Gardens and Butterflies

David Attenborough is asking folk in the U.K. to help with a butterfly survey. The numbers of British butterflies seem to be going into a decline. There has been a lot of interest in gardening for wildlife and it was hoped that bees and butterflies could be recovering but there have been a range of factors affecting numbers and particular species.
Here are some of the butterflies I was fortunate enough to photograph at Navasola in May and June. I love the wild plants and flowers here and these seem to support a variety of wildlife but I have been delighted that my efforts in creating some small patches of garden have not only paid off with a range of flowers but also brought these beautiful butterflies close by.
Last year I was given some Sweet Williams by a friend nearby. These were planted last year and survived August heat and bloomed beautifully from the end of April to June. I hope these will self seed but I have collected seeds too. I may also be lucky and get a second show of flowers from the same plants next year. Seeing how these flowers have attracted a range of butterflies and bees means they are a must for any wildlife garden and nature lover.

Please let me know any hardy flowers that have attracted butterflies in your gardens and parks. Of course the eggs and larva also need very specific plants too and these are often wild ones that are seen as weeds. Enjoy!

Who is looking at who? A Cardinal in the Sierra Aracena.

A newly hatched Cardinal spreading its wings out to dry.

A fritillary we struggled to fully identify. Visited at same time as the Cardinal.

Swallowtail heaven!

A Meadow Brown keeping an eye on me!

All taken by me but with a LUMIX camera borrowed from my naturalist friend and artist.

A Flutterby of Butterflies. Summer 2015 in the Sierra Aracena.

This year from May to early July has not only been a feast of wild flowers for me to discover and try to identify but also of so many different butterflies. My working walk into my allotment area is bordered with wild scabious which I had decided not to cut back. I was rewarded with being able to walk back and forth through butterflies resting and sometimes arguing over key flowers. It seems to be the wild scabious that they love. With its long stems it bounces up and down as you pass. It also moves gently with the butterflies and the wind and this does not make for easy photographs. A lot have been blurred. After my working walk with the wheelbarrow and scythe I walked up to the Era in the early evening.here we can check on water levels in the deposit and decide whether to pump up more before I start to water. I was flabbergasted by the flutterby of so many more butterflies up there. But then there were so many more flowers. More field scabious, but also pink centuary, and yellow curry plant and many different grasses. The Era had been a levelled out stony threshing area for grain. Possibly used back in the 1920s. We had cleared it several years ago, strimmed and scythed. However, as there were so many flowers on this area last year I decided to do nothing in September. This year I have been rewarded with more flowers and a terrific range of butterflies, albeit with photos all mainly on the scabious. Apart from the swallowtail which seems to like the bushes near the house and the cement left over from the water butt. Hopefully, it will not be a casualty of human so called progress. We hope we are nearly done with any more awful cement mixing and will have a fairly sustainable way of life and comfortable house.   .

The era above the house. Once used for threshing and now seems to be a butterfly haven.

Painted Lady on Scabious.

Wall or Meadow Brown?

Clouded Yellow

Cardinal, large on Scabious!

Brimstone on Scabious

Probably a clouded yellow as can see the dots!

Scarce swallowtail.

Must be our favourite flower. Wild Field Scabious in Southern Spain. Sierra Aracena.

One butterfly missing from the photo shoot is the two tailed pasha . This beautiful butterfly needs the madrono, arbutus unedo, as a place for its eggs. There are plenty of these around the house but maybe this year there have been too many disturbances. There are also many more places for this bewitching butterfly and its peculiar desire for urine. One of my last photos some years ago were of it drinking my dog’s pee. And sorry can’t find that one to add to the collection. However quite pleased with the LUMIX camera and the details. But can’t get hold of the photo editing to crop it and show the eyes and delicate wings yet. Life here in the Sierra is far more comfortable with our solar power but we still haven’t solved our wifi access unless in a bar or the local library. But the library is a cool break as the heat of the summer is rising well into the mid 30s here.

Wings of a butterfly to wildness of wild boar: Close encounters of the natural kind.

 

What is it that makes an encounter with a wild animal so fascinating and wonderful. It seems to me like a privilege that you are able to see one and at a safe distance in the case of the more threatening ones! We know there are boar on the Finca. We see evidence of their digging, in particular around the path up to the studio.It is a rocky and grassy path and full of wild flowers such as candytuft in the summer. I also had to go to some expense to have a boar proof fence around my new Huerta or allotment patch for vegetables. Fidel who helps us with the chestnut harvest once asked if he could hunt them. Mr T rang me up and got my most adamant reply NO! So they are quite happy here being destructive with the rocky walls, digging up the earth and making it rough to walk over, clearing pathways through the undergrowth and finding enough to eat. In Spain there is a boar hunting season and we had a man chase a boar though the Finca with his dogs once. I only saw the undergrowth move fast but later a dog with a collar and bell appeared and for a while we were wondering what to do with the dog. There are No hunting signs around the campsite and these are areas where people live and walk so again the most dangerous animal is a man with a gun.

Yesterday as I got out of the car to unlock the gate, about 2 on. Rainy afternoon. I pushed the gate open on one side and looked down towards the crest of a hill dipping down the path. For me it seemed like a great big dog appeared, blackish, about the size of a German shepherd dog. I thought at first it was maybe our friend Rainers’s dog but it looked rather grey around the muzzle .
It turned up onto the path and looked to cross. I realised then it must be a boar. It stopped on the path and turned its head round. For a few moments I was staring at the boar and the boar was staring at me. I must have been very still and the boar was motionless until it turned its head agin and wandered off across the path. Mr T was quite indignant that I hadn’t told him and he got out of the car and went down the path to see if the boar was still nearby. He had never seen one on the Finca but had several years ago taken some pictures of some young ones with one of those night automatic infra red cameras. I think it must have been a male and I have twice in the past almost run over one crossing a main road. This is a reminder to me that they are big but not usually about during the daytime. I might now have to take my walks around the Finca with my Spanish boar stick and thudding the ground with it but of course that might ensure I have no more close wild encounters. Usually these wild ones keep well clear of us if we are not to be prey!

The other close encounter was with a butterfly. It was a beautiful evening with the sun just about to disappear behind the hill to the west of our small boat shaped valley. The shadows of the chestnuts in the Navasola west fields were getting longer but I saw a lump of old broken off chestnut with the sun shining fully on it. It looked like a warm place to sit and soak up the last rays of the sun. Then something fluttered by, surely not, a butterfly in January? As I tried to follow it and perhaps identify it it landed on that piece of old wood. A good spot in the sun for a butterfly to warm its wings before a cold night. I couldn’t move but just stared down at it. It’s wings were large with bright red. It stayed there quite a while. I even thought I might have been able to go back for my camera! The butterfly and I just warming ourselves in the sun. When it finally flew off I went and sat on the wood where the butterfly had warmed its wings. I stayed there until the sun dipped down enjoying a time of quiet reflection on small things and inner delight. Ahh… A red admiral, that had been hibernating over winter and had woken with the warmth of a January sunny day here in Andalucia. My photo is of one taken at the Martin Mere Wetlands centre in Lancashire in the UK. Need to go back to my iPhone in my pocket for those sudden photo opportunities when least expecting a close encounter!

What’s a Clouded Yellow?

Lots of them here in Southern Spain and are considered indigenous to here. So European too! Must have flown a long way!

A Tramp in the Woods

An immigrant species from North Africa. Not especially uncommon, sometimes you get really good years and they are everywhere but I have never photographed them. I have seen them about but not when  I had a camera handy.

This is a female. She is really beautiful when she opens her wings. Golden yellow with a black border. These pictures today are just a tease.

This is the new mission. There is an added problem this time. These Butterflies always settle with their wings closed, you only see them open in flight. We have got to have those open wing shots.

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Fly by butterfly, butterfly fly by!

Much of my work over the past few weeks has been helped along by constant pauses to watch the butterflies so close by along the path. There have been quite a variety but the Cardinal took pride of place and was not bothered by a sweaty woman with a wheelbarrow.

Other butterflies have been the yellow ones, clouded yellow and the cleopatra, and the wood and meadow browns along with some sightings of the two tailed pasha and scarce swallowtail. These have not allowed me to photograph them just yet.