It’s been a long time since I updated my blog, and that’s because there hasn’t really been all that much going on. It’s not been a good butterfly season so far in the Sydney area. As everyone in the world knows (except for one guy living in an underground bunker 50 miles outside Des Moines hiding out in case of a sudden zombie apocalypse), there has been an extended drought in this part of the world.
Butterfly numbers have mostly been very disappointing as a result, and from early October to the end of December almost every day was very windy, which made it difficult to get half-decent photos of the few butterflies that were around. From early December I pretty much stopped bothering trying as the bushfires in the Blue Mountains made it impossible to get out to the most interesting sites.
However, I have been able to photograph one or two nice beasties so here goes…
10/11/2019 : Bell, Clarence and Blackheath
I met up with Gigi and Manson from Hong Kong, who were spending about a week butterflying around Sydney and Newcastle. I was hopeful that we’d find a decent number of butterflies as I’ve had quite a bit of luck in the upper Blue Mountains around mid-November in previous years. Unfortunately it was cold and windy that day. The hilltops were particularly cold, despite the bright sunshine, and so for the most part the butterflies were conspicuous by their absence.
The most productive spot was beneath the power lines behind the Heavy Vehicle Safety Station at Bell. It was more sheltered here and it’s a good spot for some nice skippers. It turned out to be particularly good for Hesperilla crypsargyra (Silver Sedge-skipper); there were more than I’ve previously seen in one spot.
From there we went onto Clarence, where I hoped we would find several more skipper species. Surprisingly there were no Trapezites to be seen – maybe the cold wind made them decide to stay in bed – but we did see a small number of Mesodina aeluropis (Montane Iris-skipper). These were probably the first of their generation to emerge; I suspect that if we’d been there two weeks later we’d have found a lot of these butterflies.
(Mesodina aeluropis)
(Hesperilla crypsargyra)
16/11/2019 : Bell
This was yet another attempt to get more photos of Small Ant-Blues (Acrodipsas myrmecophila). It was another cool day at Bell, though a bit less windy than the previous weekend. For the first few hours it was lightly overcast with thin, high cloud masking the sun and keeping the temperature down. It wasn’t sufficient to stop butterflies from appearing on the hilltops, though it was just case of the Usual Suspects showing up – no myrmecophila unfortunately.
The thin cloud’s silver lining was the fact that it prompted the Golden Ant-Blues (Acrodipsas aurata) to sit with their wings wide open, so as to harvest as much UV as possible. I needed open-wing shots of this species so I snapped away until the sun came out, at which point they became conscious of the melanoma risk and closed their wings.
A single Bronze Ant-Blue (Acrodipsas brisbanensis) also joined in with the sunbathing, though he wasn’t prepared to open his wings as widely as his cousins. He wasn’t a great specimen, looking bashed up as if he’d only just survived a birdstrike or a brief marriage to Amber Heard, but the photos below do demonstrate the contrast between his bronze colour and the gold of the aurata.
(Acrodipsas aurata)
(Acrodipsas brisbanensis)
07/12/2019 : Bell and Blackheath
This time I met up with Michael and Karen from the UK, who were visiting Sydney to enjoy butterflies, golf and the thick layer of choking smoke that had settled over the city as a result of all the bushfires.
Our first stop, once again, was Bell. The conditions weren’t too bad – though it was a bit breezy – but there wasn’t a great deal of activity. We did see a few aurata (on 3 different hilltops), though none was really fresh. There was just one brisbanensis to be seen there. He was on the hill when we first arrived early in the morning; I suspected he was too old and tired to be able to leave the previous evening and so had just slept up there. He was so worn I had difficulty identifying him for a moment, and when he tried to fly he was unable to make it more than a couple of metres.
On the way down from the hill I spotted a Rock Ringlet (Hypocysta euphemia). In the car I had warned Michael and Karen about this infuriating species; its habit of waiting until I was one step away from being able to photograph it had caused me to develop Rock Ringlet Tourette’s. The main symptom of this condition is the stream of foul-mouthed abuse I hurl at every Rock Ringlet I see. Naturally this particular Rock Ringlet thought it would be funny to just sit there nicely and allow Michael to take as many photos as he liked. Sometimes I really hate butterflies 😉
From the hilltop we went onto the power lines behind the Heavy Vehicle Safety Station. I’d been there 3 weeks before and there were plenty of skippers to be seen, but in the interim someone had been through and bulldozed the ground under those power lines. I understand that this was to protect the lines from the anticipated bushfires – which did hit Bell a few days later – but it was still sad to see that such great skipper habitat had been torn up so brutally.
The next port of call was Blackheath, in the hope of seeing Blue Jewels (Hypochrysops delicia) amongst other things. I had a strong feeling that we were going to have some luck, despite the strengthening winds, but Hat Hill Road was closed at the entrance to the National Park, so we had to make do with just going up Hat Hill itself. As soon as we got to the top we saw some aurata in the small trees, and they all seemed to be lovely fresh specimens. Flying around the taller trees, as is their wont, were a couple of male brisbanensis.
By now the wind had strengthened considerably, and I began to think that we wouldn’t see much else, but then I spotted a strange shape hidden in the leaves of a low eucalypt, below head height. When I went to investigate I saw it was a mating pair of brisbanensis, which thrilled me as I’d seen just one female before and only managed to take a single (not very sharp) photo of her. I was struggling to photograph them as I was having to hold leaves out of the way with one hand, but shortly after I gave up trying they flew off and landed on the ground a couple of metres away, making photography much easier. They remained paired for another 30 minutes of so, after which the female flew around for a few moments – her gorgeous blue colour flashing as she went – before settling back on the tree where I originally spotted them. She posed nicely for a few moments before taking off, circling the hilltop a couple of times, and then disappearing. The male returned to his taller treetop to smoke a post-coital cigarette before resuming his watch for females.
The other interesting butterfly to appear as a Broad-margined Azure (Ogyris olane). He wasn’t a great specimen, but he obligingly settled low down on a dead branch and allowed us to get some close-up photos.
(Acrodipsas brisbanensis)
(Acrodipsas brisbanensis)
(Acrodipsas brisbanensis)
(Ogyris olane)
26/12/2019 : Terowie, South Australia
My then wife and I spent 8 days in the Barossa Valley over Christmas as we’re both very keen on Barossa wines and had long wanted to so some wine-tasting there. We somehow managed to do tastings at 21 different wineries and enjoyed a lot of fantastic wines; not just Shiraz but a whole variety of reds, whites, rose, bubbles, fortified… In case you’re interested the last one we visited probably had the wines we liked the most : Tomfoolery. Great name, very tasty wine!
We’d decided that we ought to spend at least one day without visiting any wineries, so we planned to drive around and have a look around the area. Naturally I asked my South Australian mate Alex if there were any butterfly sites worth visiting, and he gave me the location of a colony of Waterhouse’s hairstreak (Jalmenus lithchroa) he’d found near the little town of Terowie, about 2 hours north of where we were staying. This is South Australia’s only endemic species of butterfly, and the only shots I had were “stooged” (i.e. cheated – Alex sent me 2 live adults via Express Post and I photographed them at home on my coffee table) so I was very keen to see them in the wild.
On a very hot Boxing Day, as you’d expect in that part of the country, I spent an hour or two checking Acacia victoriae bushes at a roadside just outside Terowie. This is one nasty species of wattle, with lots of spines that you don’t necessarily see unless you look carefully. I didn’t look carefully enough with the first one, so after looking around it for butterflies I reached in to give it a shake. After that I didn’t shake any Acacia victoriae bushes, I tried kicking the trunks instead, as I preferred to retain some of the skin on my hands.
Thorough investigation of over 100 plants revealed a grand total of 3 butterflies, which I think were all females. They were probably the tail-end of their generation, with two of them being battered and worn, though the third looked much fresher. They flew rapidly around the wattles, with the worn specimens being hard to follow in flight. Unfortunately the best specimen didn’t hang around for long; I was focussing for a shot when it disappeared and I didn’t see which way it went.
Those 3 lithochroa were just about the only butterflies I saw in 8 days in South Australia. I didn’t expect to see much, as the butterflies are mostly on the wing in spring and autumn so as to avoid the very hot and dry summers.
(Jalmenus lithochroa)
(Jalmenus lithochroa)
30/12/2019 : Georges Hall
I’d been to this site on 31st December the previous year and seen quite a few Stencilled Hairstreaks (Jalmenus ictinus) and a substantial colony of Imperial Hairstreaks (Jalmenus evagoras). It’s also a good site for Dull Coppers (Paralucia pyrodiscus). I needed open-wing shots of all 3 species because for some reason I’d been able to get them in my early butterflying days, when I was using a little point-and-shoot camera, but hadn’t had the same luck since getting a DSLR.
The 30th of December saw Sydney shrouded with bushfire smoke – yet again. I thought it would act like high cloud and so might encourage the butterflies to sit with their wings open. It sounded good in theory, but when I got to the site I quickly found that the wattle trees upon which the ictinus colony was based were dead or dying from the drought. I didn’t see any ictinus that day, or any sign of meat ants on the wattles.
I thought I’d have more chance with the evagoras, which is more widespread on this bushland reserve. I spent several hours walking around, checking every small wattle I could see, without seeing any trace of the butterflies. Although the reserve was extremely dry there were still loads of very healthy-looking small wattles, but all appeared to be untouched. Eventually, at the highest point, I found the crappiest little wattle in the whole reserve. It looked nearly dead but it had a number of hatched pupae. Nearby I briefly saw one evagoras flying, but it never settled and gave no chance for any photos.
I did have more luck with the Coppers; there were a number of them in one patch of their Bursaria spinosa foodplant, and before the day got too hot they did allow me to get one or two open-wing shots.
This was another very disappointing day as there was so little on the wing. It might be interesting to go there again now, after we’ve had a bit of rain, to see if the butterflies have bounced back. Unfortunately the weather forecast for at least the next week is cloudy with showers.
(Paralucia pyrodiscus)
(Paralucia pyrodiscus)
14/01/2020 : Canberra
I had been thinking of popping down to Hobart for a couple of days to look for Nesoxenica leprea, which I had seen on my previous attempt in January 2019 but had not been able to photograph. The little buggers didn’t settle even for a moment. However because of the Jetstar industrial action I decided against it, as I didn’t want my trip to be messed up by flight cancellations and Qantas flights were just too damn expensive. I therefore decided to make a day trip to Canberra to see what I might find, hoping to get Amethyst Hairstreaks (Jalmenus icilius) at least.
I had a nice day looking around various Canberra sites with Suzi Bond and four others, but we saw very few butterflies at all. Conditions in Canberra were much worse than I’d seen around Sydney. The drought had reduced the grass and undergrowth to the point where hungry kangaroos and bunnies had stripped the ground bare. The only butterfly I photographed was a Two-spot Line-blue (Nacaduba biocellata), a rather poor return for a day which saw me leave the house at 3:30am.
30/01/2020 : Bell and Woodford
I went with Jackson Harper to the Blue Mountains to see what damage the bushfires had done and whether any butterflies had survived. On the way through the mountains we saw surprisingly little sign of any fires – a lot of bushland is visible from the road and little of it seemed to have been touched.
Things changed at Blackheath. Once we got past the houses along Hat Hill Road the bush was just devastated; it looked as if the fire had been intense and burned just about everything over quite a wide area. We’d been wondering if that was the case all the way to the end of the road, but the gate was closed at Hat Hill so we couldn’t go any further. We had a quick look at one of the smaller hilltops, but saw no butterflies.
Moving on to Bell we went through another extensive burnt-out area along the Darling Causeway, but the area around the main Bell hilltop didn’t look so bad. There had been fire there for sure, but it hadn’t been so intense and a fair percentage of the trees looked OK. The hilltop itself had not burned, so we settled in to see what butterflies might appear.
We did see a few Golden Ant-blues (Acrodipsas aurata), including a female, but not a lot else of interest other than a damaged Dark Pencilled-blue (Eirmocides consimilis). Whilst it was slim pickings we were pleased to see that there were still some butterflies around.
With the Blackheath hilltop being unreachable we had to think of another spot to try in the afternoon. We ended up going to a little hilltop near Woodford, where we saw at least 6 Broad-margined Azures (Ogyris olane). The trees at this site are quite tall, so unfortunately the olane never settled less than 40 feet up, well out of the reach of my macro lens. I switched to my bridge camera; this has a 65x zoom so at least the butterflies would be visible in the photos, but it’s no substitute for close-up macro shots. It’s a shame they wouldn’t settle lower as some of them looked to be very nice specimens.
The only other butterfly we saw there was a male Southern Purple Azure (Ogyris genoveva), who flew around occasionally but never settled below 60 or 70 feet up.
(Ogyris olane)
(Ogyris olane)
Photo Gallery Updates
I have added photos to the following species pages :
- Hypocysta euphemia (Rock Ringlet)
- Acrodipsas brisbanensis (Bronze Ant-blue)
- Acrodipsas aurata (Golden Ant-blue)
- Paralucia pyrodiscus (Dull Copper)
- Ogyris olane (Broad-margined Azure)
- Jalmenus lithochroa (Waterhouse’s Hairstreak)
- Eirmocides consimilis (Dark Pencilled Blue)
- Erina acasta (Blotched Dusky-blue)
- Nacaduba biocellata (Two-spotted Line-Blue)
- Hesperilla crypsargyra (Silver Sedge-skipper)
- Hesperilla idothea (Flame Sedge-skipper)
- Hesperilla donnysa (Donnysa Skipper)
- Hesperilla trimaculata (Large Brown Skipper)
- Mesodina aeluropis (Montane Iris-skipper)