Thanks Wurzel and David. Yes, ecological clues are important to be confident with
hyale and
alfacariensis, though as the first three pictures above show,
hyale is distinctly pointy-winged.
I'll post a few pictures from today, though I had another trip a couple of days ago I haven't yet had time to write up. Today's was to the Aosta Valley for
humedasae - a trip I didn't make last year. When I arrived at the site it looked as if my journey had been in vain, as the whole area was marked out-of-bounds by a very aggressive sign. The sign said there were works going on - but that wasn't true. I could see most of the relevant habitat from various vantage points and there was no evidence of anything going on. I wonder if they were simply protecting it, in a very dry year. Anyway, I didn't trespass and there was no suitable habitat in the other direction, so I chose a quiet place to have a beer nearby, hoping that a stray female would present herself. One did, so I got my token
humedasae tick for 2018!
Other interesting species flying today were dusky meadow brown ...
... damon blue ...
(as you can see, by then there was no sun - and by the time I got home it was pouring)
... and this female southern white admiral, who spent a lot of time hanging around (literally) under leaves but didn't seem to lay any eggs:
On the way out I had time to use in Aosta itself, so went hunting for geranium bronzes. In the first town square I checked, where I usually see them, there were no Pelargoniums at all - just dried up baskets where they used to be - and I wondered if some edict had gone round telling people not to encourage this 'pest'. But at two other places in town I found the plants and quickly located the butterflies too:
To close - a statue of King Emmanuel II of Sardinia, later King of Italy (Aosta was once part of the Kingdom of Sardinia). The statue was called 'le roi chasseur' and showed the king with a slain alpine ibex at his feet:
There is some poignancy in this. By the 19th century, when the king lived, the alpine ibex had been hunted almost to extinction and only remained in two small populations, both in the Aosta Valley. The good king is therefore shown having killed one of the last remaining of its species in the world. However, the same century saw protection put in place for the animal (by the good king, so he could carry on hunting them?) and indeed it was reintroduced to the rest of the Alps from the two Aosta populations. Every alpine ibex alive today is a direct descendent of the Aosta animals. There is apparently very little genetic variation in the species now.
Here are a couple of ibex I photographed in 2010, showing what an amazing (and suicidally insane) animal was nearly lost to the world:
Guy