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I touched down in Málaga at 11h09 this morning. By 13h00, I was happily watching desert orange tips.

Female desert orange tip was one of my targets for this trip. I was happy with this shot, which will look better when I process it properly on the computer:



I also got some underside shots. This one is on the food plant:



This is a female rejecting a male:



She is already full of eggs.

This female …



… laid this egg:



I then checked in at my hostal before going out for an afternoon stroll. This brought me: geranium bronze, Lang’s short-tailed blue, African grass blue, holly blue, Austaut’s blue (Polyommatus celina), southern brown argus (cramera), geranium bronze, swallowtail, clouded yellow, small white, southern mallow skipper (tripolinus), sage skipper, monarch, wall and meadow brown, as well as some great dragonflies and damselflies. I’ve processed just a few of these piccies:


(African grass blue)


(southern brown argus)


(Austaut’s blue)


(southern mallow skipper)


(sage skipper)


(male violet dropwing)


(Platycnemis latipes - I think)


(same)

Guy

How uplifting to see a post like that Guy! Looking forward to seeing what else you turn up - I’m sure you’ll enjoy every moment - happy hunting!

Wonderful stuff, I concur with your P. latipes ID

Thanks Benjamin and Buggy. It is indeed lovely to have some freedom!

A hot day in the hills today. I’ve processed a few piccies but haven’t got time for a full write up. I spent a lot of time on Carcharodus spp. trying - successfully, I think, to secure baeticus. The problem is, I believe, we are between broods for this species. The second brood has been flying since June and is almost finished. The third brood wasn’t flying when I visited last year in August.

This, I believe, is a rather knackered baeticus. It cannot be tripolinus because of the forewing marks, which are too square by far, and I’m equally sure it’s not lavatherae:





This is the underside of a different, equally knackered, individual:





This female Carcharodus was oviposturing and I never got a proper look at her underside, so quickly did she settle and move:



Biggest surprise of the day was what I believe is Morpho peleides - I don’t have my South American books with me! It never stopped but I got some flight shots. I was about 3km from the Benalmádena butterfly farm when I saw it, so I think that is where it came from, poor thing:





Another surprise was a tail-ender blue-spot hairstreak:



It is a male, with the sex brand showing clearly in relief.

Just a few more piccies before I flop into bed:


(dusky heath)


(female celina)


(grranium bronze)


(rare glimpse of the upperside of a striped grayling. These butterflies were always and only in the shade)


(Cleopatra)

I’ll be up to one of my favourite hilltopping spots tomorrow so need to start out early before the heat makes the climb too unpleasant!

Guy

I'm loving this already, Guy, and you've barely started.

I wish you good fortune over the next few days and I'll look forward to seeing what you've found.

Delighted to see these - I've been missing the butterflies of the Sierra de Mijas - hopefully this October/November...

Going back to Comma numbers, after seeing none this spring, there's been an explosion in numbers here in Somerset - more on my BC wider countryside transects than I have seen before!

Thanks David and Matsukaze. Good news about the comma numbers, M. I hope you can get out in October/November. These last two years everything just seems to change at the last minute.

Some piccies from today. Most are from up the local hill, some from lower down.

Two-tailed pasha reliably hilltops at my favourite spot. I took my 360° camera today (strictly, 4pi steradian camera) so I can go back virtually when I want. This is the spot:

https://momento360.com/e/u/9069cb9a037 ... ize=medium

And this is the pasha who was there today:



Several rather vicious looking spiders had set up traps for unwary hilltoppers and I saw at least one southern gatekeeper fly into their jaws. These are two of the spiders:





In fact, little was actually hilltopping today. I only saw two long-tailed blues - my first of the trip.

Other species:


(sage skipper - very common, especially near sage!)


(false mallow skipper, C. tripolinus. I looked for baeticus but didn’t confirm any.


(Bath white)


(helice female clouded yellow)


(southern gatetekeeper)


(southern brown argus)


(form/subspecies/species lyllus of small heath, peculiar to southern Spain)


(monarch)


(and another - this is one of my favourite Málaga buterflies)


(hoopoe)

Even though temperatures are nowhere near as high as last year, when 40°C+ was normal, things are still hanging in the shade. You can walk long distances without seeing a single butterfly, and then one will zoom out of the shadows and return quickly to another shadow. Only the whites and yellows seemed happy behaving like normal butterflies, drifting from flower to flower, and even they dashed back to shade when they had had enough:



Tomorrow I will take a slight break (though desert orange tips are on the menu!), before heading up to the hills near Antequera on Wednesday.

Guy

Really enjoying the photos, Guy. I probably shouldn't admit this on a butterfly forum, but the hoopoe picture is definitely my favourite!

Thanks Matsukaze. Nothing wrong at all with liking hoopoes!

Today was supposed to be a day off. It began OK, with a late start and a gentle trip to see if the desert orange tips were flying. They weren’t, though I did find another egg. I also found all stages of some shieldbug:


(eggs)


(nymphs)


(adult)

This is the orange tip egg, deep in the shade, so a lousy photo:



I toyed with the idea of visiting the Picasso museum but the queues were too long. I don’t mind queues but I like space and time inside, which you don’t get when there are thousands of people. So bought a few provisions and was heading back to the orange tips when I noticed my iPhone was missing - I had been pick-pocketed. I ran back to the hostal to see where the iPhone was, using my iPad, and discovered it had been turned off - so definitely stolen, not lost. Ho hum. I remotely erased the iPhone (so when it is next turned on it should self-destruct) and cancelled Apple Pay on it, but that still left the problem of banks, travel documents &c. By good luck, I had an old iPhone with me as a back-up, with an old Swiss sim card, and was able to reactivate that and recover most of what I needed. The holiday is still on!

After buying tickets for tomorrow, I went back to the desert orange tips and enjoyed a little personal time with them. Many of these are the same individual but I saw at least 4 in total and perhaps more.















It was clear they were thinking about roosting and several went to roost in the shade while I was there:



Guy

I caught the early bus to Antequera this morning, then walked to El Torcal. I saw little on the way until I reached the run-up to El Torcal (mainly because I took a quick, road route, rather than the scenic one) but just as I started to climb spotted my first Adonis blue of the year:



This was a good sign I would see different things today. The next new species for the year was rosy grizzled skipper, of which I saw a few in the lower parts of the climb:





Lots of familiar things too, including sage skippers, dusky heaths, southern gatekeepers, meadow browns, celina, southern brown argus, Bath white and clouded yellow, but a patch of tree graylings about halfway up the climb reminded me this was different geology.


(dusky heath)


(Polyommatus celina)


(sage skipper)


(tree grayling)

A hoopoe led me along the path at the bottom, but too far ahead for good photos:



Then when I came out onto the flat at the top, I spotted my first Spanish chalkhill blue. I’ve seen these frequently in northern Spain, where they have a faint blue wash. In Andalucía, where I haven’t seen them since 1983, they are chalky white on both surfaces. It was too hot for open-winged shots but I glimpsed the upperside a couple of times:





Most shots were undersides:





I had the usual tatty Carcharodus issues. Here is a typical example, ups only:



And here another, ups and uns:





As usual, there were a few random Cleopatras flying about, males and females. This is a male:



Lots of woodchats, as well as black redstarts and a wheatear species (or two):


(male woodchat)


(female woodchat)


(and again)


(wheatear sp)


(wheatear sp)

This was only about the third long-tailed blue of the trip, amazingly:



I think this is some species of antlion:



Guy

A nice read Guy. Baeticus look a lot different from my trip in June. If it’s under the motorway in Benalmedina, my shots of Baeticus and tripolinus are of much fresher individuals. Baeticus always appear paler underneath to me with pale brown veins . Always good numbers of them at that spot and I often see both species together

Guy , I wonder what the status of lavatherae is in the extreme south of Spain. I haven’t seen any records from trip reports that are available and I have not seen them around Malaga area either. Is is replaced by Baeticus completely.

Hi Andy. Yes, lavatherae is a possible for some of the ones yesterday, on El Torcal. I travel without books, so will study all the pics more carefully, with the books, when I get back. Pending books, I’m happy with the one I posted earlier (the uns) for baeticus, which is definitely not tripolinus and I really can’t see it as lavatherae. I’ve never seen that uns pattern on lavatherae and it’s a species I know intimately from Switzerland and the Pyrenees. That was at your motorway spot above Benalmádena. There were virtually no fresh Carcharodus there at all - nearly all very worn. I’ll probably visit again tomorrow after I’ve been to the airport for my PCR.

Today I tried the Parque Natural just north-east of Málaga, having never gone there before. I normally go just north-west because it’s a more direct route on foot out of the city. So I set off on the long trek to the top, taking in a cheeky Ziz Knys in the river bed before the climb:



The park on this side is mostly forest with rides and though it was a very pleasant walk, with some shade, I saw very little in the way of butterflies - just a few of the common things I see every day, like celina and cramera, proto, fidia, cecilia &c. I was aiming for the crest, where the forest path met the road from Málaga and there was a bar on the maps! There was indeed a bar, where I paused for a few needed beers. Then I continued up to what looked like the best hilltopping spot nearby:



There were magnificent views over Málaga and the surrounding countryside:





And as I expected, there was a lot of hilltopping going on. The main exponents were swallowtail, Iberian scarce swallowtail and two-tailed pasha, with long-tailed blues, walls and an assortment of other species that might have been hilltopping or might have lived there. There were a lot of dusky heaths, for example.







It was wonderful to be surrounded by them - definitely worth the climb up!

While I was there, I recharged my remaining iPhone. Solar chargers work brilliantly in Spain (the phone is deep in the bag, out of the direct heat - iPhones don’t handle extreme heat well and it gets much too hot under the charger, for example)!



Coming back down, I caught a nice female Cleopatra posing:



Otherwise, nothing I hadn’t seen on the way up, except for a grayling that wasn’t fidia. Unfortunately, I was descending a steep, shale path at the time, with my camera away for safekeeping.

Near the bottom, I became aware of what I thought was an insect creeping around the rim of my cap. I took the cap off to have a look and it turned out to be the biggest tick I have ever seen - many times bigger than a normal tick:





I can only think it jumped down from a pine tree onto my head. It certainly didn’t climb up me to reach my hat … I put it gently back into some undergrowth. I have nothing against ticks.

Guy

EDIT : I think it’s a tropical tick of the genus Hyalomma - and potentially quite dangerous if it arrived on a migrating bird, carrying a tropical disease.

Finally, I’ve got ups and uns of the same individual of 100% baeticus:





Compare these with a fresh tripolinus, also photographed today:





I think the upperside is more distinct, with the broad, nacreous markings of baeticus contrasting with the scratched lines of tripolinus (and alceae). The undersides are different in shade and degree rather than kind.

Two other skippers were flying today, Mediterranean skipper and sage skipper:









As well as hundreds of striped graylings …



… I also saw a normal, British grayling:



This is a speckled wood, which was flying locally, where the wood was a little damp:



Walls were common throughout most of my walk, as well as dusky heath, southern gatekeeper, celina and cramera, while Ziz Knys and geranium bronze were very local. This Ziz knys was huge - I had no idea what she was until she landed:



I am used to seeing geranium bronzes well away from potted pelargoniums:



I think this is a keeled skimmer, Orthetrum coerulescens:



I suspect this is a spotted flycatcher and her chick, though she never sat in that characteristic erect position:



This is mum:



And this the chick:



She was feeding the young one. Another young one was with them occasionally but more often went off on his own.

I had my PCR today and it was negative, so RyanAir should let me fly home …

Guy

Fantastic array of species Guy - I wouldn't know where to start apportioning so have a load Seeing these shots does make me yearn for some more foreign trips hopefully things will be more normal next year It seems a funny thing to say but I hope you stay negative

Have a goodun and stay safe

Wurzel

Definitely a Spotted Flycatcher and chick.

Wow, that Tick! Scary!

Thanks Wurzel. No need to apportion any little green men. I certainly don’t mean to make anyone jealous - just share the pleasure a little!

Thanks for the ID confirmation, Paul. And yes - one scary tick! Except, of course, I wasn’t scared of him. I have a special love of nature’s unloved creatures, as I’m sure many of us on these forums do.

Last day today, and the hottest, hitting 42°C in the shade in the afternoon. I climbed up to my local hilltopping sites to say goodbye, as well as exploring further in case there were some different habitats up there I had missed. Two-tailed pasha was butterfly of the day, appearing every time I climbed up to a crest or peak:



This is a seemingly gravid female up at s hilltopping spot. Perhaps it means the strawberry trees are not far away … I need to find where they are to have a chance of seeing avis in the spring but so far I haven’t found any.



I think this one is a male:



Swallowtails and Iberian scarce swallowtails were up there too, hilltopping away. By chance, a bee-eater is passing above the swallowtail in this picture:



Long-tailed blues and walls were hilltopping too, and everywhere there were sages skippers, celina, cramera, Bath whites, clouded yellows, dusky heaths, southern gatekeepers and striped graylings.

I closed the holiday as I began it, with desert orange tips. I got one horribly out-of-focus upperside shot, but some good underside shots:





All the pictures will look better when I’ve processed them properly on the computer - the sharpening in particular is not good on the iPad. But I like to get the most important pictures stashed in the cloud the same day I take them, in case of accident or theft. I am, after all, an iPhone 8+ down so far this holiday. That, at least is replaceable. The pictures aren’t!

Guy

Fantastic set of photos. Thanks for sharing them all, and tales of the trip in general. It really is appreciated.

So many wonderful butterflies. I can't wait for international travel to be easier again so I can get out and see some of these exotics myself. You images will suffice for now though, the usual wonderful combination of subject and scenery a very good second best

It's enjoyable following your Spanish trip, Padfield It will be great when and if international travel becomes easier for us all.