Thank you for the comments, CC, Buzzard, David and Andrew.
Up here in the mountains we have now definitely entered the winter, no butterfly, season. That doesn't necessarily mean I won't see any more this year - but I walked Minnie this afternoon in lovely sunshine and nothing flew. In the valley, in my secret spots, butterflies are usually on the wing well into December, though only Queen of Spain fritillaries, a wall or two and sometimes a clouded yellow.
Here's a white admiral hibernaculum from this afternoon:
When one end is open like that it's always worth pointing the camera down the hole and using flash to see who's inside. You can just make him out in this picture:
To the naked eye, or the camera without flash, nothing is visible.
On Sunday we trotted off to the Papiliorama (why not? CHF 50 for a year's pass...). I almost invariably add one species to the growing list on my butterfly house pages and this time it was
Euploea camaralzeman, the Malay crow:
Much more common were common crows,
Euploea core, which I think this is:
Core is a very variable species across its geographical range and when you are in a butterfly house, of course, you have no idea where a particular butterfly comes from.
Several female
Hypolimnas bolina were around (as well as lots of males, of course) - the species that mimics
Euploea. This one had interesting blue reflections (as do some
Euploea species):
Another mimicry ring is based on the
chrysippus pattern. On Sunday there were lots of chrysippus around, but mostly roosting or nectaring with wings folded:
This is a male
Cethosia cyane, which shares the upperside pattern:
The female has a similar pattern but on a white ground colour and doesn't look at all like
chrysippus. I got poor photos of a female on Sunday:
Just as the female of
Hypolimnas bolina mimics
Euploea species, so the female of
Hypolimnas misippus mimics
chrysippus. There weren't any misippus in the Papiliorama on Sunday, so here is a photo from 2012 that I took in the streets of Mumbai:
This is
Greta oto, one of my favourite butterfly house butterflies, mainly on account of the fact no one else even sees them!
That individual is feeding on a real bird dropping. This, however, is not a bird dropping but a fully grown caterpillar of
Papilio thoas:
That's another thing most visitors don't notice ...
Apart from these, I photographed all the usual species I post on these pages so will leave it here for now. I did see a species of
Graphium I've never seen before but it didn't stop for a portrait.
Guy