What? You thought you'd get away without my sticking my nose in?
I thought I'd got these two species completely sussed until someone decided that all my Swiss
alcyone were actually an entirely different species,
genava. In consequence, I have never actually seen
alcyone. Roger's opinion should weigh heavier than mine here, because he has intimate experience of both species in that part of the world, but just to upset things, your butterfly looks classic
fagi to me!! The width of the white band, which departs from the line of the inner edge and is diffuse on the outer edge, the way the dark touches the eye flat, rather than being neatly eyebrowed... I'm not doing it deliberately, Roger, I promise!! And I totally agree with you, Roger, that the size difference is significant and much more obvious in the field than you might think (assuming
genava is the same size as
alcyone).
This is
fagi, and it's even clearer around the eye than Paul's and has an 'elbow', though not as sharp as Paul's:
I am pretty confident of that one because I examined a whole bunch of dead specimens from the same site, caught by a Spanish collector, and indeed I still have a road casualty from the site in my house. To the best of my knowledge
alcyone is not known from the site. Male
fagi is relatively easy in the hand because the upperside forewing is obscured by fuscous suffusion towards the apex, but female
fagi lacks this. You can also simply measure them.
There are loads of piccies of
genava on my website at
http://www.guypadfield.com/rockgrayling.html. Although officially indistinguishable, you can see they are quite different. I was hoping
alcyone would be similarly different when you got to know it, but maybe this is not the case.
In my opinion, we shouldn't submit pictures to the species galleries that we are not 100% sure of, unless we state this clearly.
Has anyone tried Lafranchis's method of examining the Jullien organs of a living butterfly? Apparently this is quite possible and doesn't harm the butterfly. He didn't show you how to do this, did he, Pete?
Guy