Lesser Lattice Brown (Kirinia climene), Southeast Serbia - another butterfly star of the Balkans!
‘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!
K. climene & K. roxelana habitat
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!
Lesser Lattice Brown (K. climene)
Lattice Brown (K. roxelana), in the next tree to the Lesser Lattice Brown.