A French Finale – July 2023
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 4:03 pm
I have recently returned from my final European butterflying trip of 2023 – 8 days touring around the departments of Isere and Haute Savoie in eastern France in the excellent company of Bob Lambert. We had half a dozen key target species lined up for this trip, but the main raison d’etre of the entire expedition was to find and photograph the Scarce Large Blue, a butterfly that has been inexcusably absent from both of our life-lists.
The European “Large Blues” have always had a special place in our hearts. I was only 13 years old when the extinction of the Large Blue in the UK made headline news back in 1979, but I vividly recall the feeling of disappointment and a deep sense of loss – I felt cheated of a birthright – I would never get to see one of the most iconic of species in the British countryside. My childhood days of leafing through the pages of the Observer’s Book of British Butterflies, dreaming of one day seeing arion for myself in the wild, now felt slightly tarnished by what was, in hindsight, a tragic conservation failure.
I had to wait until I was in my early thirties until I finally got to see a wild Large Blue during a family holiday in the Dordogne. Although it had been a long time coming it didn’t disappoint! Bob got his first sighting of a Large Blue a few years after me, a close-up encounter with this deep blue beauty at one of the successful reintroduction sites at Green Down, Somerset.
The species has retained some kind of mythical romanticism for both of us, and as we have progressively trawled through the world of European Butterflies over the years, we have eagerly sought out other members of this group. I confess that we both still use the term Maculinea when discussing these beasts, rather than the correct modern taxonomy of Phengaris, probably because we are both stubbornly set in our ways and old enough to be considered eligible for “dinosaur” status these days!
We saw our first Mountain Alcon Blues in the Maritime Alps back in 2011; at that point in time this was still considered by most to be a separate species from the Alcon Blue. Dusky Large Blue followed in 2019; good numbers at a beautiful and remote site in northern Spain. With the Alcon and Mountain Alcon subsequently having been reduced to subspecies status by the taxonomists, there was just the Scarce Large Blue left for us to find. So, when I mentioned to Bob last summer that I was planning a trip out to France in July this year to see it, I should not have been too surprised that his eyes lit up. A few days later I got a phone call from him – “I don’t suppose you want any company when you go out looking for the Scarce Large Blue next year, do you? Because I’ve spoken to the wife and I have got permission to join you, if that’s OK. Please say if it isn’t.”
How could I say no?
Anyhow, enough preamble, let’s crack on with the main story…
Tuesday 25th July
The timing of this trip was a bit of a compromise. Scarce Large Blue was definitely our number one target, but we also hoped to catch up with a few Erebias that fly in late July and early August. We therefore pitched our arrival towards the end of July, aware that if the season was an early one, we might be on the late side for teleius. These days, timings of any European trips are a gamble, so there was the usual trepidation as we arrived, on time, at Geneva Airport in the afternoon of Tuesday 25th July. Passport control, baggage reclaim and car hire collection went very smoothly and we were soon on the way to our first site, a wetland just 20 minutes’ drive from the airport.
On arrival, the weather was overcast but mild. There was a distinct lack of butterfly action, but after ten minutes of looking out across the marais from the observatory platform, we caught a couple of brief and distant glimpses of what might have been our main target. Other butterflies were scarce but included single figures of Meadow Brown, Speckled Wood, Large Skipper and Small White – nothing to write home about! We walked a little further and took an overgrown path onto the edge of the marais, which was abundant in Great Burnet, Purple Loosestrife, Hemp Agrimony and Purging Buckthorn scrub.
Scarce Large Blue habitat
Ten minutes later, a Scarce Large Blue female flew up right in front of me and posed nicely. Fantastic! Target species number one in the bag in no time at all! This took all pressure off. We grabbed a few photographs, then left her to go about her business. A single, tiny Large Copper in a rather poor state of wear provided added interest, after which we walked back to the car, buzzing from the almost-too-easy experience of our final European Phengaris lifer. It was time to drive to our first base, via the supermarket to stock up on the usual essentials. We had limited cooking facilities at our first apartment, a lovely, peaceful, rural, if somewhat overpriced gite, right on the edge of a lake near Aix-les-Bains, so we made do with a pre-packaged salad, some bread, cheese, and of course plenty of decent red wine, Beaumes de Venise and Cahors tonight. Hardships like these just go with the territory when touring for continental butterflies!
Wednesday 26th July
After a decent night’s rest following our travel out here, we awoke in good spirits on Wednesday and indulged in the breakfast provided by our host. We had a decision to make. We could either stay local this morning and explore another wetland reserve just around the corner, or we could head further south to another Scarce Large Blue site. We had only seen and photographed a single female yesterday and wanted to get to know the butterfly a little better. Local Lepidopterist John Green had kindly been doing a few recces on our behalf at a well-known site near Grenoble just before our arrival in France, and we knew from him that SLB was currently on the wing out there, so it was a no-brainer really. We were fortunate that John had given us the benefit of his local knowledge, as this was a large reserve, and the SLB was only flying in a linear area of a mere 250 metres along one specific overgrown track. We spent a couple of hours out there, and two female Scarce Large Blues kindly gave us a great display, posing nicely for the cameras and egg-laying right in front of us, completely unperturbed by our presence. It was a very memorable occasion, and fascinating to watch the females selecting the youngest, tightest flower heads on which to deposit their valuable ova, but other than SLB, there was an alarming dearth of butterfly activity.
Scarce Large Blue
I had left behind a Lincolnshire that was teeming with butterflies: Red Admirals and Commas in their hundreds, Silver-washed Fritillaries en masse, numerous Gatekeepers, Large and Small Whites, Purple Hairstreaks and so on. Despite the prolonged unsettled weather and rather abysmal summer, the “Lincolnshire Butterfly Biomass Index” was registering well into the heavyweight zone. And I had arrived in an area of France that is usually bouncing with insect life, only to find that over the course of several hours in what seemed to be prime habitat, we had recorded just the following: one Large Skipper, one Clouded Yellow, one Large White, two Small Whites, two Scarce Large Blues, five Provencal Short-tailed Blues, two Holly Blues, two Meadow Browns, one Gatekeeper, one Small Heath and five Speckled Woods. That was it. Twenty-three butterflies, 11 species in total. What the hell was going on?
By lunchtime we had taken a sack-full of photographs of SLB, so we decided to head to higher altitude up to the Haut Breda, where we hoped to find our next main target species, the Sudeten Ringlet. The sun was shining as we drove up a winding road, around a series of hairpins, climbing all the time. The roadside verges here had been heavily strimmed right up to the tree line – there was not a single wildflower or blade of grass taller than a centimetre to be seen – just mile after mile of utter devastation. As we got close to our destination, we were also getting closer to the clouds, and sure enough as we parked up, we found ourselves actually in them.
Haut Breda
It was cool and damp, but we got out to check out the habitat anyway. It didn’t look great. As Bob pointed out, using the vernacular, the whole place had been “cowed to death”. Overgrazing is a highly depressing but increasingly common failure factor when it comes to alpine and sub-alpine entomology these days. The clouds lifted briefly, but the habitat condition meant very little was on the wing. We saw four Piedmont Ringlets, one Large Ringlet and one Lulworth Skipper. Of sudetica there was not a glimpse. We admitted defeat and went to the supermarket in search of decent food, as tonight we were in our second base, and we had cooking facilities at our disposal. We were staying in a beautiful, rural, and rather ancient property at Froges for two nights, and enjoyed some fine French sausages with mushrooms and dauphinoise potatoes for dinner. Bob does all the evening cooking during our ventures, and I do all the driving – it’s developed into a familiar routine over the years and seems to work well!
Chateau Froges - home for 2 nights
Thursday 27th July
This morning we had the pleasure of meeting up with John Green and having a last look at his Scarce Large Blue site. It was great to spend some time chewing the cud and chatting about butterflies with John whilst being in SLB territory, and benefitting from his knowledge and experience of the area. He confirmed that in 30 years of living locally he had never known a season so low in butterfly numbers.
But we had unfinished business with a certain Ringlet that we missed out on yesterday, so late morning we set off from the marais and wound our way up towards the Col du Glandon. I had it on good authority that the Sudeten Ringlet flies near to the Col on the north side, but I didn’t have any precise location details. During the research phase before this trip, I had identified what looked to be a potentially suitable area on Google Earth, where we could park up and search. On arrival we got out of the car, ducked under an electric fence (more bloody cows!), and aimed for an area of ungrazed scrubby grassland where some Scabious was in flower. It may have been intuition, pure luck, or a combination of the two, but this spot quickly produced the goods. Several Erebias were flying around, reluctant to settle and difficult to photograph when they did (usually down amongst grasses, or swaying in the breeze on a flowerhead). After some consternation that we might actually be looking at Lesser Mountain Ringlets, I eventually got good enough views of a few undersides, which confirmed that we did indeed have Sudeten Ringlet in front of us – another lifer for us both. Happy days! Almond-eyed and Lesser Mountain Ringlet were also present at this site, along with a few Purple-edged Coppers, Damon Blues, Chalkhill Blues, and Dark Green, Silver-washed, Spotted, Heath and Meadow Fritillaries.
Habitat of Sudeten Ringlet
Hire Car in sudetica territory
Sudeten Ringlet
We stopped off on the way back down from the Col at a roadside layby where we had the first Apollos of the holiday, plus a good range of fritillaries including Weaver’s, Titania’s, Heath and False Heath Fritillary. Wood Whites were also flying here, as were numerous Marbled Whites, with dozens taking up salts and moisture from the roadside.
False Heath Fritillary
Marbled Whites
Of course, evening celebrations were in order as we wrote up the records of the day and checked our photographs. Tonight’s wine list included a bottle of Ventoux, a Vacqueyras, and the remains of last night’s Beames de Venise. We enjoyed the dauphinoise and sausages so much last night that we went for a repeat performance tonight and slept well on bellies full of wine, food and the satisfaction of that Sudeten Ringlet life-tick!
Part Two to follow
The European “Large Blues” have always had a special place in our hearts. I was only 13 years old when the extinction of the Large Blue in the UK made headline news back in 1979, but I vividly recall the feeling of disappointment and a deep sense of loss – I felt cheated of a birthright – I would never get to see one of the most iconic of species in the British countryside. My childhood days of leafing through the pages of the Observer’s Book of British Butterflies, dreaming of one day seeing arion for myself in the wild, now felt slightly tarnished by what was, in hindsight, a tragic conservation failure.
I had to wait until I was in my early thirties until I finally got to see a wild Large Blue during a family holiday in the Dordogne. Although it had been a long time coming it didn’t disappoint! Bob got his first sighting of a Large Blue a few years after me, a close-up encounter with this deep blue beauty at one of the successful reintroduction sites at Green Down, Somerset.
The species has retained some kind of mythical romanticism for both of us, and as we have progressively trawled through the world of European Butterflies over the years, we have eagerly sought out other members of this group. I confess that we both still use the term Maculinea when discussing these beasts, rather than the correct modern taxonomy of Phengaris, probably because we are both stubbornly set in our ways and old enough to be considered eligible for “dinosaur” status these days!
We saw our first Mountain Alcon Blues in the Maritime Alps back in 2011; at that point in time this was still considered by most to be a separate species from the Alcon Blue. Dusky Large Blue followed in 2019; good numbers at a beautiful and remote site in northern Spain. With the Alcon and Mountain Alcon subsequently having been reduced to subspecies status by the taxonomists, there was just the Scarce Large Blue left for us to find. So, when I mentioned to Bob last summer that I was planning a trip out to France in July this year to see it, I should not have been too surprised that his eyes lit up. A few days later I got a phone call from him – “I don’t suppose you want any company when you go out looking for the Scarce Large Blue next year, do you? Because I’ve spoken to the wife and I have got permission to join you, if that’s OK. Please say if it isn’t.”
How could I say no?
Anyhow, enough preamble, let’s crack on with the main story…
Tuesday 25th July
The timing of this trip was a bit of a compromise. Scarce Large Blue was definitely our number one target, but we also hoped to catch up with a few Erebias that fly in late July and early August. We therefore pitched our arrival towards the end of July, aware that if the season was an early one, we might be on the late side for teleius. These days, timings of any European trips are a gamble, so there was the usual trepidation as we arrived, on time, at Geneva Airport in the afternoon of Tuesday 25th July. Passport control, baggage reclaim and car hire collection went very smoothly and we were soon on the way to our first site, a wetland just 20 minutes’ drive from the airport.
On arrival, the weather was overcast but mild. There was a distinct lack of butterfly action, but after ten minutes of looking out across the marais from the observatory platform, we caught a couple of brief and distant glimpses of what might have been our main target. Other butterflies were scarce but included single figures of Meadow Brown, Speckled Wood, Large Skipper and Small White – nothing to write home about! We walked a little further and took an overgrown path onto the edge of the marais, which was abundant in Great Burnet, Purple Loosestrife, Hemp Agrimony and Purging Buckthorn scrub.
Ten minutes later, a Scarce Large Blue female flew up right in front of me and posed nicely. Fantastic! Target species number one in the bag in no time at all! This took all pressure off. We grabbed a few photographs, then left her to go about her business. A single, tiny Large Copper in a rather poor state of wear provided added interest, after which we walked back to the car, buzzing from the almost-too-easy experience of our final European Phengaris lifer. It was time to drive to our first base, via the supermarket to stock up on the usual essentials. We had limited cooking facilities at our first apartment, a lovely, peaceful, rural, if somewhat overpriced gite, right on the edge of a lake near Aix-les-Bains, so we made do with a pre-packaged salad, some bread, cheese, and of course plenty of decent red wine, Beaumes de Venise and Cahors tonight. Hardships like these just go with the territory when touring for continental butterflies!
Wednesday 26th July
After a decent night’s rest following our travel out here, we awoke in good spirits on Wednesday and indulged in the breakfast provided by our host. We had a decision to make. We could either stay local this morning and explore another wetland reserve just around the corner, or we could head further south to another Scarce Large Blue site. We had only seen and photographed a single female yesterday and wanted to get to know the butterfly a little better. Local Lepidopterist John Green had kindly been doing a few recces on our behalf at a well-known site near Grenoble just before our arrival in France, and we knew from him that SLB was currently on the wing out there, so it was a no-brainer really. We were fortunate that John had given us the benefit of his local knowledge, as this was a large reserve, and the SLB was only flying in a linear area of a mere 250 metres along one specific overgrown track. We spent a couple of hours out there, and two female Scarce Large Blues kindly gave us a great display, posing nicely for the cameras and egg-laying right in front of us, completely unperturbed by our presence. It was a very memorable occasion, and fascinating to watch the females selecting the youngest, tightest flower heads on which to deposit their valuable ova, but other than SLB, there was an alarming dearth of butterfly activity.
I had left behind a Lincolnshire that was teeming with butterflies: Red Admirals and Commas in their hundreds, Silver-washed Fritillaries en masse, numerous Gatekeepers, Large and Small Whites, Purple Hairstreaks and so on. Despite the prolonged unsettled weather and rather abysmal summer, the “Lincolnshire Butterfly Biomass Index” was registering well into the heavyweight zone. And I had arrived in an area of France that is usually bouncing with insect life, only to find that over the course of several hours in what seemed to be prime habitat, we had recorded just the following: one Large Skipper, one Clouded Yellow, one Large White, two Small Whites, two Scarce Large Blues, five Provencal Short-tailed Blues, two Holly Blues, two Meadow Browns, one Gatekeeper, one Small Heath and five Speckled Woods. That was it. Twenty-three butterflies, 11 species in total. What the hell was going on?
By lunchtime we had taken a sack-full of photographs of SLB, so we decided to head to higher altitude up to the Haut Breda, where we hoped to find our next main target species, the Sudeten Ringlet. The sun was shining as we drove up a winding road, around a series of hairpins, climbing all the time. The roadside verges here had been heavily strimmed right up to the tree line – there was not a single wildflower or blade of grass taller than a centimetre to be seen – just mile after mile of utter devastation. As we got close to our destination, we were also getting closer to the clouds, and sure enough as we parked up, we found ourselves actually in them.
It was cool and damp, but we got out to check out the habitat anyway. It didn’t look great. As Bob pointed out, using the vernacular, the whole place had been “cowed to death”. Overgrazing is a highly depressing but increasingly common failure factor when it comes to alpine and sub-alpine entomology these days. The clouds lifted briefly, but the habitat condition meant very little was on the wing. We saw four Piedmont Ringlets, one Large Ringlet and one Lulworth Skipper. Of sudetica there was not a glimpse. We admitted defeat and went to the supermarket in search of decent food, as tonight we were in our second base, and we had cooking facilities at our disposal. We were staying in a beautiful, rural, and rather ancient property at Froges for two nights, and enjoyed some fine French sausages with mushrooms and dauphinoise potatoes for dinner. Bob does all the evening cooking during our ventures, and I do all the driving – it’s developed into a familiar routine over the years and seems to work well!
Thursday 27th July
This morning we had the pleasure of meeting up with John Green and having a last look at his Scarce Large Blue site. It was great to spend some time chewing the cud and chatting about butterflies with John whilst being in SLB territory, and benefitting from his knowledge and experience of the area. He confirmed that in 30 years of living locally he had never known a season so low in butterfly numbers.
But we had unfinished business with a certain Ringlet that we missed out on yesterday, so late morning we set off from the marais and wound our way up towards the Col du Glandon. I had it on good authority that the Sudeten Ringlet flies near to the Col on the north side, but I didn’t have any precise location details. During the research phase before this trip, I had identified what looked to be a potentially suitable area on Google Earth, where we could park up and search. On arrival we got out of the car, ducked under an electric fence (more bloody cows!), and aimed for an area of ungrazed scrubby grassland where some Scabious was in flower. It may have been intuition, pure luck, or a combination of the two, but this spot quickly produced the goods. Several Erebias were flying around, reluctant to settle and difficult to photograph when they did (usually down amongst grasses, or swaying in the breeze on a flowerhead). After some consternation that we might actually be looking at Lesser Mountain Ringlets, I eventually got good enough views of a few undersides, which confirmed that we did indeed have Sudeten Ringlet in front of us – another lifer for us both. Happy days! Almond-eyed and Lesser Mountain Ringlet were also present at this site, along with a few Purple-edged Coppers, Damon Blues, Chalkhill Blues, and Dark Green, Silver-washed, Spotted, Heath and Meadow Fritillaries.
We stopped off on the way back down from the Col at a roadside layby where we had the first Apollos of the holiday, plus a good range of fritillaries including Weaver’s, Titania’s, Heath and False Heath Fritillary. Wood Whites were also flying here, as were numerous Marbled Whites, with dozens taking up salts and moisture from the roadside.
Of course, evening celebrations were in order as we wrote up the records of the day and checked our photographs. Tonight’s wine list included a bottle of Ventoux, a Vacqueyras, and the remains of last night’s Beames de Venise. We enjoyed the dauphinoise and sausages so much last night that we went for a repeat performance tonight and slept well on bellies full of wine, food and the satisfaction of that Sudeten Ringlet life-tick!
Part Two to follow
