www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

After school I cycled to the local woods to look for Tiberius. He went into hibernation (or was eaten) while I was in India and I never saw him again. I looked a lot over the winter, in vain, but hoped that if he was still alive he would move to the end of a branch before leafing time, as Aurelian did last year. Today, again, I failed to find him. I won't give up hope - it is possible he hibernated higher up the tree and it is well nigh impossible to spot a tiny caterpillar disguised as a leaf bud amongst hundreds of leaf buds.

On the way home I checked for brown hairstreak eggs. I found very few over the winter and was only able to relocate one today, thanks to pictures I had taken of the branches earlier in the year. It looks healthy and if it hatches is perfectly placed for easy photography of the larva. In my experience, about half of brown hairstreak eggs actually hatch.


(The growing buds make it quite hard to spot eggs at this time of year. This is the only angle from which it was really visible)


(The emerging caterpillar will not have far to go for its first meal - though I think the bud in this picture is a flower bud, of course. The leaves will come after.)

To put the year in context, I took this picture of a recently emerged betulae cat on 15th April 2011, on exactly the same bushes (at about 1000m):



I will keep a daily check on the blackthorn bushes over the next week or so.

Guy

For the record, it wasn't a week of unbroken sunshine but just 5 days. Familar scenes outside my classroom window today...





No butterflies for this weekend, I fear ...

Guy

This is actually one of the very, very few times that've read your PD without feeling crazily envious! Still normal service will resume next week I'm sure .

Have a goodun

Wurzel

Wurzel wrote:This is actually one of the very, very few times that've read your PD without feeling crazily envious.....

Wurzel

Ditto

Still, no doubt I will soon be turning green again

Neil F.

I never cease to be amazed by the wild fluctuation in weather conditions where you are, Guy.

I suspect in any given year, 19th April could see wall to wall warm sunshine and 23c.

Much that I complain about conditions in the UK, there's almost no way we could entertain the possibility of that level of snowfall in late April.

Yes,CH does have an extrordinary variable climate,by our standards! Proper winters and proper summers.
But the butterflies must like it,as they have sooo many more species than we do.
It's not fair!

Yes, the weather is as much a topic of daily conversation here as it is in the UK! I'm glad if this latest twist in the meteorological story has allowed you a little Schadenfreude ...

Guy

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

padfield wrote: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

There isn't a Findus food factory down the hill is there? In which case, I know what it might be Seriously - thanks for sharing such an incredible sight; wish I could have been there!

Cheers,

- Pete

It was quite an impressive sight, Pete - though I think that beautiful 8 mm grayling cat you posted trumps it!

YouTube offered to stabilise the video after I'd uploaded it and I think that might either have made it lower quality or perhaps made it require a greater bandwidth, so it loads in low resolution on my computer. Either way, the video isn't a patch on the original, so I'm uploading it again without stabilisation to see it that's any better. It might take a while ...

Guy

EDIT: I've now replaced the video, without YouTube stabilisation. It gives much better resolution on my computer, even though it's now shaky.

EDIT EDIT: I obviously don't use YouTube enough. You can select HD in the settings - and then both videos look fine. I didn't know that!

Guy:

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.

We used to soar in a open-top gliders with them over rubbish tips in Aden (Yemen) many years ago. We vulgar military types called them "shite hawks" for a very good reason. You could fly up close behind one, shout loudly and yes, it would.....

Never saw them in quite the numbers in your impressive photos Guy.

Jack

Jack Harrison wrote:We vulgar military types called them "shite hawks" ...

I wonder what avian profanity they used to describe you ...

This is obviously a very successful bird, perhaps because it has learnt to profit from human wastefulness. I saw it abundantly near towns in India. Nevertheless, it does also take fresh food and can often be seen fishing on the lakes in Switzerland. Perhaps the reason we have so many is precisely because of the large population of rich humans living around lakes in this country.

Guy

padfield wrote:Perhaps the reason we have so many is precisely because of the large population of rich humans living around lakes in this country.

You won't find that in any guide book, but I bet you're right.

Just for fun, I tried to photograph the ISS tonight. I used a 1/10 s exposure and tested this on Jupiter before the pass. Here is the result:



Bang on time, the ISS cruised into view, going at quite a whack. 1/10 s is clearly much too long!



Here is a photo taken a little later, as it headed back down to the horizon, with a star caught in the same frame. The star is nicely point-like, showing the set-up is stable and well focused:



An interesting experiment, and well worth a try - but tomorrow night I'll probably just enjoy the sight and wave at the astronauts.

G

EDIT: I just looked on the internet and found the ISS moves at 17500 mph. This is about half a mile in 1/10 s. There is no hope at all of getting a photo without a large aperture telescope. Tomorrow's pass is not very bright but next time there is a bright pass I'll go for a trail instead of a photo.

A glorious day today - though it is set to turn nasty again at the weekend. I finished school early and visited a local blues site. As expected, it was well behind schedule, with no blues and not even any violet fritillaries, which usually fly there from mid-April. In fact, I did see one blue passing through - probably a green-underside blue - but nothing in the body of the site.

Male orange tips were roding the perimeters and there were also small tortoiseshells, small and green-veined whites, a single small heath, a large tortoiseshell and a couple of commas. Here is a comma on garlic mustard. I think it's not long out of hibernation as it is in pristine condition and was guzzling avidly at flowers, as if to replace sugars and moisture lost over the winter:



Guy

Wow, look at the size of your garlic mustard. There is no sign of the flower heads growing up from the few small leaves just above the ground here. Just as well there are no butterflies yet, I suppose!

I'm a bit further south than you, Nick!

I tried a few 15 second exposures (the maximum my camera does) on the ISS tonight. The results look a bit silly, as you get a short, straight line in the sky - but the main point is that it works, so when it passes suitably close to some photogenic object like a star cluster or planet I could zoom in to make the line cover the whole field of view.

I'm very impressed with the accuracy of http://www.heavens-above.com in predicting the path. The ISS is a near-Earth object (200 miles above the surface) and so its apparent trajectory against the fixed stars depends very much on where you are. If you are registered with heavens-above it knows your location and calculates sky views from that. Below is a photo taken at 21h32 together with a detail from the predicted path. The satellite is exactly where it should be. Corvus is the quadrilateral of stars above the mountain at the left of the picture and a few stars from Hydra and Crater are visible at the top of my picture.





Guy

Heavens-Above http://www.heavens-above.com is superb; I have been a fan for years.

Not quite true to say it knows your position (unless newer registrants are located by cookies or similar) - you have to tell it where you are but then everything else is automatic.
That link above might give you my default Tobermory location - if so, then you would need to change, an easy process.

I am using heavens-above to compute the azimuth of the sun as it sets. That together with a bit of map work has enabled me to calculate that the sun will set behind the Outer Hebridean island of Barra (as seen from a vantage point on Mull) for a few days either side of 30 April. Barra can just be seen from Mull in ideal weather but the sun setting behind will be something else. And then around the solstice, it will be setting behind South Uist. All I need now is some clear skies.

I have been waving to the astronauts on the ISS for years but they never wave back

And how about this for a picture of the ISS?

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110105.html

Jack

I think I started using it when Hyakutake was around, Jack - and yes, it is a very good site. When I said it knows your location, I meant that once you have signed in it knows where you are registered. I put in my exact coordinates and altitude when I moved here and so by default it calculates based on that data.

A warm week turned to a lousy weekend, with fog, cloud and rain over the whole country.

Here is Bertie Betulae still waiting for his moment of glory:





Guy

EDIT: I've still been in such a rush, with IBs starting next week and IGCSEs soon after, that I didn't see that amazing eclipse/transit picture, Jack. I don't think I'll be getting one like that ...

The Alps are still shrouded in cloud and rain. It seems like ages since I saw a butterfly:



Guy