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Butterflies

BOG FRITILLARY

July 4, 2025

Another long-standing dream realised. In the early nineties, when I spent much of my spare time (apart from winter… and even then) watching butterflies, I had a thing about seeing Bog Fritillary Boloris eunomia. There were sites in the Pyrenees that I hoped to visit. I even had Richard Lewington paint the species for me! Well, I can now sit in ‘library corner’ and look at this lovely painting having seen it! I was very lucky to be able to join János Oláh’s inaugural Sakertours Serbia butterfly tour in June and Bog Fritillary was one of three main targets. There were lots of other targets, so it was an opportunity to good to miss and turned out to be one of my all-time favourite tours, even allowing for ‘recentism’.

Bog Fritillary has a wide circumpolar distribution from the boreal zone northwards but only scattered, widely separated colonies south of here. In Europe it occurs from the Pyrenees eastwards to the Balkans with a few colonies in the mountains of southeast Serbia. Bog Fritillary is well-named, occurring in bog side habitats, where its caterpillar food plant bistort occurs. The two colonies we visited were at Babin Zub on the Stara Planina (‘The Old Mountain’). The first was a tiny spring-fed bog with several flourishing stands of bistort Bistorta at 1515m ASL. It was very easy to find the fritillaries at 0700 in the early morning sunshine of 12 June, sometimes flying in the vicinity of Violet Copper Lycaena helle, which often shares the same habitat, a delightful combination. We returned in the evening until 1915 and found several Bog Fritillaries basking in the evening sun. we estimated a total of eight adults at this site [plus six Violet Coppers L. helle]. The row of halos on the underside hindwing is a unique pattern.

The following morning an early start saw us at another colony, a much more extensive bog with a lot more bistort at 1457m ASL, although we only found four Bog Fritillaries B. eunomia until 0800, roughly the same time as out visit to site no. #1. Numbers here dwindled to two the following day, one the next and then none on 16 June. Bog Fritillary is not considered threatened owing to its northern populations, but its southern outposts must surely be threatened by change of land use not to mention climate change and the fact that colonies are widely separated without stepping sone populations to repopulate lost colonies.

Bog Fritillary *Boloris eunomia* (Mike Watson)

Violet Copper *Lycaena helle* (Mike Watson)

Bog Fritillary *B. eunomia* habitat Babin Zub with plentiful Bistort *Bistorta* (Mike Watson)

*Where it started - Bog Fritillary by Richard Lewington* (Mike Watson)

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climene!

June 25, 2025

‘Climene!’. I could hear János say the magic word somewhere in the wood we were exploring, in a remote corner of southeast Serbia on his Sakertour butterfly watching holiday. Well, it’s quicker than saying Lesser Lattice Brown. We had split up to search for it and I had checked the southern part of the low, wooded ridge we had been directed to, without any luck, apart from a nice Lattice Brown Kirinia roxelana, which typically flew up into a tree and landed on the trunk, how very un-Satyrlike! There were lots of Ilex Hairstreaks on the oak trees and Pearly Heaths skipped through the leafy canopy but no Lesser Lattice Brown yet.

We had also spent a lot of time the previous day scouring a historic site for it. We had crossed a disused ford, through clouds of puddling butterflies, including a few Lesser Purple Emperors, Large Tortoiseshells and Common Gliders and followed an overgrown farm track up a hillside, passing a freshly dead Roe Deer along the way, to an abandoned farmstead. This is a depressingly common sight in the mountains of southeast Serbia, as the younger generation moves to the cities and does not want to take on the hard and unpredictable life of farming. On a separate note, butterflies relying on hay meadows must be in trouble here, while those thriving in overgrown grasslands will do well for a while before woodland reclaims the land. We had a waypoint for our target and spent a long time staring into the trees of an ancient copse but without any luck. It was hot and lunchtime, so we decided to take a break and try another spot later. We had unwittingly also spent most of the morning right next to another climene spot, as we later discovered!

Back to the afternoon and ‘We have one!’ shouted János and Jasmin. I hurried up to the top of the ridge, following their voices and sure enough they did! Jasmin had found it, or another, a while earlier, taken some photos, just in case, and then, after finding János, they relocated it. It looks just like a Meadow Brown at first glance and can easily pass in a crowd of them, of which there was here! Including penetrating the oak canopy and occasionally landing on the leaves. However, the Lesser Lattice Brown flew with a more purposeful, stronger action and always landed in the trees, whereas the Meadow Browns would sometimes land in the grass too, and had a weaker and more erratic, bouncy flight. To complicate matters roxelana was here too! Thankfully it is very strikingly marked! We enjoyed some terrific views of the Lesser Lattice Brown, always perching in a sunny spot within the shady canopy and never on a tree on the edge of the small wood. This was great for artistic images! The tiny forewing dot and four small hindwing dots were obvious, as were the two ‘scratch’ marks on the largely orange forewing (it was a male and the scratch marks are just darkened transverse veins across the discoidal area). We could also study the lightly scalloped hind wing rear edge. Excellent stuff!

*Lesser Lattice Brown (Kirinia climene) finds another shaft of sunlight in the shadows of the oak canopy.*

This subtle beauty of the shadows is a very localised butterfly in the Balkans, although, outside Europe, it occurs all the way east to Iran and southern Russia (it is also known as Iranian Argus). Its habit of seeking shade in hot weather makes it a tricky species to locate and we owe much to sharp-eyed Jasmin for unlocking this one. Thanks to the slope of the wood, our views were often at eye level too. Kirinia is unfamiliar to most British butterfly enthusiasts, being a tree-loving genus of mostly eastern Palearctic browns. Of its five members Lattice Brown occurs the furthest west, as far as Croatia but the rest stretch all the way to Amurland and the Pacific. It was particularly good to see two of them on the same afternoon. What a day in the Balkans it had been, following the False Comma in the morning!

*Lattice Brown (K. roxelana), in the next tree to the Lesser Lattice Brown.*

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FALSE COMMA

June 22, 2025

The False Comma Nymphalis vau-album (or Compton Tortoiseshell, as it is known in North America) has always been a scarce butterfly on the western limit of its range in Europe. In recent years it has become even more so, and is considered extinct in Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. However, it seems to be holding its own in the mountains of southeast Serbia and a number of butterfly tour companies now target this spectacular nymphalid. I was privileged to join my friend János Oláh’s 2025 Sakertours Serbia butterfly watching tour. János applies the same level of determination and planning to finding rare butterflies as he does to birds and we had a fantastic time, recording 110 species in five full days including some very sought after ones. As well as False Comma, in this small corner of Serbia, near the Bulgarian border, we also saw: Yellow-banded Skipper Pyrgus sidae; Apollo Parnassius apollo; Violet Copper Lycaenea helle (among seven species of copper!); Blue Argus Aricia anteros; Bog Fritillary Boloria eunomia (among seventeen species of fritillary); Poplar Admiral Limentis populi (four, of the all dark form tremulae, prevalent in the Balkans); the enigmatic Lesser Lattice Brown Kirinia climene; Russian Heath Coenonympha leander; Bulgarian Ringlet Erebia orientalis and Almond-eyed Ringlet Erebia albergana, to mention a few.

This False Comma has a small notch in its left wing and was easily identified as the same individual.

János has done a lot of testing over the last few years, checking the optimum timing for this tour and he concluded that 11 June was a good start date for freshly emerged butterflies of a wide range of species hopefully including False Comma at the beginning of its season. However, after one of the coldest springs on record in eastern Europe this year we were nervous that we might be too early this time. We need not have worried; it seemed that the recent warm weather just before the tour start had got things back on track for some normal flight timings. There are zillions of waypoints available online for previous sightings of False Comma, but it is a mobile butterfly, so it pays to know some of its favourite spots. There is much else to see in this part of Serbia and János promised all the other butterflies as well, so we did not devote 100% of our time to searching for False Comma. There is evidence that it is mostly active in Serbia between 8.30AM and 12PM in warm conditions in June/July, with ‘virtually no activity after midday’ (Gascoigne-Pees et al 2014) and we spent plenty of time in known previous locations around this time. So, we were interested to get a hot tip from Isidor Saric that he had seen one along one of the forest tracks we had walked along a couple of days earlier, but at 3PM. He was spot on with the location though, and, to our delight, it was still present, a few metres from where we started to search! A great bit of spotting by Jasmin, as it flew down from the forest canopy to a tiny ditch behind us.

Easily overlooked on the ground among the debris of the small spring-fed ditch.

The only wet areas of the dirt track were where spring water from uphill appeared at its edge, there had not been any rain recently in what was turning into a prolonged dry spell. We watched it more or less continuously from 1145 to 1303 on 15 June, taking salts, or perched up in the canopy, at around 4-5m from the ground, usually on leaves but a couple of times on a tree trunk. At 790m ASL this sighting was at the lower end of the altitudinal range and well short of the regular 1569m ASL Babin Zub Hotel site. The temperature was around 25 degrees Celsius, and it was noticeable that it only flew to the ground after basking in sunshine. When the sun was occasionally covered by a cloud it remained in the leaves. It also stuck to a stretch of around only 20m, and mostly flew up or down, rather than along the track, so it would be very easy to miss if our walk by did not coincide with one of its visits to the ground, as had presumably happened already. We had seen plenty of other butterflies taking salts along this track, including numerous Commas Polygonia c-album but had drawn a blank with False Comma until now. When taking salts, it could be approached quite closely with care, but it did not like rapid movements. A very special close encounter with one of Europe’s rarest butterflies!

False Comma, taking salts from a trackside ditch.

Its distribution is not limited by the source of food as their caterpillars have quite a wide range of food plants including common birch, willow, poplar and elm species. So, the recent decline in Europe is thought to be climate related. False Commas are thought to have quite specific climate requirements, favouring prolonged and stable sub-zero temperatures during hibernation (in such places as old wood stacks and disused buildings) but they do not do well when early warm spells are followed by severe frosts. When they emerge, they do not seek nectar but other substances including sap and animal excrement. Eggs are laid in shady and damp spots in woodland, not in direct sunlight as with some other nymphs. N. vau-album is also strongly migratory (especially to the east of Europe) and this may have influenced records in eastern Europe but the consistent presence of fresh adults in Serbia means it is certainly breeding there and therefore must be a habitat and climatic sweet spot.

The spectacular False Comma, a life-changing experience for butterfly enthusiasts!

False Comma retreats to the trees when disturbed, or just when it has taken on enough salts.

False Comma keeping an eye on us from the canopy.

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BLOG

BOG FRITILLARY

climene!

FALSE COMMA