Greece 10 - England 14

We have just had ten lovely days on the Greek island of Hydra, basking in sweltering temperatures but managing to keep up our walking tally because a beach or a taverna or both lay at the end of every trek. I always enjoy discovering the butterflies, moths and other creatures on overseas holidays and Hydra came up trumps with a new species for me.

It's the delicate little Blue shown above; not blue in the picture, because like almost all the members of this delicate, fast-flying species it likes to rest with its wings folded, hiding its vivid topwings. Actually it was Penny who spotted this one, using her legendary powers as our Finder of Insects Indoors; in this case, it was fluttering about on the glazed glass of our little studio's front door. 

It's a Zebra Blue, also known as Lang's Short-tailed Blue (you can just see the short tail between the 'eyes', or the Plumbago Blue, the last name being appropriate in our case as a lovely big plumbago towered over the house. The underside patterning is absolutely delightful and repays a long leisurely look.

My second favourite of the holiday was an old but always lovely familiar, the Scarce Swallowtail, which coincidentally has a rather zebra-like pattern too, though the name Zebra Swallowtail is taken by another relative found only in Canada and the United States. We don't get the Scarce in the UK and our native Swallowtail is of course a great rarity here. I saw a couple of them on Hydra but did not get the chance of a photo.

Here, however, is my Scarce Swallowtail which obligingly nectared at a nearby Plumbago while we were tucking into a Greek salad at a lunchtime beach taverna. I zoomed over with my iPhone after glimpsing it halting its majestic, swooping flight, to the interest of other lunchers.

A more familiar butterfly on Greek Summer holidays is the little Geranium Bronze, faithful to its foodplant and recently recorded in the South of the UK, and spreading northwards here. There were lots of these darting about and flying in pairs - either courting or males fighting - and also plenty of Common Blues nectaring on swags of lavender and other flowers. Again, in both cases, the wings are folded but one Common Blue - sorry that my pic is rather blurred - had a tear which allows a glimpse of the glorious topwings.

Two Geranium Bronzes partying in the sun. The lower one shows a glimpse of the bronze topwing which gives the species its name

One of our favourite swimming spots on the island was Vlichos, a couple of miles' walk along the beautiful coastal path from Hydra port, which some guidebooks refer to as 'Butterfly Bay', citing dark brown and black butterflies flipping about in the shade. Sure enough, we found quite a few of these - Freyer's Greylings which share the habit of the English Greyling of clasping their wings tightly together at rest, sliding the forewing back to form a triangle with the hindwing and then tilting towards the sun to cast the least possible shadow. All this makes them a bit of a nightmare to photograph, but I got a couple of snaps of examples just showing their bright eye, one of them on the blue shoe of a fellow coffee drinker in the port.

The skippers are always well-represented on Greek wildflowers and here are a couple of pictures of a Mallow Skipper and below them, a Sage Skipper, I think.

 

There was no shortage of Whites, meanwhile, both Large and Small...

...and the Painted Ladies which have been so successful in England this Summer were out in force on Hydra too.

Finally, some other enjoyable insects from the island: a shining Copper Chafer beetle which P spotted on one of the port's vertiginous flights of steps in time to stop me treading on it:

And a fine-looking grasshopper - possibly the Twin-striped:

Excellent butterflies from Greece then, ten species in all, one for each day of our holiday, plus a solitary and very familiar moth: a shy Silver Y. 

BUT, look what I discovered on my first day back here in Oxfordshire. FOURTEEN different butterfly species in our garden alone: Small and Large White,  Brimstone, Marbled White, Ringlet, Peacock, Red Admiral, Holly Blue, Hedge Brown, Common Blue, Small Skipper, Large Skipper and Meadow Brown.  The one I have (so far) failed to photo was yet another Painted Lady. The heatwave, the third this Summer, has created a butterfly paradise.