Alpine Amble - Part 1

 

 

 

 

As Autumn draws to a close and the long nights draw in, times become hard for butterfly enthusiasts, you can eke out the rest of the season, and kid yourself there’s still life left with reckless November Red Admirals, or tired, morbid Speckled Woods, or distract yourself with birds and Brown Hairstreak eggs as a stop-gap before the first Orange Tips next April. Truly, winter is a trying time of year. This is oversimplifying the case a bit, since serious devotion and field skills improve our understanding of our butterflies’ winter doings more and more each year (check out Matthew Oates’ Purple Emperor larval doings: http://www.thepurpleempire.com/Resources/Emperor%20Season%20Without%20End.pdf, and Pete Eeles’ White Admiral ones: http://www.dispar.org/reference.php?id=120) , this is the great thing about butterflies, there’s always another layer of complexity and understanding to unlock.

The point is however, that there are fewer butterflies around, and coping strategies are therefore required, one such, is reminiscence. This July, by way of a light at the end of the examination tunnel, I spent three weeks hiking in Switzerland, along the Via Alpina’s Green route (http://www.via-alpina.org/en/page/246/the-green-trail), with a long-suffering friend. The idea is to walk from refuge to refuge across Switzerland (we used tents, more because of cost than any purist walking notions), on a rather challenging route, generally involving a 1000m ascent and corresponding descent each day. It’s a famously impressive part of the world, taking you through the Bernese Oberland, past chocolate box towns (think Murren), rushing waterfalls (think Reichenbach, of Sherlock Holmes fame), and of course, high alpine meadows rich in butterflies. 

 

High altitude meadows - land of the Gland'

 

Over the course of the trip, we chalked up somewhere in the region of 100 species, many flying in awe-inspiring abundance, in equally awe-inspiring settings. For me one of the most exciting groups are the lycaenids, seen in much greater diversity than here in the UK, they’re striking, obvious, and pose few of the ID challenges that Erebia and Pyrgus often raise. The most exciting for me was the Glandon Blue, a really hardcore species that ekes out a living flying among the peaks (we never saw one below 1700m) at low densities (wherever there were large numbers of puddling blues, there would only ever be one or two Glandons), and thus has eluded me for a while. They’re small, and nippy, and appear very dark in flight, but are stunning up close, with a really unusual set of diffuse underside markings.

Glandon in Glandon country.

Lady Glandon

 

A typically anti-social Glandon sneaking into the corner of a party
of puddlers.

Seemingly copying the Glandon Blue’s underside, but setting it off with a rather more extravagant upperside (at least in the males), the Alpine Blue was another denizen of (slightly less) high altitudes, and while flying at similarly low densities, it was rather more widespread. These were joined by another new species for me, the Cranberry Blue, seen only a couple of times around boggy areas where the foodplant (Vaccinium uliginosum in the Alps) grew.

 

Alpine Blue

Cranberry Blue

Even more tied to their foodplants were Geranium Arguses, invariably seen perched on or around the flowers of Meadow Cranesbill (don’t know why I never looked for eggs). Sharing a second name and perhaps an underside with the Geranium Arguses, (but little else) was the much rarer Silvery Argus, I was delighted to chance upon a single female in a boggy clearing.

 

 



Geranium Argus, strangely enough, on Geranium.

Silvery Argus - set apart by the delicate
pale blue wash

Mazarine Blues, despite no longer gracing the meadows of our fair isle, were one of the commonest blues, flying in small numbers pretty much everywhere, right up to about 1800m. Females depositing their sea-urchin like white eggs on clovers were seen several times, as well as a male harassing one still drying her wings.

Mazarine Blue

Mazarine Blue

Commoner still than Mazarine Blues, were Small Blues, which were fairly ubiquitous, forming their little leks in small hotspots, particularly at higher altitudes. Here, the foodplant, Kidney Vetch was found thriving on rocky soils, very frequently with their eggs peppered liberally among the flowerheads. They were particularly fond of mud-pudddling, and on several occasions, made the greatest possible sacrifice for this predilection, when a careless foot or quad-bike tire ploughed over the little aggregations that formed in damp spots. Rather more sinisterly, survivors did not seem to take the hint, and would often be seen feasting among (and even on) the corpses of their fallen companions, a stark reminder of the life and death struggle that confronts one of the most fragile-looking of European butterflies every day.
 

Small is beautiful

Feasting on the bodily fluids of spent comrades.
 

Like the Small Blues, male Coppers were often seen staking out territories in sheltered spots, one to each glade. These weren’t too well represented across the walk, with just Sooty, Purple-Edged and Scarce seen (Violet, Large and Purple-Shot can also be found in Switzerland). Sooty was the commonest, in pretty much every flowery habitat up to about 1800m, Purple-Edged was frequent in boggy areas in little colonies, and Scarce was strangely patchy – it was abundant towards the end of the walk, but completely absent elsewhere.
 

Scarce Copper (male)

Sooty Copper (male)



Classic eurydame-type male PEC - what it 'should' be.

The lack of quantity of copper species was certainly made up for by their quality, these are royalty among lycaenids, the Sooty Copper a black prince, smoky, somehow lighter and more wraith-like on their larger wings than the petulant, angry fireballs of their Scarce and Purple-Edged relatives. All three species feed on relatives of docks, and come in their own limited-edition forms in the Alps: subalpinus for Sooty (much darker than lowland forms, lacking orange on the underside), montanus for Scarce (males with a thicker black forewing, and females a tad washed out), and eurydame for Purple-Edged, males lacking the trademark purple upperside colouring, and females a uniform brown apart from darker cell spots, while both sexes lack any really yellow underside markings. The latter proved a real point of interest, I’ve only ever seen them in the Alps  - all smart eurydame specimens, and was expecting to see much more of the same, but some didn’t seem to have read Tolman and Lewington, with one male sporting really impressive purple markings, and plenty of females with a yellow flush on the forewing uppersides.
 

Hippothoe-type male PEC - note strong purple iridescence,
what it 'shouldn't' be.



Strongly-marked PEC underside, more
hippothoe like.

Variety, both within and between species is very much the order of the day in the rich tapestry of life that is the Swiss lepidoptera, and nowhere was this more obvious than at the large gatherings of mud-puddling lycaenids that formed on hot days. Blue wings, blue skies, and white peaks will live long in the memory.