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

Some of Carol’s ancestors are from Hereford so we’ve brought Billy Bailey, our caravan, up for a long weekend so she can rummage around in the dusty archives. A day for Carol in the records office left me footloose and fancy free until I was due to collect her from Hereford at 4:00 PM.

Billy is on a Caravan Club site built on the grounds of an old station of a now dismantled railway. Has the dismantled railway been turned into a footpath or cycle track? No – darn! However, we’re about 2 miles north, as the crow flies rather than as the rambler walks, of a section of the Wye Valley Walk. That sounded quite promising. I togged up, slung the weighty camera rucksack on my back in case I bumped into any interesting critters and set off. My first mile had to be on roads but they were relatively quiet side roads so no problem, then I’d be onto bridleways and footpaths.

Finding the bridleways and footpaths marked on OS maps should be easy. Sometimes either it isn’t or I’m not very good at it. I failed to find my first choice, a bridleway. The hedges where it should have been seemed far too thick for any horse to find a way through. As an alternative I came across a footpath junction about ½ mile further on – further in the wrong direction, of course. Fortunately I didn’t want to take the northern footpath; there was a sign announcing it’s existence but you’d have needed a machete to get through the overgrown hedgerow. The southern branch, however, heading towards the Wye Valley was in a much better state of repair, clear and open, so I took it.

After about 3 miles of indifferently/inadequately marked footpaths and a few resultant leaps of faith helped by combining OS map detail with Garmin eTrek satnav data, I finally reached my goal and joined the Wye Valley Walk. Hopefully this would be better signed. It was but only just. Were I marking a track, I’d put signs where the path actually changed direction rather than 50 yards after the change of direction. I had a short detour because of one such situation but managed to correct myself. The signs – two discs, one declaring “Wye Valley Walk” and a second bearing a direction arrow – are there but some required something of a search. Unfortunately most of the direction arrows are either partly or completely worn out. The partly worn out ones are particularly dangerous because the remaining part of the arrow can easily be misinterpreted. Naturally I took the opportunity to misinterpret one such and took a little more exercise covering an extra mile in the wrong direction before I returned and corrected myself once again.

After seven or eight miles, probably six of which had been the correct miles, I was still some three miles from base and was looking for a suitable return route. On the OS map, I spotted what appeared to be a useful track, cutting a corner, that would get me back to the quiet country lane heading home. Half a mile got me to the start of the track. “Private Road”, it declared. “Bother!”, I said and retraced my steps for a third time. It was another three mile slog along tarmac back to Billy.

My timing was much better than my route finding, however – after 12 miles of dry weather, just as I turned into the camp site, it started raining. As I was refreshing myself prior to collecting Carol, the heavens opened.

After some traditional refreshment the rain ceased and I fought my way through the Hereford traffic – Hereford traffic is an absolute nightmare – and started looking for somewhere to park to rendez-vous with Carol. The first two car parks I tried were pay and display. Did I have any change? No, of course not. Could I pay with a credit card? No, of course not. I’d spotted a multi-storey car park on the way in; multi-stories are usually “pay on exit” jobs so I fought my way back through the nightmarish Hereford traffic and drove into it. “Pay and display”. Arghh! I was about to phone Carol and tell her that Hereford wouldn’t allow me to park legally when I remembered an old and probably fake £1 coin (it feels wrong and had been rejected a year or so ago when trying to park in Devon) lurking in the car. To my relief, the Hereford machine accepted it. I had an hour to find Carol.

Do not drive into Hereford expecting to be able to park without a good supply of £1 coins. In fact, my advice is not to drive into Hereford at all.

Carol had had a relatively fruitless search in the records office, too. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised:

• Our pitch number at camp site: 13
• Carol’s assigned microfiche reader: 13
• Carol’s locker at records office: 13
• date:  Friday 13th.

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.

I’ve written previously about liking the powerful effect a black background lends to some photographic images. This year, in France, we were in a position to get a few such images again. Once more it was, of course, more by luck than design. In this case, luck came in the form of a shaded woodland walk beside the very first few kilometres of La Rigole, a purpose built small canal feeding water into the Canal du Midi. Bright sunlight filtering through broad-leafed trees is a typically high contrast situation and, hey presto, some very dark backgrounds become possible.

La Rigole gave us our first encounters with Beautiful Demoiselles. That’s a  pretty crappy but nonetheless appropriate English name, in my opinion. Let’s give such a splendid creature its equally splendid Latin name: Calopteryx virgo. They proved to be a little awkward to photograph in some respects, insisting usually on sitting directly facing the sun. Consequently, the magnificent metallic blue of the males’ wings tended to be unlit. Eventually, though, I found one sitting on a pleasantly sunlit leaf  in front of a very shadowy rock beside the water. I confess that I have been a little naughtier than my usual self and cloned out a small but distracting blurred leaf that was inconsiderate enough to intrude into the frame at top left. The black is entirely natural, though.

I didn’t realize I’d be getting a dark background in this second example. The subject was an unknown critter to me and I was simply anxious to photograph it to add to my insect catalogue. The critter in question turned out to be a Hawthorn Shield Bug. It had the good grace and foresight to pose on a particularly artistic fern leaf – I just love that gracious curve up into the corner of the frame – with no surrounding clutter, poised above a wonderfully dark stretch of La Rigole.

If only all insects were as cooperative and photographically inclined.

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!

[Ed: I think I’m going to have to call this Retroblog.]

A couple of years ago we were fortunate enough to have our camping pitch in the south of France (Montagnac) used by several cicadas for their emergence, their transformation into consenting adults. Since we were on top of the action in that case, I managed to record the sequence on my trusty old film camera. It is still in our web album section and remains a highlight of our contact with wildlife.

Dragonflies have a very similar lifecycle except that, whereas cicada larvae live underground for many years, dragonfly larvae live underwater for a  somewhat less time. The actual time seems to vary  by species but a year or two seems typical.

Dragonflies abound at our favourite French sheep farm campsite from which we have recently returned. This year I had noticed several husk on the outside wall of les sanitaires (the toilet and shower block) and had wondered if they might be bush crickets or some such. Dragonfly exuviae (larval cases) never occurred to me since they looked too small and, most importantly, were some distance from the lakeside. When ready to emerge, I thought dragonfly larvae clambered out of the water up the nearest suitable grass stem and performed their magical transformation right there. Not always, it seems.

One morning Carol rushed excitedly back to our pitch announcing that a dragonfly was emerging right now. Not for the first time in history, I shot off towards the toilet block armed with a camera, monopod and long lens. Why do insects continually encourage me into such freedom-threatening situations?  What is it about toilet blocks that attracts them? I really am going to get arrested one day.

Regrettably I had missed the actual emergence from the larval case and the new soon-to-be adult was hanging on it, as they do. Here, however, is a slightly reduced sequence of the wings and abdomen developing into the full-sized adult. It’s a Black-tailed Skimmer, by the way, but I can’t tell if it’s a female or a male since both start out a similar colour. Incidentally, young males are called teneral males.

… and back online after a long break. The break was caused by my being encouraged not to blog whilst travelling because we (well, Carol) had read some disturbing nonsense about insurance companies using published absence as a potential excuse to decline claims should wandering burglars happen by. A sad world, isn’t it?

Anyway, here we are again. Our 7-week trip was decidedly indifferent [Ed: that’s being kind – it was crap.] vis-a-vis the weather. For some time the silly old Mediterranean seemed to attract and hold firmly on to some nasty storm system so we had quite a bit of rain. Fortunately, we didn’t have as much rain as the poor people in the Vars region who suffered fatal flooding. The French newspapers didn’t seem to be able to believe the conditions for a couple of weeks, either. Mon Dieu, c’est grave. Eventually, however, meteorological sanity returned, normal service was resumed and our final three weeks were gloriously sunny and, sometimes, almost too hot (35°C/95°F).

Largely due to the vagaries weather, we stayed put for longer than anticipated in one particular site and didn’t try much new. As a result, our scenery photography suffered a little though Carol did finally get a few worthwhile shots in the Pyrenees. ‘T was a very educational trip for nature and wildlife, however, and we’ve returned with far too many images of critters and plants. Carol has added greatly to her wild plants catalogue and I to my Lepidoptera and Odonata catalogues. Once the marathon job of sorting and sifting is done, a selected set will be published as usual.

Meanwhile, this was my first trip away armed with TheBeast so I was keen to try a few new things. After an awful lot of failed attempts, I did finally manage to catch some birds in flight. Darwin, aren’t swallows fast!? The night heron was much more co-operative though it did seem a little confused about the time of day. To be fair, the book only says they are mostly active at night, and it was evening (hence the quality of the light).

We spent our last three weeks at our oft-visited sheep farm in Fanjeaux. It has a lake overrun with frogs which is, I suspect, what attracts the herons. There are also fish, now that the lake has been restocked after what seemed to be a localized near-extinction event.  One evening the lake was visited by a cruising black kite and, though the picture isn’t great, I can’t resist using it because it has clearly caught something in its talons.

Maybe I’m going to need a new name to replace Traveblog?

So, as I said, on Wednesday we spun over to Harwich to drop Keith and Marlene at the port where they were due to embark on Jewel of the Seas for their cruise through the Baltic Sea to Russia and back. They’d have been happy to go by train but Carol was keen to visit a first cousin once removed so we forced them to endure a cross country 2½ hour trip in our car. It’s gotta beat lugging four pieces of luggage though London.

We saw Jewel of the Seas long before we saw any of Harwich. The land around Harwich is pretty darn flat and this vessel towered above it. It wouldn’t look out of place orbiting Jupiter. It’s huge! It has (it says here) 12 passenger decks for 2501 passengers (and 1?) served by 859 crew. It looks like several decent sized hotels bolted together and sat in a hull. We managed to drop Keith and Marlene off with little in the way of ceremony – there was no waiting – and left them to embark and search for their cabin. This is where a satnav system could truly come in handy – key in the postcode of your suite/cabin, select shortest route, and off you go.

Off we went to investigate Harwich, once we’d found it hiding behind the Jewel of the Seas. ‘T was an interesting little town in a threadbare sort of way. It looked a little worn at the edges. Come to that, it looked a little worn in the middle, too. I did, however, sample the finest jellied eels that I can remember tasting; they were quite superb. We also got an education about “leading lights”. There are two lighthouses: the higher and lower lighthouses. As an approaching ship, the idea was to position your vessel in such a way that the higher lighthouse’s light  could be seen directly above the lower lighthouse’s light. This alignment led you into the harbour channel. Simple but effective, I would imagine. Not as much fun as a satnav, though.

Harwich also makes a big deal about being the original home of Christopher Jones, master of the Mayflower of pilgrims fame. We found his house on the Harwich heritage trail but it didn’t make an enticing picture.

Having killed enough time being thoroughly educated – I also learned that a pint and a half of Hoegaarden could set one back £7.90 – £7.90 for Chrissakes! – we went to visit Carol’s cousin on Shotley peninsula, the opposite side of the harbour. When Jewel of the Seas began sounding off, we all repaired to where we could watch the ship leave and wave goodbye to our friends. As we waited I practiced panning with TheBeast (handheld, IS mode 2) and managed to grab a reasonable shot of a black-headed gull which was cruising by the harbour wall in the early evening sun. They have such beautiful white eye-liner, black-headed gulls.

Eventually the floating moon of Jupiter approached and Carol grabbed a shot of it dwarfing Harwich. We waved. There’s no way Keith and Marlene could have seen us waving but we did it anyway. Well, you have to, don’t you?

Bon voyage Keith and Marlene!

I really should know better. On Monday we set off on plan A with Keith and Marlene. I can’t remember what plan A was but I do remember thinking that my camera would not be required. After a mere 5 minutes or so my navigation officer switched to plan B. We ended up driving round some of our typically English village and local countryside locations such as Ivinghoe Beacon and Ashridge.

En route from Ivinghoe Beacon to Ashridge are a couple of stunning bluebell woods, one of which attracts an almost constant flow of admirers; so many admirers that an ice cream van stations itself opposite and does a brisk trade, even in our currently wintery airflow.  However, what made us slam on the brakes was the other, less popular wood which, this year, seems to have come of age and eclipsed its more popular neighbour. What set this wood apart was a lack of other people and a lack of dead wood spoiling an otherwise good line up. Keith and Marlene, hitherto unfamiliar with bluebells, clicked away with their pocket digitals while all I could do was pick out shots I’d like to take had I been sensible enough to bring my camera. Lose 10 points. Marlene kindly let me try a shot or two with her camera but I failed to hold the small camera steady enough in my klutzy hands. We continued the tour.

K & M had expressed an interest in the stunningly yellow rape fields that are currently turning our countryside into something out of Vincent Van Gogh’s notebook. We thought we knew just the spot for another photo shoot. I again borrowed Marlene’s camera with only slightly better results.

On Tuesday afternoon, while others decided to relax at home under the occasional glowering cloud, I corrected my original oversight and returned to both the bluebell wood and rape field armed with camera, lenses and tripod. After only 5 minutes or so I had the bluebell wood to myself and did two circuits merrily re-using pixels as though they were going out of fashion. Eventually a couple of other tripods arrived with their owners and began doing likewise. Our tripods compared notes before I took mine off to the rape field where I managed to grab a single shot before one of the glowering clouds obliterated the celestial spotlight. I’ve tried rape fields before and always been disappointed but at last I seem to have something with which I’m satisfied.

Isn’t spring a colourful time of year and shouldn’t I know by now always to travel with a camera? Dumbo!