Pictures from Halkidiki - Part 1

[JKT]

I'm back from Greece and I'm going to have quite a number of questions...

The first one I thought to be Pyrgus, but I'm no longer so sure. The markings on the rear wings are more like Spialia, but that does not quite match either.

YIMG_1582.jpg (226.37 KiB) Viewed 494 times

The other two are there just to confirm I did not get any interesting Whites.

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YIMG_1132.jpg (193.99 KiB) Viewed 492 times

All in all there were surprisingly few butterflies, except for a few special spots. The number of species was not very high even in those places.

[Padfield]

Hi JKT,

You don't have any undersides of that skipper do you - even bad ones? My first impression is that it is malvae. I don't think it is Spialia. Even allowing for the submarginal spots to be weak, the postdiscal spots on the forewing are all wrong and for me the jizz is quite wrong. But having said that, I've never seen orbifer in the flesh so I don't really have a feel for that butterfly.

On p.42 of Lafranchis (the English version) there is a picture of a female malvae with the same hindwing as yours, and as Lafranchis lives in Greece it may well be he photographed it there.

Unfortunately, I agree with your conclusion on the whites. The first has some characters of mannii but isn't - the forked vein 7 rules it out!

I look forward to your next pictures!

Guy

[JKT]

I totally missed that picture in Lafranchis' book. Thanks! So it turns out that the only Pyrgus I saw on the whole trip was P. malvae. For some reason I'm less than ecstatic.

I think the next batch will be a bunch of Carcharodus topsides...