A website dedicated to European Butterflies

Contact Me
Matt Rowlings

 

Mail me to receive
"What's New" Update
e-mails

Field Notes

Lesbos, April 2005 (f)

The reddest female I found.

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Male lacking the extensive red.

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Undersides unusual - this was early morning and the butterfly obligingly walked up this stick after a little encouragement! Air temperature was only 7.5degC.

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Rare site - a feeding male.

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Male with richer cream hindwing than most

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Another feeding male - with age the scales fall off leaving an
almost scaleless, but healthy, butterfly.

Lesbos, April 2005 (f)

Another exquisite female

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

Showing the sparse scaling and transparency.

Lesbos, April 2005 (f)

Lesbos, April 2005 (f)

This underside was of a female looking for somewhere to roost for the evening.

Lesbos, April 2005 (m)

This is a superb species, found only at the extreme south eastern part of Europe. It is know from mainland Greece near the Turkish boarder, rumoured from Bulgaria and near Thessalonika in Greece and is found on a handful of the E Aegean islands including Lesbos and Samos. The butterfly flies very early in the year, March and April, so is rarely encountered unless a special effort to travel is made. The first week of April 2005 provided the ideal timing for a trip to Lesbos.

On Lesbos the butterfly was strongly associated with olive groves. At only one site were olives absent, rather it was flying amongst sparse oak trees. These habitats are generally covered in flowers in April on Lesbos but I rarely found the butterfly feeding. When it did feed it was always on yellow flowers and usually on Compositae, which don't seem so common in these habitats. The adults appeared to spend most of their time warming up in the warm sunshine by settling on dirt, low plants or occasionally rocks. Air temperature didn’t seem an issue, provided there was direct sunshine. Our first colony was located with an air temperature of 7.5 degrees C – only the hibernating species Large Tortoiseshell, Nymphalis polychloros and Nettle Tree Butterfly, Libythria celtis were hardy enough to fly with it.

We found colonies from sea level to 750m. Generally females were found lower down and males higher up. This was very noticeable on the slopes to the south and east of Mt. Olympus where males were found above the olive groves, 250m above the females.

The butterfly is notable for the very extensive scale free areas on the forewings. This increases with age, old specimens have nearly transparent forewings. The males lose much more scaling than the females. The females are usually flushed with extensive red mottling, but this is very variable. The loss of scales on the forewings makes the butterfly easy to distinguish on the wing. In flight it looks distorted by the obvious hindwing and the ghostly forewing.

TOP