Thank you all for your very kind comments. Of course, it is going to be very strange living in the flatlands of East Anglia again after half a lifetime in the Alps but I am looking forward to spending some quality time with my father. Vincent Baudraz has also reminded - me many times now (!) - that I will be able to use 'l'hiver britannique' to update my site and get on with finishing and publishing my various writing projects.
Yesterday I said goodbye to my piano.
Fortunately, we have a piano back home in Suffolk. I don't think I could survive without one - this was the first thing I bought when I arrived in Switzerland. I sold her to a friend whose daughter is learning the piano, so I know she will continue bringing music and joy.
Today I decided to visit my cardinals. At the risk of boring everyone who has followed my diary these last years, I should explain (for the last time
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
) why these butterflies are so important to me. In 2005 I made the news for photographing a female cardinal in Switzerland - the first of the species since 1947. In 2012, Vincent and Michel Baudraz saw another, in almost precisely the same spot. In August 2013 I discovered there was a resident population near Martigny and quickly went to press with les frères Baudraz and Yannick Cittaro (
https://naturwissenschaften.ch/uuid/ca4 ... 60a1fef71a). They kindly let me put my name first on the paper, so it was authored by 'Padfield et al.' When I applied for Swiss citizenship, I presented the panel with a proof copy of this paper to prove integration (Swiss citizenship has a very high integration component - you must prove you are an active part of a Swiss community) and basically, that was it. We talked about butterflies for an hour and they told me the same day they were welcoming me in with open arms. So the cardinal is not just a butterfly to me - it represents my Swiss citizenship.
Although the population has thrived since then, it has not spread, and this remains numerically probably the rarest Swiss butterfly. If you know where to go, you will see it. If you don't, you probably won't, though in June and early July they do disperse into the mountains to escape the heat.
I arrived at the site at about 10h00 and the first male cardinals started zooming in at around 10h15. Numbers built up steadily until about 12h30. In the mornings, in the breeding season (they don't breed in the spring), you only see males here, aggressively defending territories. Here is a slow-motion video of a male doing just this. He appears towards the right of the video after a few seconds, scares the hell out of a group of whites, continues flapping and gliding to the right, then turns and zooms straight at me! Watch in HD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgsq5XdpFY[/video]
(YourTube URL if the video link doesn't work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgsq5XdpFY)
And here are a few unexciting photos of some more males, in the excruciatingly brief moments when they paused to nectar:
The first female appeared at 13h15, just breezing through. By then, I had to get back - not least because Minnie was flaking. I might return one afternoon before I leave the country to film some females.
And finally, if anyone has Google Cardboard or equivalent, I strapped my 3D video camera to my crash helmet yesterday and cycled down to the valley - so I could recreate this journey that I take so often, in virtual reality. The content isn't interesting to anyone except me, but it might be interesting as proof-of-concept to others. Because it's 12 minutes, I published it in side-by-side 3D (true left an right, not cross-eyed). This gives the most comfortable and realistic viewing, if you have an appropriate viewer. This also should be viewed in HD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5WIa3Ynfeo
(the 'teeth marks' in the right eye are because I put the camera in a bum-bag and strapped the bum-bag around my helmet - they are the zip)
Guy