides with a jarring crash. Ouch! However, I recovered and was particularly keen on a new species for me: what I think is a so-called Common Darter (far left). I wish creatures with such wonderful markings and colouration were not called “common” but I get their point. I was also excited by the very delicate White-legged Damselfly (middle left). Of course, I had no idea what I was snapping until I returned home to the books. I think the third suspect (near left) is a repeat of a female Common Darter but don’t quote me.

I was most intrigued by what I correctly guessed was egg-laying activity. I’d seen some pairs both flying and resting coupled together. This formation, I now know, is called the copulation wheel for obvious reasons (left). Following that, however, the pairs of some species fly along joined in what is known as the tandem position for ovipositing whereby they repeatedly dip down to the water to allow the female (rear of the pair) to deposit her eggs. They move very fast and it’s darn difficult to snap them but I tried and got something half-way recognizable (right).

At this rate I’ll be joining the British Dragonfly Society. They have a place at Wicken Fen that must be worth a visit.

Due to popular demand

I received a suggestion that I group together some of our insect photographs, mainly butterflies recently featured in this blog, to form a composite Insects photograph album. Since I was considering doing exactly that, I’ve done it. I was originally thinking “Butterfly Album” but then realized we had, over several years of travelling through France, collected several other insects of interest that might have objected to their omission.

For those sharing my fascination with our six-legged friends (from which category I personally may have to exclude wasps), the resulting album can be found at:

http://www.curdhome.co.uk/photos/Insects/index.htm

This addition has caused a slight reorganizing of our photograph album index page but I think I prefer the change.

Sunday was a day for recovering after the excesses of Saturday night entertaining so we were taking it easy. The sun deigned to put in another appearance (Saturday was good, too) and I thought things were a little too laid back so I finally dragged myself back to our local Sandhouse Lane Nature Reserve to see what the locals were up to. Now we’re into August things certainly seemed a little quieter but I did find a few specimens at which to point my camera.

My first victim was what I now believe to be a female Common Darter (left). Originally I suspected it was a female Keeled Skimmer. Unfortunately my Insects of Britain and Western Europe field guide, purchased by Carol for me last year, is particularly poor on the female of the species, showing only a few, and some confusion arises. Internet photographs to the rescue, thankfully. This specimen’s right hind wing is missing a wing tip, unfortunately, but it was worth capturing. The rest of the inhabitants of my butterfly patch were the more common suspects this year: Painted Ladies and Large Whites. I managed to snag a Large White (right) with partially open wings just to add to my collection but I really need to adopt my Corfiot Cleopatra hunting technique for these, catching them in flight. That technique would be made easier with Corfiot levels of sunshine, though.

A moth with which I was unfamiliar dropped in on the thistles and began feeding, fluttering rapidly all the while and never resting. I banged off a few speculative frames and was delighted to find that I’d lucked out; one fortuitous shot captured the wing patterns pretty well. Back at the ranch, I noticed what I hoped would be a distinctive white mark on both forewings so I began flicking through my trusty insect identification book again. Sure enough, the Y-shaped white mark gives a number of similar moths their names. The constant fluttering whilst feeding makes me think that this one is the so-called Silver-Y moth. (There are also Beautiful Golden-Y and Plain Golden-Y moths.)

Wandering around the reserve I spotted what I thought was a different blue butterfly, one of those with little or no blue colouration. Like the dragonfly, It wasn’t a great specimen but I snapped it for identification. Maybe the damaged specimens are due to the fact that we’re coming towards the end of the season after some frenetic mating and territorial spats. My “new” blue turns out to be the female Common Blue, after all. I’ve repeated my male Common Blue shot for comparison.

On Friday Carol was off playing with her mother and I was left at home to amuse myself. So, after I’d finished my chores, I took myself on another hunting expedition, armed only with a camera, to Sandhouse Lane Nature Reserve to see if I could add to my growing collection of insect portraits. The sun was being typically shy when I arrived so the only activity in which the butterflies seemed interested was resting and conserving energy. Inactivity makes them a little difficult to spot so I resorted to the rather unsubtle device of tramping about in the vegetation to scare them up. Close to the trees I managed to disturb and track a Speckled Wood (right) which obligingly settled back down on the ground for me to photograph.

I wasn’t seeing anything else new in butterfly land so I wandered around the rest of the reserve to see what else I could find. What I found was quite a few damselflies and dragonflies, a couple of which cooperated long enough for me to get the camera fixed on them. The damselfly (right) is a so-called Common Blue Damselfly. That seems to be a rather ignoble name to me for such an attractively marked and delicate creature. The dragonfly (left) is the similarly common (what else would I expect) but somewhat oddly named Southern Hawker. I assume it doesn’t keep spitting and the only thing that I can see it selling is death to other flying insects. Imagine being a modestly-sized fly and having that giant screaming at you head-on. This specimen had a wingspan of about 3 inches/75 mm.

The sun did put in a half-hearted appearance for my second hour and managed to liven up the locals a little. On a second visit to butterfly heaven I snagged a better shot of a Gatekeeper (left) courtesy of there being more light making possible a tighter aperture setting. Then, as I was leaving, a couple of whites began feeding perfectly positioned at my eye level. How considerate of them. Whites can seem a little tedious compared to their more colourfully marked cousins. They also tend to keep their topsides hidden since they most often settle with their wings closed. In the case of this Green-veined White (right), though, the situation was perfect as the markings giving rise to its name are on its underside. Just look at the eye, too. It’s speckled – quite staggering.

A very worthwhile trip from an initially unpromising day.

On Sunday, Carol introduced me to one of the sites that she and her colleagues at the Greensand Trust look after, the Sandhouse Lane Nature Reserve. The reserve is a relatively small area surrounding a disused sand pit and is sandwiched, some might say hidden, between Heath and Reach and the A5. Much of the trust’s conservation work somewhat perversely seems to involve pulling plants up and/or cutting trees down. However, it also seems to be effective. Almost as soon as we had entered the reserve, we came across an area seething with Lepidoptera. I had to content myself with looking since I was unfortunately without a camera.

Yesterday, having first busied myself with an arduous job replacing one of the towing electrical sockets on our car, I corrected my original oversight and returned to Sandhouse Lane in the late afternoon camera-in-hand. Well, camera-in-rucksack actually but you get my drift. Butterflies like sun as much as I do and, since there was little in evidence, I wasn’t certain that my intended subjects would cooperate but cooperate they did.

Right inside the gate I ended up stalking a Comma butterfly (left), albeit slightly the worse for wear (which I noticed only after returning to process the shots). It didn’t settle for long before it zoomed off to tussle with an intruder, presumably hence its wear. Incidentally, it’s called a Comma because there is a tiny white mark in the shape of a comma – on the underside. Next up was a brown (right); brown butterflies are many and various and can be difficult to identify in the heat of battle, as it were. Photos help greatly; they may not be quite as effective as an ether jar and a magnifying glass but the pants weather damages populations quite enough without over-zealous collectors imposing further reductions. This one is a Gatekeeper, a.k.a. Hedge Brown.

In this summer (I can’t believe I said that – this, a summer?) of Painted Ladies, Sandhouse Lane had what looked like more than its fair share but, having snapped a Painted Lady on our buddleia recently, I was more interested in other quarry. [Aside: good Lord, stalking quarry in a quarry, what a silly language!] On our first excursion I’d seen an unidentified blue and what I suspected was a Small Copper. I was hoping they’d reappear and sure enough they did. Blues are a little perverse, sometimes closing and sometimes opening their wings. Frequently so-called blue butterflies are so perverse that they are brown. This blue (left) was actually blue, however, and turned out to be a Common Blue (well, of course). Considering my amateur’s lens together with their small size and nervous disposition, I was pretty pleased with the result. The Small Copper (right) isn’t quite such a clear shot but it’s worth a look and will do me for now.

The thistles were doing the main work of attracting many of the critters. I managed to grab an even smaller butterfly that I think is a Small Skipper (left) and a striking moth called a Six-spot Burnet (right). The shot where I seem to have gate crashed two Six-spot Burnets having some fun together shows all six spots more clearly. Well, alright, all twelve spots since there are two of them. It looks as though there may soon be a lot more Burnets – far too many spots to count.

I must return if we ever get another dry day.

During this final week of the Tour de France, ITV4 has scheduled several additional days of live coverage on their main channel, as opposed to screening it via the interactive system (the “red button”). This is a mixed blessing. The main ITV4 channel coverage comes swamped with extremely irritating American-length-and-frequency commercial breaks whereas the ITV4 interactive coverage is unexpectedly and blissfully commercial free. The interactive coverage provides 3+ hours of live action with absolutely no breaks whatsoever. On one day there was a notable exception to this rule when there was a terminal break in the final kilometre of the stage apparently caused by an automatic cut-off to transmission. That little glitch has not recurred and the one and only advantage that I can see of the main channel’s coverage is that it is accompanied by the incisive, dry wit of Gary Imlach.

Commercials on most of these “fringe” channels are doubly irritating because the same handful of inane commercials seem to be repeated at every break; there’s little or no variation. An already irksome device becomes insufferable. For sanity’s sake, it’s necessary to find something more appealing to do in these commercial interludes, such as scrubbing the kitchen floor or visiting the dentist for that overdue drilling of a cavity.

Today I was lucky, the sun had emerged after our obligatory downpour, and our buddleia bush was attracting Peacock butterflies. A couple of days ago it had been attracting Painted Ladies and Commas but now it had moved on to Peacocks. Marvellous! Since the Peacock is one of those cooperative butterflies that settles to feed with its wings open, I was in a position to avoid a trip to the dentist by grabbing my camera and sneaking outside to try and snap one. The butterflies were clearly at pains to save me from several trips to the dentist because, initially, they insisted on settling high up and at angles unsuited to portraits. Eventually, however, one did decide to eat on a sunny lower branch and I managed to add it to my Lepidoptera catalogue. Nothing difficult about the shot but it proved to be a good clean specimen.

I wonder what might be next? Red Admiral butterflies are partial to buddleia, too.