Hi Andy. Yes,
lavatherae is a possible for some of the ones yesterday, on El Torcal. I travel without books, so will study all the pics more carefully, with the books, when I get back. Pending books, I’m happy with the one I posted earlier (the uns) for
baeticus, which is definitely not
tripolinus and I really can’t see it as
lavatherae. I’ve never seen that uns pattern on
lavatherae and it’s a species I know intimately from Switzerland and the Pyrenees. That was at your motorway spot above Benalmádena. There were virtually no fresh
Carcharodus there at all - nearly all very worn. I’ll probably visit again tomorrow after I’ve been to the airport for my PCR.
Today I tried the Parque Natural just north-east of Málaga, having never gone there before. I normally go just north-west because it’s a more direct route on foot out of the city. So I set off on the long trek to the top, taking in a cheeky Ziz Knys in the river bed before the climb:
The park on this side is mostly forest with rides and though it was a very pleasant walk, with some shade, I saw very little in the way of butterflies - just a few of the common things I see every day, like
celina and
cramera,
proto,
fidia,
cecilia &c. I was aiming for the crest, where the forest path met the road from Málaga and there was a bar on the maps! There was indeed a bar, where I paused for a few needed beers. Then I continued up to what looked like the best hilltopping spot nearby:
There were magnificent views over Málaga and the surrounding countryside:
And as I expected, there was a lot of hilltopping going on. The main exponents were swallowtail, Iberian scarce swallowtail and two-tailed pasha, with long-tailed blues, walls and an assortment of other species that might have been hilltopping or might have lived there. There were a lot of dusky heaths, for example.
It was wonderful to be surrounded by them - definitely worth the climb up!
While I was there, I recharged my remaining iPhone. Solar chargers work brilliantly in Spain (the phone is deep in the bag, out of the direct heat - iPhones don’t handle extreme heat well and it gets much too hot under the charger, for example)!
Coming back down, I caught a nice female Cleopatra posing:
Otherwise, nothing I hadn’t seen on the way up, except for a grayling that wasn’t
fidia. Unfortunately, I was descending a steep, shale path at the time, with my camera away for safekeeping.
Near the bottom, I became aware of what I thought was an insect creeping around the rim of my cap. I took the cap off to have a look and it turned out to be the biggest tick I have ever seen - many times bigger than a normal tick:
I can only think it jumped down from a pine tree onto my head. It certainly didn’t climb up me to reach my hat … I put it gently back into some undergrowth. I have nothing against ticks.
Guy
EDIT : I think it’s a tropical tick of the genus
Hyalomma - and potentially quite dangerous if it arrived on a migrating bird, carrying a tropical disease.