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padfield wrote:...Young's bitter and chips - two other things (apart from gatekeepers *) you can't get in Switzerland ....Guy

* Paul and I may beg to differ on that one, eh Paul?

The mystery Erebia – I offer these thoughts: there is a very faint white speckling that suggests euryale to me, rather than mnestra. Euryale is very common in the Valais and the male unh is almost completely unmarked, although this will be obvious to Guy.

It looks too dark for mnestra, and the red unf post-discal band just about shows a small ocellus, which also would I think rule out mnestra as it looks to be a male (too dark for a female) and the male does not have fw ocelli. The band also looks a little too wide for aetheria from what little I can see of it and the ocelli look like more than just the pin-pricks one would expect of aetheria. Not that I've seen many aetheria in the Valais.

A shot that showed the margins (or more of the forewing) would be almost conclusive, as euryale would very likely show the chequered margins unless rather worn.

Hi Roger - Thanks for those thoughts, even if it does muddy the waters slightly....
We were actually about 100 km east of Guy's on that particular day at about 1800+m, in Vaud, near the Italian border.
...and I was not seriously expecting a result from such a poor picture!
More of a little challenge (and joke!) for Guy, since he demonstrates such amazing ID skills for erebia out in the field.

N

Are there really no gatekeepers in Helvetia? Well my back garden's full of em (guffaw). Traveling makes me constipated anyway, so maybe Switzerland is my lifetime miss. Tho Guy does sound like a very interesting man. Maybe one day i'll take him over some Fish and Chips,,, tho maybe they'll be cold when i get there.

...this is another erebia, from the same site, about 1/2hr later in the same location....
no guarantees it IS the same as the last erebia, but they were both very dark in flight....

I suspect that last one is melampus. If you check on my 'official' record of that day (10th July) in my journal you will note I recorded both melampus and epiphron. I agree with Roger that euryale is still a candidate for the first unidentified one - and it is the commonest Erebia at that site.

Thanks for the offer, Zonda. About halfway through the winter term is when I will really be pining for English ale and chips, if you want to pop over with a flagon of one and newspaperful of the other.

It's true - gatekeepers are unknown in most of Switzerland. There is a concentration in the Jura (on the border with France) and near Geneva (on the border with France...) but nothing near me or in the Rhône Valley. See http://lepus.unine.ch/carto/ and follow the route Rhopalocera, Pyronia, tithonus to get a map. You'll see a record in the northern branch of the Rhône Valley, towards the lake, but I have checked the site thoroughly in the last couple of years and not a sniff.

This was my first of the year, in cloudy Suffolk on 11th August!



I also saw a clouded yellow in Suffolk today, only my third of the year!! This species has been amazingly scarce in Switzerland in 2010, despite a good year last year.

Guy

Interesting, and strangely isolated from one another these congregations. Must be the mountains keeping them apart. My Gatekeeper abb. didn't show up in the garden this year, another mystery.

Just on the subject of euryale, here is a shot (21990) of a selection puddling in the Hautes Alpes this year. There were hundreds of them, and I think you can just about see from this photo the variation in the white unh markings, although most were virtually unmarked. So it’s not necessarily a geographical or seasonal variant. Nick’s second Erebia is slightly puzzling (at least to me). The forewing outer margin is heavily rounded in a way that is characteristic of melampus, which is probably definitive proof. However, the upf red post-discal band is pretty much continuous whereas the band for male melampus is usually clearly divided by the veins, sometimes even into nice discrete red oval or bullet-shaped segments; I have a number of photos from the Valais this year and all fit this pattern. I have also seen male melampus with an almost continuous but fuzzy-edged band in Vaud this year. The band here looks more like what I would expect from epiphron aetheria.

Also, the pin-prick blind (i.e. no white centres) ocelli are in s2, s4 and s5. This diagram shows where: http://www.butterfliesoffrance.com/wing%20diagram.htm (the diagram is reproduced with permission from Tristan Lafranchis). Usually I find that melampus, if it has an ocellus other than s4/5, has one in s3 rather than s2, and that aetheria has one in s2 rather than s3.

Of course, Erebia being unhelpful little butterflies, they always settle in the grass making both ID and photography very difficult. In this case, a clear sight of the hindwing would help enormously as aetheria often has a clearly angled margin (as in 23052). I would not disagree with Guy if he was certain it was melampus. There is no substitute for local knowledge.

Thanks to the lousy weather I obviously have too much time on my hands!

PS Gatekeepers don't occur in Var in the Mediterranean region.

Thanks Roger - I don't have that much time - but this is more interesting than the report I am writing....
Will study any more pics I have and look at your wing-spot patterns to see if I can shed any more light on these erebia
You are right about it being an extremely unhelpful species - not only hiding in the grass but flying away at the least approach as well
(Back to my report... )
N
EDIT. BTW - A "Gatekeeper incident" occured in Valais when we visited, down in the Valley bottom by a river...that is why Guy made specific mention of it!
Both Paul and I witnessed, or at least Paul said to me, "....does that look like a Gatekeeper to you?"...and I had a quick glance, saw what appeared to be a Gatekeeper, and said "...yep, looks like it..." and we both moved on without taking a picture or giving it a second thought. Well, it was ONLY a Gatekeeper....It was a little while afterwards when we mentioned this to Guy that we found out it shouldn't have been there! Of course, a return to the patch revealed nothing! Given my experiences of ID in Switzerland ( ) and despite Paul's usually excellent IDs, we can only put it down to something else...but it DID look like a Gatekeeper, even down to the grey fringe on the wings...

Again, I agree with Roger about the possibilities, and I wouldn't feel confident to go for a firm ID without seeing both sides. It was indeed the wingshape that made me suggest melampus. But, as Roger says, that species does normally have a more broken orange band. If it is the same species as the first unidentified one then I would say it is certainly epiphron aetheria, which was my preferred option for that one (that underside cannot, of course, be melampus).

Here is melampus from near me in Switzerland:



And here's a Swiss epiphron:



Because the undersides are so different, and the jizz is different, these two are rarely confusable in the field. But superficially they are rather similar! And variable, of course - especially epiphron.

Guy

Thought we might want to wind this up with a toast to all who read this site from (L>R) Guy,Roger, Nick and I. ..... don't know why we were smiling.... we were just about to return to UK. Seems like a lifetime ago already!!!

Thanks, Paul - that's a great shot!

We were all smiling and looking at the camera because, if you remember, the barmaid was holding it at chest height...

Guy

Bunch of weirdos, that's all I can say. I mean, fully grown men prancing around the Swiss Alps looking for butterflies, of all thing. You should all be locked up. Rogerdodge clearly doesn't trust any of you, with the stranglehold he has on his camera, and I hope Paul didn't have too much to drink and attempt to attach an ash tray to his lens the following morning

Cheers,

- Pete

padfield wrote:Thanks, Paul - that's a great shot!
We were all smiling and looking at the camera because, if you remember, the barmaid was holding it at chest height...
Guy

...and she had a lovely smile too - if you noticed, Guy

I wondered why the damn cover didn't fit, and I have been having "dust" problems .... and she was a very nice barmaid, most helpful

Paul
What a great photograph, and a memory stirrer.
It was a fabulous few days with amazing butterflies and brilliant company.
Fond memories...........

p.s. She was an excelent barmaid, but got her finger over the lens (top right hand corner). Aren't I just the picky one.

Pete:

Bunch of weirdos, that's all I can say. I mean, fully grown men prancing around the Swiss Alps looking for butterflies.

I showed some builders today a picture I took of a spider and its prey. They thought I was nuts to take a photo of such a strange happening. There’s no hope for people like that. No appreciation of the real world. All they were intersted in was bricks and mortar. They are the weirdos!

Jack

Rogerdodge wrote:She was an excelent barmaid, but got her finger over the lens (top right hand corner).

Thinking of the word LoveR will help you tell left and right apart, Roger!

Aren't I the picky one...

Guy

(And of course, you're right, Jack. Robert the Bruce was inspired to victory by sitting and watching a spider...)

Thinking of the word LoveR will help you tell left and right apart, Roger!

Aren't I the picky one...

but Guy - I remember, as she took the photograph thinking "She has her finger over the top right side of the lens" at least, that is how it appeared to me!

..a final chance for my ID skills....
Geranium Argus? It is on wild geranium.... (Poor picture - but the only one I got of this). Fourth day...