For our first weekend in Cuba we had booked onto a two day “cities and mountains” tour which would take us from the north coast down to the south of the island and back. Our bus picked us up early Saturday morning and we were taken to our transfer point in Varadero before heading off on a very inter...

Thanks Steve and David – I hope I haven’t peaked too soon! The above four were particularly memorable images that I went straight for after downloading the 1200+ files from my camera. Hope you enjoy what’s to follow… We had chosen a hotel on the north coast of Cuba as our base for two weeks, situate...

Ye Gods, it is cold and dreary here in Blighty! Us poor butterfly addicts are now entering the toughest part of the year, where spirits drop, darkness prevails, and the reality of the UK winter begins to set in with a vengeance. It has been a few months since I last posted here. My wife (Vicki) and ...

Easy choice here - a rather cracking aberrant from the central Lincolnshire Limewoods this summer - ab.glomerata + postico-obsoleta.

Berger's for me too. For the same reasons as others have mentioned.

Just finished reading this - having blitzed half of it over the past few evenings, today's afternoon rainfall gave me the perfect excuse to indulge further. Thoroughly enjoyed it. A superb read, beautifully illustrated and presented from start to finish, and as others have already said, a phenomenal...

Here are three personal favourites of mine from 2023, one from the UK and two from France. 1. The perennially photogenic Orange-tip (UK): Orange-tip unds 020523.JPG 2. The rare and fantastic False Ringlet male (France): False Ringlet male 7.JPG 3. A particularly fresh and gorgeous Oberthur's Grizzle...

My FZ150 produced much better photos... I don't find the manual (DVD version included) easy to understand. I will continue reading through it and experimenting, but either the settings are very wrong, or there is an issue with the camera. Hi Nick, I am just catching up with this thread. If it is an...

Wow! That's a pretty impressive aberration Guy. Good job getting the underside!

This is all very interesting. Having spent many years studying this species in the central Lincolnshire Limewoods, and having located and mapped the distribution of tens of thousands of overwintering ova over more than 25 years, I could wax lyrical about its preferences for various ages/types/orient...

You may be right bugboy. A fellow Lincolnshire lepidopterist made similar comments. I also at first thought it was damaged. Looked like it has an area of scale loss. But when viewed from different angles the colour on the affected area changed, from white through varying shades of light and mid blue...

You can view some of these on the Lincs BC branch sightings page at https://butterfly-conservation.org/in-your-area/lincolnshire-branch/lincolnshire-latest-sightings. That Red Admiral ab. klemensiewiczi is gorgeous. Steve I completely agree- sensational! I am gutted that this is one of the abs that...

...do you think that Southern Hermit has gone extinct at the known site? It would certainly appear so from my reading of your report. No, I don't. I think it's still there because all its close relatives are still there. The most plausible explanation is that prieuri's emergence time is a little in...

Yes that Peacock was amazing! As was the Red Admiral. Got another weird Peacock today - a pathological ab. with unilateral scale defect? Looked rather strikingly different! Peacock pathological ab 2.jpg Peacock pathologiocal ab 3.JPG Peacock pathological ab unds.jpg Peacock pathological ab 4.JPG

That is indeed a rare one, Pete. Do you think the sharp change from hot and sunny conditions to cool and wet ones has played a role in the generation of these abs? Yes, I suspect the unsettled and changeable climate this summer has played a large part in the appearance of so many aberrations - it h...

The number of butterfly aberrations recorded this year in central Lincolnshire has been unprecedented, and has included: multiple examples of Comma and Silver-washed Fritillary, some quite extreme; bilateral gynandromorphs of SW Frit and Brimstone; rare and superb examples of Meadow Brown and Red Ad...

selbypaul wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 6:38 pm Thanks for the write up as ever. Always a good read.

My pleasure, Paul.

Well done, Pete. I've loved reading this. Teleius is one of my top ten 'must-sees' in Europe and I'll get round to it one day. Thanks David - don't leave it too long - it's an essential life-tick! Always interesting to read your reports Pete, sorry to hear you didn't see pronoe at the ski resort :D...

Part Two Friday 28th July This morning we left behind our delightful base at Froges and headed north-east towards Bourg-Saint-Maurice, our third base. But first we drove up to a ski resort where we hoped to find our next main target species, another Erebia that would be a lifer for us both if we co...

I have recently returned from my final European butterflying trip of 2023 – 8 days touring around the departments of Isere and Haute Savoie in eastern France in the excellent company of Bob Lambert. We had half a dozen key target species lined up for this trip, but the main raison d’etre of the enti...