Farewell to Greece

 

                                          

This striking moth, above, added to my excitement on a hot but lovely walk along the coast from the old town of Nafplio to a beach three miles away. It last featured here two years ago when a friend in France discovered one at their holiday house and sent a picture asking what on Earth it was.

The answer is a Palm Moth and initially I was startled by her message because this grand and striking creature is a native of Uruguay and Argentina and shouldn't be in Europe at all. It turned out to have arrived France in the mid-1990s in a consignment of ornamental fan palms. Since then, it hasn't looked back. 

Sadly. Because palms are a lovely feature of the Mediterranean coast - and indeed of resorts such as Torquay in the UK.  The Palm Moth pounced on the first French palms it saw and its caterpillars began their practice of boring into the trunks. The moths have spread to Spain, Italy and - as you can see - now Greece, creating a wilderness where once there was a line of shapely palms.

When my friend alerted me in September 2022, the picture rang a bell and I realised that my Moth Bible has a picture of it in a section which I seldom use about rare adventists - moths which spread through human agency like the commercial palm market.  Here it is, with a bit more info:

Back in Greece, I enjoyed stalking various larger 'brown' butterflies including this version of our Wall Butterfly or perhaps Speckled Wood and the Grayling (again of a Mediterranean sub-species), Speckled Wood and Skipper in the composite picture, along with three moths. I need to find time to attempt some ID work on all of these unlees a passing Greek entomologist can help, although I can tell you that the bottom right-hand butterfly in the second composite was a child's sticker, lost and glued by someone's heavy footstep to a Nafplio pavement.

The skipper above is another ID task awaiting me - a Mediterranean form of the Grizzled? - but I was at home with the lovely Marbled Whites which flitted about among almost all the ancient ruins which Penny and I went to see (takes one to know one...).  I was also very pleased to see a Bath White - the butterfly bottom right in the composite below. They are common in Europe but very rare indeed in the UK.  I still remember the excitement of seeing them in Portugal when I was 15.  They resemble a rather superior female Orange-tip with similar but more intricate green dappling on their underwings - sorry that my pictures of this, left, are so blurred.

Finally, back to the glorious Swallowtail which I gave you a glimpse of in my first post about Greece, last week. Here are some more pictures, including one with a bee in attendance, plus a little film of this majestic creature in action.