Holiday time

  

No sooner did I stir from my lethargy - or to be fair, business with other things - to post here, than Penny and I were off on holiday in Greece. It was our first long break since before the pandemic and I can much recommend the Southern Peloponnese in the last two weeks in May. We wandered round even grade one, five-star sites such as Mystra, Monemvasia and the Diros caves with very few other visitors. 

   The wild flowers were still flourishing too, including the lovely Madonna Lily, below, the sort of thing you usually only see at weddings or in flower arrangements in the UK. This one was nonchalantly growing out of a mixture of thin-looking soil, tree-roots and rock on a track down to a beach.

   Butterflies always come up to the mark in Greece. They were called 'psyche' in ancient times, a word more famously used for the soul and thence transferred to all the various branches of mental health affairs. In modern Greek they are 'petaloudhi', a pleasant word which means 'something that touches against flowers'. It stands comparison with the French 'papillon', German 'schmetterling' or Spanish 'mariposa'.

  My top pictures show two of the best: the 'English' Swallowtail and the Scarce Swallowtail. They were abundant, floating gloriously around, but seldom willing to settle in iPhone photo range. I got just a couple of chances and luckily they paid off.  I was lucky, too, to stalk successfully the even more jittery Clouded Yellow shown below. I saw dozens of others but they were always furiously on the move. 

   We also had White Admirals, possibly a magnificent Twin-tailed Pasha and assorted Brimstoney butterflies but none of them deigned to pose. Those that did are shown below: a handsome Mediterranean version of the Speckled Wood - two pics of slightly varied specimens - a Comma, some sort of Meadow Brown, the remains of a Painted Lady, a Common Blue, a Small White, a Skipper awaiting ID and a very pretty Geranium Bronze, topwing and underwing, one of a large family which lived in lush geranium plantings outside our bedroom window. The species is South African but was introduced to Europe in the 1980s and has flourished, including in the Southern UK.

Tomorrow: Greek moths and the cats which catch them.  Plus some other flying residents of the Southern Peloponnese.