Tag Archives: France

Sorting out pictures from summer trips can be a useful pastime for otherwise dull winter days and evenings. In that respect, it is a benefit to have the task to do. The downside is that remembering detail from summer trips that seem such distant memories can be a bit of trial. Critters that you thought you had identified become once again unknown and you can’t quite place exactly where you shot a particular scene. It’s even worse when there’re two photographers’ collections to be merged. Determination eventually gets the job done, though. Our general insects page has finally been updated with some of our newly made n-legged friends. Here’s a couple of colourful characters to act as ambassadors that will, hopefully, whet your appetite to look further.

Quite why a family of creatures would be tagged Froghoppers I find a little strange but here is one. They are apparently generally dull, brownish in colouration, but we stumbled across what appears to be the only brightly coloured example in Chinery’s Insects of Britain and Western Europe. I say “we” but it’s actually hawk-eyes Carol who normally spots these things. This little chap was enjoying some fine weather beside Le Loir at Luché-Pringé. Cute, don’t you think? Well, I’d call it cute; in fact, I have done. If you want to be formal, call it Cercopis vulnerata.

Maintaining the colourful theme but, I suspect, venturing into the realms of the decidedly less cute for some, particularly some members of the fairer sex, is this rather startling spider rejoicing in the name of Argiope bruennichi. Here are shots of it showing both topside and underside. The underside also shows it wrapping up its lunch which has been caught in the web. The web itself is quite interesting; that white zig-zag construction of silk is called a “vertical stabilimentum”, according to Chinery, and is typical of the species. Quite an engineer, it seems.

A little less colourful, perhaps, but no less interesting IMHO is this Scorpion Fly (Panorpa). I should say these Scorpion flies, I suppose, because there’s no guarantee that these two individuals are of the same species, there being about 30 difficult to separate species in Europe. The wing markings look the same to me, though. It’s the male, regrettably rather unnaturally positioned on the stark white side of our caravan, that clearly shows why they are so named, with a fearsome looking upturned tail, just like that of a scorpion. The more naturally posed female looks a little less like a scorpion hybrid.

Dogged determination gets the job done in the end.

We’ve been travelling to the Marais Poitevin, a.k.a. La Venise Verte, a few kilometres inland from La Rochelle, for many years. We used to stay at a very pleasant campsite in Damvix; we even became recognised by and struck up a sort of friendship with the campsite owner, Didier. [Ed: what a comfortable sounding name Didier is – were I French, I’d quite like to be a Didier. Or Jean-Paul. Or maybe Etienne. Anyway …] Didier even bought us a drink once when we stumbled across La Fête de la Musique on one visit. Charming!

All good things come to an end and Didier retired, surrendering the campsite to new ownership. However, a mere 2 mls/3.5 kms down the road is Arçais where our friends Mike and Linda live. It’s great to visit them and share a little vino, paella, Thai food and so on. Arçais also has a campsite; it’s a little more rough and ready than the one at Damvix but pleasant enough, nonetheless. It’s also has the distinct advantage of being with crawling distance of Mike and Linda. For the last couple of years, we’ve made this our base in the Marais Poitevin.

Another advantage is that our favourite pitch is surrounded by a very productive, when it’s flowering, privet hedge. Fortunately it flowers in late May which is when we are most likely to be there. The trick is to get there before M. le gardien gets out his hedge trimmer and massacres all the highly aromatic privet flowers. Then it is like a very powerful magnetic to a mass of passing wildlife and it is at its most productive, for a nature watcher. In 2010, I saw my first Large Copper butterfly feasting on the privet flowers, and very thrilling it was, too.

2011 seemed to be the year of the beetle. Many, though not all, were found in our favourite privet hedge. M. le gardien  was champing at the bit to cut the hedge back but we got there in time. Leading the band on stage in a rather flashy metallic green suit was Rose Chafer (Cetonia aurata). Catch that in a super-trooper spotlight and the audience could well be dazzled – we certainly were. You can spot the leaders a mile off, can’t you?

On supporting vocals and giving a little bass gravitas to the whole proceedings, was Oxythyrea funesta. I’m afraid the audience is just going to have to learn to deal with the scientific binomial name which could be shortened to O. funesta, there being no common English term that we’ve found so far.

The flashy git on lead guitar just has to have been the strikingly-marked Plagionotus arcuatus. No hiding backstage out of the spotlight for him, with his bright yellow striped suit. Another one with no readily pronounceable English name, either, so just go ahead and scream, girls.

The beetle intended to be the original drummer was to have been the rather subdued Agapanthia villosoviridescens (far left).  However, a  bunch of screaming females was never going to get their collective tongues around a name that complicated – heck, I can’t pronounce it either before or after a drink. So, I’m afraid poor old A. villosoviridescens was seen as something of a hindrance to stardom and a new drummer was hired with the much more approachable handle of Capricorn Beetle (Cerambyx scopolii, in formal circles – near left). Good set of drum sticks!

Of course, no tour can be staged without a considerable amount of support in the background. These guys in the fancy striped suits weren’t actually in the back ground, but they were on the grounds of Linda’s allotment, a.k.a. the farm. In England, these would start alarm bells ringing and be a cause for great concern. Pretty though they may be, they are a pair of incredibly destructive Colorado Beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) – and they appear to be mating. Yikes!

Stay in France, guys. Please don’t come on tour in the good ol’ UK.

Normally when we get to our blissful dairy sheep farm at Fanjeaux, we have trouble dragging ourselves away. Our normal pattern is to go through the motions of a debate between ourselves, whereupon we always decide to stay as long as possible making a last minute dash for the  northern coast and our ferry. [Note: dashing, with Billy in tow, is a relative pedestrian affair and requires two days minimum.]

This trip was different. We had already enjoyed a mix of new and old haunts with a mix of sight-seeing, Odo-spotting and socialising (meeting friends Mike and Linda Eaton) at Montagnac for a week. We’d already enjoyed four weeks of almost unbroken sunshine. Technically, Luc and Nadine close their campsite at the end of September though they are normally helpful enough to let us stay on a few extra days if we want. Our friends were all leaving, though; we were in danger of feeling like Billy No-mates, which did not appeal. Nor were there any dragonflies of any note with which to amuse ourselves. Furthermore, the weather forecast was excellent for the coming five days and we were looking longingly at clear blue skies over the Pyrenees. We love mountains – you can keep your beaches – but, all too often their weather is unsettled. Not wishing to miss a rare clear spell on the French side of the majestic Pyrenees, we happily packed up and headed for Bagnères-de-Bigorre.

When we come to the end of a spring trip to France, Channel 4’s excellent TV coverage of Le Tour de France softens the blow of being at home again – it lets us down gently. Helicopters fly TV cameras around some of the more intriguing sights in the countryside surrounding the stages and we can enjoy the feel of France again vicariously. Le Tour always, but always, visits both the Alps and the Pyrenees. Let’s face it, the French don’t think they are truly cycling unless they are pedalling up a painfully steep and seemingly never ending hill. At Bagnères-de-Bigorre we were within striking distance, in a car you understand, of three notable Tour de France cols. With this weather and this scenery, we had no trouble amusing ourselves.

On our way down from the col d’Aspin we happened across a very picturesque leisure area around the Lac de Payolle. That is, it would normally have been picturesque but this was a Sunday and the place was buried under dozens of camper vans. Furthermore, this Sunday was the French fêtes des grands-pères [grandfathers’ day] and the dozens of camper vans had been joined by dozens of picnicking families with grand-père in tow. Nonetheless, it was a large area and very agreeable.

Being the Lac de Payolle. in the large area was a decent sized lake – dammed, of course, as are most French lakes – clearly designed for leisure pursuits. However, at its top end the lake was fed by something resembling a flush. What Odo-nutter could resist a flush when the season was not quite over? Certainly not I. ‘T was a good job, too. Several hawkers were buzzing around including Southern Hawkers. However, there were others that I didn’t immediately recognize. After much stressful snapping, mostly on manual focus, I eventually snagged a shot of a male in flight. New species #8: a Common Hawker (Aeshna juncea). This may be a so-called Common Hawker but I’d never seen one before. I did snag a female ovipositing, too, but the flight shot is the only shot I got of the male, the darn things just would not settle. it comes to something when a shot in flight is “easier” than a stationary shot!

IMHO this was a classic trip, the weather was great, our stops worked out well, we enjoyed some good times in the company of friends and we got to see new dragonflies to add to our growing catalogue. 30 confirmed species overall, including eight new ones, I regard as a decent tally. I don’t want to see them all in one year – what would I do to amuse myself next year?

The beginnings of misgivings began in my mind when we visited Fanjeaux, comme d’habitude, during our spring trip. Farmer Luc had let a fish farmer in to breed inconceivably large numbers of inconceivably small fish in his lake. The inconceivably small fish weren’t even useful, they were useless decorative Koi Carp that, apparently, eat almost everything in sight. There were also some inconceivably large fish that had been introduced to the lake: Grass Carp the size of nuclear submarines. Whereas Fanjeaux had been our top Odonata spot, both in terms of number of  species and individual numbers, we saw many less than I would have expected for the time of year. There was even a time when the usually ubiquitous Scarlet Darters (Crocothemis erythraea) all but disappeared. My suspicion was that the inconceivably large Grass Carp were destroying the floating vegetation making ovipositing difficult, while the small Koi Carp were feasting on Odonata eggs.

Here we were again in September. What a different picture we were greeted by this year compared to the normally numerous dragonflies in Septembers of previous years. There were a few pairs of Red-veined Darters (Sympetrum fonscolombii) zooming about ovipositing furiously; the trouble is they were ovipositing into the midst of swarms of inconceivably small but irritatingly voracious Koi Carp. How many of those eggs would survive literally thousands of small jaws? Furthermore, the floating vegetation, so necessary for damselflies to oviposit, had completely disappeared down the gullets of the inconceivably large Grass Carp. There was still a relatively healthy population of Willow Emerald Damselflies (Lestes viridis) which, laying their eggs in fresh green wood, would have a fighting chance but their larvae then drop into water where … there may well be thousands of tiny decorative jaws waiting to snap them up. Prospects were not good. Odonata spotting was not good. I had become a rather depressed camper. Disheartened but undaunted, we tried a few of our other known haunts in the area.

First up was what we refer to affectionately as La Rigole #2. It is actually Le Lac de Lenclas, a small manmade leisure lake nestling in a sharp bend of La Rigole, the small purpose-built canal that feeds water into the much larger Canal du Midi. We were wandering along the lake’s digue [dyke] when I spotted what looked at first sight lie a Scarlet Darter. I edged precariously down the 45° rocky slope of the dyke and brought my camera to bear on the suspect. As my camera came painfully slowly into focus, a definite pink hue greeted me. Joy unbounded! – my subject was a magnificent Violet Dropwing/Violet-marked Darter (Trithemis annulata). Carol had spotted one briefly on our spring trip but I had missed it, being otherwise occupied. New species #6. This made up firstly for my previous trip disappointment and secondly for my misgivings about our erstwhile favourite lake at Fanjeaux. What a stunning sight!

We also tried what we refer to as La Rigole #1, more formally referred to as La Prize d’Eau d’Alzeau, which had been the first section of La Rigole at which we had spotted Odos. Not much was happening beside the water itself so we struck off along a track through some trees, sans proper camera, I might add – there having been no activity at the water, we really weren’t expecting to see anything. Big mistake! After not very long I spotted an unrecognised specimen flitting along the forest track in front of me. We had got the snappy camera and Carol managed to grab a distant shot. We returned to the car for lunch followed by some proper photographic equipment with which to return to the forest track. It took a while but eventually we spotted our quarry. Getting on the right side of the light was difficult and the results are not exhibition quality shots but we did get enough for an identification. Furthermore, our snappy attempt proved to be a female and the second attempt, a male, so we had ourselves a matched pair of Blue-eyed Hooktails/Large Pincertails (Onychogomphus uncatus). New species #7.

We’ll just have to return for better pictures on another occasion.

After four nights in La Brenne, we made a longish run south to Millau to go “ooh, ah” at its justly famous viaduct. Whenever I look at it I can’t help but think, “how on earth did they build that” which is silly because I’ve seen a TV programme about its being built. Quite simply stunning! We spent another four nights of mildly indifferent weather, though not at all bad, and watched the local wildlife which consisted almost entirely of birds. We were camped beside the river Dourbie which provided Dippers (Cinclus cinclus), Grey Wagtails (Motacilla cinerea) and the vivid blue flash of a Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) while overhead the enormous shapes of the very successfully re-introduced Griffon Vultures (Gyps fulvus) soared.

Then it was time to head for what I’d been thinking of as the main event, Les Alpilles. Les Alpilles are an attractive set of modest hills just north-east of the Camargue (the Rhone delta) and directly north of an area called La Plaine de la Crau. Here, reputedly, were a few quite well known (to naturalists) Odonata spotting spots. We’d stayed here a couple of years previously when I was beginning to develop my interest in dragonflies but, alas, I didn’t know we were near one of the Meccas for Odo-watching. Wildlife holidays are run to this place. Since our previously used campsite had decided to close early, we stayed at Camping Municipal des Romarins in Maussane-les-Alpilles. Some pitches are a little tight and it is a little urban for our usual tastes but quite adequate and conveniently located. The “free” (inclusive?) wi-fi made up for any shortcomings, too.

We began with the initially unassuming Canal de la Vallée des Baux. The habitat looked promising with quite a bit of floating greenery and plant-lined banks. The only slight downside was that access to the water’s edge wasn’t good. There is a footpath running along the north side of the canal but it was quite high with respect to the water and the banks were mostly overgrown and steep. Nonetheless, it proved a good little hunting ground. Enter new species #4: Spotted Darters (Sympetrum depressiusculum) which are entrants in the “dragonfly with the most difficult to pronounce scientific species name” award. Nice of them to have both sexes present, too – the red one is the male and the yellow, the female. As usual, I didn’t know what I was snapping away at until I studied the pictures back at base camp.

I snapped away at pretty much everything I saw, just to enable the compiling of a reasonably comprehensive list, and it’s a good job I did. There were some “Featherlegs” damselflies (Platycnemis) around and I was initially guilty of assuming that they were my usual White-legged Damselflies/Blue Featherlegs (P. pennipes). I deleted several shots back at Billy ‘cos I’ve got loads already. I had been very much mistaken. These were new species #5: White Featherlegs (Platycnemis latipes). Fortunately I managed to snag a very obliging couple in-cop after I had realized my grievous mistake.

Probably the main wildlife attraction in the area is the Peau de Meau or Coussouls de Meau. To visit this, you should first call in to the Ecomussee de la Crau in the nearby town of St-Martin-de-Crau and purchase a permit for a mere €3 (at the time of writing). Keep it all legal and support such wildlife habitat protection. We did so and set off to discover what all the fuss was about.

As one of Europe’s premier Odonata sites, I don’t know what I was really expecting but, whatever it was, this wasn’t it. I honestly thought we had come to the wrong place but would my Navigation Officer let me down? No, of course not. The place looks more like a desert than anything else, very flat and very stony. It’s basically a flood plain and the Coussouls name has something to do with it’s being used for grazing sheep. A very stiff breeze was blowing. We did begin to see a few darter dragonflies on the flat, stony plain but they were trouble flying. In fact, they were having trouble holding on to any perches.

We soon realized that the main attraction when it comes to Odos is a quite fat stream that flows past the main entrance, such as it is. In places, this stream is afforded some shelter from the wind by a hedgerow. The first characters we saw here were stunningly beautiful, utterly drop-dead gorgeous Copper Demoiselles (Calopteryx haemorrhoidalis), new species #5 and one that must be a contender in the “most difficult scientific name to spell” competition. Fortunately, I was wearing my specialist Salomon Aqua-tech shoes and could wade about in the stream trying to get better shots of them. With the metallic purple sheen of the males, these creatures are so captivating, it really was difficult to drag myself away to investigate further afield.

It’s a bit difficult writing what was supposed to be a travel blog when you can’t do it “live” due to insurance risks. It has to be done after the fact. Isn’t modern life a wonderful thing? Together with this little modern difficulty, the company that acted as registrar for my domain name has ceased trading, I can see a few changes coming this winter. Well, it gives me something constructive to do on dull days and evenings. Anyway, here’s the beginnings of a retrospective look at our second, largely Odo-chasing French trip of the year.

After our first trip and having hidden at home while Satan’s Little Disciples were abroad, our second trip ran from August 28th to October 9th, and what a trip it was! This was the kind of trip I live for and one of the absolute classics IMHO. Firstly, the weather was terrific; we had almost five weeks of glorious sunny weather, mostly unbroken. Secondly,  the sites we tried worked out well, our friends Mike and Linda travelled down to southern France to give us a break from each other’s company for a week. To cap it off, just when we thought Odo-chasing was largely at an end – we were wrong, by the way – we rounded off with a stunningly blue six days in the magnificent picturesque Pyrenees. We love the mountains but you really do need good weather for our kind of entertainment and, given the unpredictability of mountain weather, planning ahead is rarely a good idea. You have to react when the conditions present thamselves and react we did.

A couple of our sites were chosen deliberately with Odo-chasing in mind and they did not disappoint. We began in La Brenne staying at the Étang de Bellebouche. La Brenne claims to have 2,000 lakes, mostly small. The lakes resulted from mediæval fish farming but now make a great habitat for birds, particularly water fowl, and dragonflies. Whilst the area seems to be quite well known to wildlife enthusiasts, it is otherwise not generally on the main tourist trail, I think. Shunning crowds, that suits us perfectly. Odo-wise, our good fortune began on day one when we spotted quite a few Southern Darters (Sympetrum meridionale) on patches of heather. I’d seen female Southern Darters before, typically infested with little red mites, but never a male so I called this half a new species.

A day or so later we were snapping away at some Emerald Damselflies and only later, back at base with a computer screen, did I suspect that these were something new to us. We actually spotted them first at another étang, the Étang de Cistude, but they were also around a smaller fishing lake at our home base, in Bellebouche. Sure enough, they were noticeably smaller than the usual suspects though, staring through a camera’s viewfinder, size is rarely obvious. These delightful metallic green and bronze creatures were Small Emerald Damselflies (Lestes virens ssp vestalis). This one is a female. New species #2.

On the same day we nabbed a another character that initially appeared to be female, given its brown colouration. Close inspection, though, revealed what appeared to be very much male appendages. Skimming through the book produced but one candidate; this was quite clearly a Winter Damselfly (Sympecma Fusca) My third new catalogue entry.

What a great four days at La Brenne; generally decent weather and three new additions to the catalogue. I was already a happy camper.

When we first retired we began taking six week trips to France. Last year we extended that to seven weeks, braving the presence of Satan’s Little Disciples in the last week of our trip. This year, in lieu of a spring trip in Britain, we decided to go a week earlier than before which pushed us into the eight week arena, still much less than some of our acquaintances but a bit “scary spiders” for us, nonetheless.

Crossing on 15th May, our first three weeks were blisteringly grand – France was having an excellent spring in the same way that we i Britain did. The French spring had been so “good” that many of their regions were already in a drought situation with water usage restrictions. What’s good for the tourist isn’t so good for the farmers, which is where the vast majority of their water goes.

The Dragonflies seemed to be enjoying the fine weather, too. Our first significant stop was for two days on Le Loir at a village called Luché-Pringé, reasonably close to Le Mans. Last time we were here our car broke down forcing us to stay for nine days while “la Vectra Anglaise” was repaired. This visit was smoother, fortunately. On our second day amongst the dragonflies beside the river, I spotted a stranger. The stranger steadfastly refused to settle but I managed to grab an in-flight shot of the culprit receding as it headed for the middle of the river. I had no idea what it was and consulted more experienced spotters upon our return. This character is a (probably male) so-called Two-spotted Dragonfly or Eurasian Baskettail (Epitheca bimaculata). Our location put it somewhat beyond its accepted range, so it was quite a rare spotting. One of my experts also said that they’d never seen an in-flight shot of this species before so I was v. lucky to get it.

In the second half of our break, most of which was spent in relatively unsettled weather on our favourite dairy sheep farm at Fanjeaux, we, that is to say Carol, spotted another interesting visitor. I actually missed it engaged in placating other English campers with an electricity problem – and I still haven’t forgiven myself. I Was prepared to book a special trip to Sardinia to see these stunning beasts. Carol, with the “wrong” lens on her camera, managed to grab this excellent shot, nonetheless, and described it to me as being “like a Scarlet Darter but pink”. When I looked I shelved my disbelief and knew immediately that this just had to be a Violet-marked Darter (Trithemis annulata). At best this, also, was on the north-western edge of its range and possibly beyond. What a staggeringly beautiful creature and I’m still as sick as a parrot that I missed seeing it.

I am a traditionalist. This may seem a little strange for someone who spent their entire career in technology but it’s certainly true. I suspect it stems from my father who was a craftsman, a joiner in fact, with a very traditional, manual approach. I like to do some things the old way. As a result, I stuck with real film cameras until just two years ago when, spurred on by others and by the time required to digitize film through a scanner, I finally jumped into the digital SLR market with a Canon EOS 40D. I’m very glad I did ‘cos I couldn’t take half the wildlife pictures I now take using slow old Fuji Velvia slide film, beautiful though it was. This hovering Emperor Dragonfly (Anax imperator), for example, is not practical at ISO 50. It was actually shot at ISO 800, f8 at 1/1000th sec.

Whilst still in film mode, I fell in love with images obtained (by professionals, I hasten to add) using a stonkingly beautiful medium format panoramic landscape camera called the Fuji GX617. This beast produces images that measure 6×17 cm images on a 120/220 roll film, be that negative or positives (as in slide film). A 120 film takes only 4 images, 220 manages 8 Unfortunately, as well as being unwieldy, the camera and its associated lenses cost about £10K so I just drooled and admired pictures from the likes of David Noton.

Enter: the flexibility of digital processing at home.

We’ve just returned from a trip around France where I found a couple of landscape views that seemed to be crying out for the 6×17 format so I deliberately shot them with the intention of cropping them down chez moi. BTW, I’ve sized the main images linked to these thumbnails, at 1000 pixels wide so they should fit on a typical 1024-pixel screen.

The first image I couldn’t resist was of this man wading back, apparently out of the sea, to his tractor. I love the sense of isolation and confusion, though maybe the latter is just me. “What’s going on here, then?” Actually, just off shot to the left are his mates in a small fishing boat waiting to be recovered by him and the tractor. He’s actually walking up a flooded concrete ramp.

Rather more obvious is this very traditional (other than the 6×17 format) touristy shot of Rocamadour. Without this format it is difficult to show both Rocamadour on one side of the valley and the opposing cliffs without too much sky at the top and/or green fields at the bottom.

Farming provided my next opportunity and is really the land-based equivalent to the fisherman shot above. Our favourite dairy sheep farm at Fanjeaux is in very picturesque countryside but the width of this view would again give far too much sky and/or cornfield on a traditional 35mm (3×2) format. On the far left horizon is the church tower of Fanjeaux itself whilst on the right is our host’s neighbouring farm. The harvester  is sandwiched nicely between the two.

The same dairy sheep farm has a lake for irrigation purposes and the lake supports a healthy population of Odonata. Damselflies tend to indulge in massed ovipositing, large groups of pairs all trying to lay eggs at once to ensure the continuation of the species. The groups are often too deep to get everything in focus but on this occasion the group was relatively wide but shallow. This also seems to work in good ol’ 6×17 format. Most, if not all of these are Small Red-eyed Damselflies (Erythromma viridulum).

I do most of my cropping in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional these days ‘cos I shoot RAW and who should understand Canon RAW better than Canon? Of course, to make a decent print of such pictures would require an A3 printer and probably a few more pixels than my EOS 40D. I’ll just have to wait until the new kit turns up.

We have two Garmins. Garmin A is a basic walker’s device called an “eTrex h” (the “h” is for high sensitivity). Garmin B is a nüvi something (and what’s that umlaut all about?) for our cars. A friend of mine has one of the earlier eTrex (no “h”) models which is quite prone to losing contact with the satellites when walking under any moderate tree canopy. Mine seems better so the “h” has apparently done some good. However, both GPS devices have trouble when I turn them on inside our house; they go into “acquiring satellites” mode and usually fail. The eTrex h even helpfully asks, “are you indoors?”

Now, the French are quite keen on building tunnels so that they can pile roads, particularly autoroutes, through mountains that have inconsiderately been thrown up by the forces of nature in the road engineers’ way. I appear to be able to drive through a 1km tunnel with hundreds of feet of rock above my head without the nüvi (what is that umlaut all about?) losing touch with the satellites; my track remains well plotted on the road.

If Garmin nüvi can’t see thrü (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em) my skimpy roof tiles at home, how does it manage to see through a mountain?

Jüst cürioüs.

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