Orchids at home and fresh oothecas found!

I bought some goodies for my little friends in the garden - a butterfly house which is a place for them to shelter when the weather is bad - all you do is add some twigs for them to perch on and put it somewhere sheltered, not in full sun. I'm going to put it up on our shed near the pool. The other is as it says on the label. It comes with pebbles which you put in the bowl then partially fill with water so bees and butterflies can land on the pebbles and have a drink. The reason for the garish yellow colour is because insects are attracted to this colour apparently. I'm going to put it in the nectar bar.

The first wave of orchids has been incredible! I got out and marked every one that I could see before Keith did the first mow of the year in mid March. It looks a bit odd with dozens of yellow labels, but they do the trick! It does take him a lot longer to mow now though. One day the postman came to the door with a parcel and asked what they were for! 😁

Whilst I was outside with my phone I took a few pics of the view - here looking towards the Montagne Noir on the left and the local Malepere hills on the right. Now (a month later) there is yellow here and there from the rape fields.

Moving to the right we are looking in the direction of the Corbieres hills which is the direction of the coast.

By the end of March the first wave of Ophrys sp. orchids had been flowering for a while, but the next wave of orchids' leaves were up, so many of my labels have moved to those ones. The Magnolia had started flowering as well but has many more flowers on now.

Bertie.*** Of course, when I called him gently to get him to look at me, he started walking towards me. 😀

Above and below are Early Spider Ochids (Ophrys sphegodes), which the vast majority in the lawn are.

And this is a Sombre (or Dingy) Spider Orchid (Ophrys fusca).

Last week I noticed a Yellow Bee Orchid (Ophrys lutea) up on a high bank beside one of our neighbour's properties, so I couldn't get a very good photo. We had quite a few in the garden last year, so I kept checking. A few days ago I suddenly found 25 of them in our front lawn!

Just up the road on the banks and verges the Lady Orchids (Orchis purpurea) have started flowering. We don't have any in our garden, so I am willing them to move in our direction!

I noticed some also in a neighbour's front garden, which had been recently mown. These orchids are smaller, so have managed to cope with being mown but still managing to flower! 

I counted about 50 here! This is just a part of their front garden - it's rather large. The brother in law of the owners who lives next door mows it with a proper tractor.

Now onto the Praying Mantises. An exciting find - live oothecas! K discovered them, three, attached to the underside of the drain cover beside the pool patio! Now, there is a possibility that some or even all have been parasitised, but I will keep an eye out and hope for the best. They are supposed to hatch in the spring when the temperature is at least 17C.

Different shapes - some longer than others.

Everything changes so quickly in spring, doesn't it? It's hard to be up to date with spring posts!


*** I never told you about Hallie. In October she succumbed to the kidney disease that I mentioned last summer and we had to have her put to sleep. I didn't feel like saying anything at the time, and it's never felt the right time in any other post really. But I'm mentioning it now just because I've posted pics of the boy cats recently. 💔💔💔

Wildflowers on the Sentier Botanique near Montreal

On the 22nd March, a lovely sunny day when the temperaures had freakily risen to about 25C, we went for a walk to the Sentier Botanique (botanical walk) which is about 12 minutes drive from home. It's a woodland walk in an area where there are many wildflowers, many of which are ones that I am familiar with from northern Europe, but there are also sunny banks which have Mediterranean garrigue plants! Totally weird but it makes it oh so interesting.

Where we park is next to a stream, which I was really surprised to see was dry. It’s been running every time we’ve been here in the past, even in summer the first time we came here. I thought we’d had a wet winter, but obviously still not enough to refill the water table. Worrying times.

First butterfly we saw was my second only Comma since moving here! I didn't get a shot of it though. It's crazy that what I consider a common (garden) butterfly is rarely seen around my new neck of the woods.

The most common flowers out at this time were Celandine, Pulmonaria, Cuckooflower, Greater Stitchwort, Wood Anemone and Vinca.  There was also the beginning of the wild cherry blossom and Tree Heathers. Interestingly, not a single orchid was seen.

Cuckooflower or Lady's Smock are the most commonly used common names for this flower (Cardamine pratensis). They are an important food plant of the larvae of the Orange Tip butterfly.

There were plenty of butterflies around, many of which were Orange Tips (Anthocharis cardamines), but it was not surprising given the amount of Cuckooflowers here. They were all very active though, so I was only able to get some butterfly shots by zooming in. No chance of any macros as they didn't stay on a flower for longer than a few seconds!

There were also a lot of these Wood Anemones (Anemonoides nemorosa) on the verges of the path.

We then came to a place where the path either loops around to go back to the car park, or you can walk a bit further on, and down into the valley bottom where there is a little stream (that joins the bigger stream by the parking) and a waterfall. We've not seen much more than mud for the stream and a few drops of water for the waterfall, but this year it was completely dry.

It was heavier shade here and as we descended the temperature noticeably dropped - which was quite nice on this unexpected hot day! It was a bit too dark for my photos (my camera can't cope) so my photos are not sharp and are noisy. But it was nice to see some different plants in this different habitat.

Top left: Anemone hepatica, Top right: Cowslip (Primula veris)
Bottom: A parasitic plant known as Purple Toothwort (Lathraea clandestina) which grows in conditions just like this, near streams in valley bottoms in shade, where it can parasitise the roots of various trees.

We then had to walk all the way back up the steep slope, but thankfully rope handrails had been provided which made it much easier. I don't think I could have got down there without it and it certainly helped pulling myself back up! 😀

Back to the sunlight and we decided to return along the path that we came on, as I recall the return path being less flowery and less interesting. I probably wouldn't have got these butterfly photos if we hadn't stuck to the nicer path. 

These are male Brimstones (Gonepteryx rhamni) although we also have Cleopatras here, which are a brighter colour with orange on the forewing. My focus is off on the first photo, but it has focused nicely on the Lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis) that it is feeding on!

On a Cuckooflower (Cardamine pratensis).

There were Bee Flies buzzing about all over the place. I love these insects! This one is Bombylius major and it's a parasitic insect, laying its eggs near the entrance to where the nests of certain species of solitary wasps and bees are. In fact, what they actually do is, whilst flying, flick their abdomen towards the entrance hole and chuck eggs towards it! Needless to say, only a small amount of larva get into the host nests to eat the larvae and food stores within, but presumably, that is all that is needed.

This is only the third Speckled Wood (Pararge aegeria) that I have seen in over four years here and I actually saw one in our garden last autumn which was a nice surprise! Yet they were the most common butterfly in my last garden in Brittany.

At home, we’ve had an amazing show of the earliest orchids - pics to follow in a later post. I must get this posted.

Happy Spring! 😄

Spain Trip Oct 2023 - Part 3 Los Barruecos and Trujillo, Extremadura

The interesting granite rock formations and lakes near Caceres were designated a Natural Monument in 1996. The landscape is somewhat surreal, with rounded boulders everywhere, just in this one spot in the middle of the plains. The lakes (actually several but you can't see them all at once due to the rocks) are man-made, dating from the 15th century and were used for agriculture and wool washing. A battle scene in Game of Thrones was filmed here for Season 7.

Walking around the lake looked like a fairly short walk, however, the paths don't go all the way around the outside directly (and we didn't know there were several lakes either!) and so we were walking here there and everywhere, taking about 90 minutes eventually, and it was hot, and we didn't have anything to drink. At one point we thought we could take a short cut, only to come across a boggy stream made wider and muddier by the cattle so had to retrace our steps. All the while I was being moaned at by K because it was my idea to take a 'short' walk around the lake!

I saw my one and only lifer butterfly of the trip here in the short grass beside the lake, and I only noticed it because it was flitting about. It's the absolutely tiny African Grass Blue (Zizeeria knysna) with a wing span of just 18-23mm for males and slightly larger for females. This butterfly is found in Africa, the Iberian peninsular and Cyprus.

In the afternoon we drove across the steppe area from Caceres to Trujillo, which was a bit of an eye-opener. These fields were so arid and yet there were cattle in them, and even more surprising was the amount of bird life! We were able to stooge around slowly and spotted many Wheatears and Stonechats, plus Crested Larks and other little brown jobs. However we failed to see any Great Bustards or either of the two species of Sandgrouse that are to be found in this area.

It gets worse! If you open up the photo, you can just see cattle in the middle of the picture.

We then visited Trujillo, which is a town whose fortunes were made by the conquistadors who returned from Peru, having defeated the Incas. The most famous, and the person in the large statue was Francisco Pizarro, who was born here. The town's castle was used in Game of Thrones as the ancestral home of the Lannisters, in Season 7.

The main square at Trujillo.

Statue of Francisco Pizarro, 1478 - 1541. There is an identical statue in Lima, Peru.

Palace of the Conquest: many mansions were built by the returning conquistadors with their New World riches.

The castle, which has 9th century Moorish origins. It was purely a defensive castle with no residential rooms. Taken from the info board: "The importance of the Trujillo castle lies not only in being an important medieval defensive bastion, but also because of the important events that took place in it. In the time of Pedro I it was chosen so that the king's treasurer, the Jew Samuel Levi, would guard the wealth of the Crown, because it was considered one of the safest fortresses in the kingdom."

Looking down from the castle area.

White storks are fairly common around these areas and these are their nests, built up on metal platforms. They do seem to have a thing about church roofs!

Next post - back to the Romans again. There's no escaping them!