Exploring the Montagne Noire Part 1

We have been meaning to get up into the mountains for ages, and now that holiday season is upon us, it's better to avoid the coast and keep away from the crowds.

As we have only explored a tiny part of the Montagne Noir, yet we look out at it every day from our house, that was the destination we chose. After some research on places to visit, we headed for the highest point to start with - again we can see that from the house. Sensibly we left Mary Moho at home and set off in the car - a good thing after having navigated some of the smaller roads, especially through little villages!

On the way, we stopped beside a pretty mountain stream to have a look - you just never know when it's a Dipper type river what you might see - but no, no Dippers in sight, however... lots of lovely butterflies enjoying the wild buddleia bushes.

Scarce Swallowtail (Iphiclides podalirius):

Silver-washed Fritillary (Argynnis paphia):

Once at the top of the Pic de Nore (altitude 1,211m) we had an amble around. The building here is a transmission tower and is visible from a long way away. Wildflowers were everywhere! It must be very windy up here as many of the plants I know to be normally much taller such as Knapweed were very short, like most mountain flowers. Certainly the temperature reduced by about 5C from lower down. Later on in the afternoon it was so hot I think we should have done our itinerary the other way round!

Knapweed (Centaurea, pink flower, don't know which species), Yarrow (Achillea millefolium, white flower) and Jasione Montagne, blue flower, which has many common names, one of which is Sheep's Bit Scabious, although it is not related to Scabious. I used to see this plant around the coast in Brittany.

Red and white markers beside the road for when it is covered in snow, and blue Campanula of some sort.

A shame that it was so hazy, that we could not make out the Pyrenees at all! I think here we are looking towards the Haut Languedoc range to the south.

Parasol mushrooms:

The paler pink flower is Scabious, which is flowering everywhere at the moment. Around home it has lasted a long time as we are getting a decent amount of rain this summer, so the countryside inland is still quite green.

Female Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus) and a bee on Wild Thyme (Thymus serpyllum). This is a different variety of thyme from that which we see growing on the garrigue (Thymus vulgaris, or Common Thyme) - serpyllum is the one I have in my garden which I grew from seed for the Thyme bank in my Breton garden, and have brought here with me via some self-seeding in pots of other things!

After that we started to head down towards a lake but on the way stopped in a picnic area for lunch. I walked back a little to a wildflower meadow full of Scabious that we had just passed, which you would think would be teeming with butterflies, but really there were very few. I did walk past the first Comma that I think I have seen since I moved here though! There were quite a few Silver-washed Fritillaries in this meadow and some Gatekeepers.

This Silver-washed Fritillary posed for me on the gravel of the parking area near where we had our picnic:

The rest of the day out will be posted in Part 2 another day.