Unlike the males, female adonis blue butterflies don’t immediately strike the eye as blue.
Like many creatures, the female colouring is one which is less likely to be noticed by predators. Look closely at the thorax – there is a bluish tinge.
(The thorax is the section of the body behind the head. It’s the bit that the wings and the legs are connected to.)
A seasonal-flavoured subject. I was surprised to find a mistletoe plant growing within Wolverhampton’s city limits, by a side road off Finchfield Hill. It was probably planted deliberately.
The picture was taken about a month ago.
From the exhibited ice age carvings in the museum at les Eyzies, France, a bison with its characteristic humped back …
a cave bear looking like it is stalking prey …
and another bison.
Adonis blues are another species of butterfly which you are very unlikely to see in this part of England: they are restricted to the limestone/chalk hills of the south on this side of the Channel.
The limestone cliffs of the Vézère valley seem to be just the ticket for them. They headed for flowering bushed even in the centre of the village of les Eyzies.
This one is a more showy male. The females have a brown pattern.
Another insect from near the French village of les Eyzies, this time a fritillary butterfly feeding on a buddleia flower.
Les Eyzies is on the river Vézère, a tributary of the Dordogne in southwest France, at the confluence of the Vézère and its own tributary, the Beune.
Its USP as a tourist attraction is its claim to be “the world capital of prehistory”. The Vézère and Beune valleys have a wealth of rock shelters and caves which were among the first where modern archeology discovered survivals of stone-age Europeans. The area is, deservedly, on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites.
The famous cave of Lascaux is further upstream, and can now only be visited in a modern copy. But other caves and shelters can be visited to see stunning paintings, engravings and sculptures of the wildlife of ice-age Europe. The village also has a museum, the National Museum of Prehistory, which has exhibits of world class.
What surprised me was the variety of flora and fauna it was possible to see while walking (usually) to those prehistoric sites which were within a few kilometers of les Eyzies.
The leaves of the extensive woods were beginning to turn, but there were still many flowers on the verges of the roads as well as the gardens, The flowers where attracting insects, including both bees and butterflies, of kinds which were new to me.
This fritillary was feeding on a garden buddleia in the hamlet of St Cirq de Bugue.
Something a bit different for Christmastime.
Hummingbird hawkmoths are large, day-flying moths. They are quite hard to photograph because they seem to fly all the time, even when they are feeding.
I have (very occasionally) seen them around Wolverhampton, but never managed to get a picture of one.
I saw this one in France, in the village of les Eyzies, back in September.
This much photographed bronze statue by Laurence Broderick is in the new Bull Ring centre.
A singing and German-speaking elk head from another of the stalls on the Birmingham Christmas Market. Its repertoire definitely put Billy Bass in the shade.
Dig that crazy beard.
It is pure coincidence that this, like the previous post, features one of the beer stalls on the market.
A stall on Birmingham’s recent German Christmas Market resembling a bear which had consumed plenty of the stock.
The first of a series of off-topic posts over the holiday season.
Old man’s beard with the feathery “hairs” of some seeds whitened even more than normal by a coating of frost.
View over the partly-frozen Birmingham Canal towards the bottom lock.
The trees beyond the bridge are on the far side of the Staffs & Worcs Canal towpath.
These vivid autumnal leaves were on bushes by the lawn at Wightwick Manor.
As so often in the pictures this year, there were the remains of water after recent rain.
