The forecast - which turned out to be quite accurate - offered little hope of any sun today but I got out anyway, to have a cycle around the villages west of Geneva. It was dry and pleasantly warm but no butterflies took to the air (my targets, if there had been any sun, were short-tailed blue and spring map, as well as just seeing what the area was like in early spring). Here is the great, grey-green, greasy Rhône in the gloom:
When I lived in Gibraltar, one of the highlights was seeing tens of thousands of black kites funnelling over the Rock in March and then funelling back to Africa in August. As they headed north, I used to think, 'I wonder where they're going...'. Well now I know. They were all going to a back garden near Geneva - every single one of them. I don't know what they leave out on their bird tables round here but it's not Co-op premium wild bird seed mix:
Sorry about the quality of this video - the light wasn't good enough, I think, for my camera:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxl_JSgjSfo[/video]
To be fair, they weren't just in that back garden:
Black kites are possibly the most numerous large raptor on the planet but in Europe they are rather local. Where found, they can be abundant, scavenging rather than hunting and often gathering at refuse.
One of my short-tailed blue fields was covered in dandelions, so it should offer great photography opportunities if it is sunny next week. Butterflies sit on dandelion flowers for a long time as there are so many florets to savour.
I was interested to see what the lizard and bee orchids might look like a month before their usual flowering date but there was no trace of them to be seen - at least, to my untrained eye. The only orchids I found were green-winged orchids (
Orchis morio), which were locally common:
Guy
.
