Thanks chaps - here it is!
Hungary
As I mentioned on my previous post, I was one of this year's lucky recipients of the Annual Research Bursary provided by Butterfly Conservation's European Interests Group (see:
http://www.bc-eig.org.uk/downloads/EIG_ ... ursary.pdf). Put simply, this is the opportunity of a lifetime - up to £500 for a cash-strapped student to head out to Europe and its wealth of huge, intact ecosystems (and all the butterflies they entail), asking only an A4 proposal and a write up at the end. The generosity of EIG is extraordinary, and was much appreciated by me this summer.
I used my grant to go east, specifically to the Ferto Hansag National Park (
https://www.ferto-hansag.hu/en), which surrounds the Hungarian part of the Neusidlersee - the huge alkaline lake that straddles the Hungary/Austria border. The lake and surrounding wetlands are of enormous importance for birds, and for the duration of my 6 week trip, I was lucky enough to be living right next to it. This meant I could enjoy White - Tailed and Eastern Imperial Eagles, Black - Winged Stilts, Moustached Warblers, Night Herons, Spoonbills and many more right outside my front door, this extraordinary variety of species proved to be normal service in the Ferto Hansag, and is emblematic of the quality of the place - at every turn I was confronted, and delighted by its seething, throbbing biodiversity - unforgettable stuff. Away from the lake, the park also takes in large areas of steppe (with birds like Great Bustard and Saker), wet woodland (poplar plantations with a liberal sprinkling of Lesser Purple Emperors), and a great many beautiful wet meadows.
This latter habitat was strangely reminiscent of my native Somerset - appropriately so, for, like Somerset, it provides a crucial refuge for Maculineas, not arion, but alcon, teleius and nausithous - Alcon Blue, Scarce Large Blue and Dusky Large Blue. My project (for which I had the grant), was to spend 6 weeks assisting the staff at the Ferto Hansag with mark-release-recapture work on these butterflies, which they've been doing for an astonishing 17 years (starting 2 years after I was born - humbling!). The work provides really useful information about phenology (when are the butterflies emerging? Is this changing in response to climate?), population size (how is this affected by management? Is there any pattern to changes?), and dispersal (how good are the Maculineas at dealing with obstructions and colonising new sites?), and has helped to inform the management of the sites at which they fly, resulting in some seriously impressive populations.
To put this into context, many UKBers have gone in pursuit of Large Blues in the last few years, and have seen how lean things can be at Collard Hill - I was volunteering there in 2014, when they were particularly thin on the ground 7 or 8 sightings meant a good day, certainly, numbers never seem to be particularly high. Obviously, 2014 was a year when the blues were hit by a nasty combination of a furnace-like 2013 summer and a wet winter, and numbers are now much higher, but it's fair to say that I'm not used to seeing Maculineas in large quantities. Thus, a communal roost of 40 or 50 butterflies in the Hungarian meadows, a whirling, swirling cloud of blue and brown wings as the sun set, is a sight that will be hard to ever beat - the populations of these fast-declining butterflies in the Ferto-Hansag are some of the strongest in Hungary, and perhaps even Europe as a whole. Indeed, 2017 seems to have been a record year for them there (as it has been for Large Blues here), and the totals we marked at our 4 sites are all the highest ever, often 200 in a day at one, with my personal tally coming to a respectable 2400 - heartening stuff.
Anyway, some photos, I didn't take as many as perhaps I might have done, being busy trying to get butterflies in a net and within reach of a marker pen rather than a camera, and so many of the memories will not have been consigned to pixels, but here's a selection.
- Alcon Blue
- Dusky Large Blue
- Scarce Large Blue
- Marking a Dusky Large Blue
- Dusky Large Blue
- Scarce Large Blue
- Scarce Large Blue
- Alcon Blue ova
- Dusky Large Blues
- Scarce Large Blues
- Dusky Large Blue
- Dusky Large Blues
- Scarce and Dusky Large Blues
- Dusky Large Blues
- Maculineas
I've got a slightly fuller account, with a bit more about the Maculineas on my fledgling blog if anyone's interested, though you'll have to excuse my attempted heights of literary fervour -
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogI ... 1#allposts.
I might be down there for a week around that time...
