romunov’s blog et al

I’ve been absent for a few days last week (ok, for ten days). I was attending a camp in Vransko (between Celje and Ljubljana). It’s a student camp (more here, comprised mostly of biology students, but you will find other pimps in there as well. Work there involved a lot of field work, and for some groups, even field lab work (with dissection microscopes and such, especially for spider and botany groups, but also dragonflies). I was in a group that studied butterflies. We searched for suitable habitats for butterflies, but due to late season the flowers weren’t in bloom and the grass has been cut on a lot of pastures, the catch wasn’t what we hoped for. None the less, our repertoire represented 72 different species on 32 different localities. Our highest locality was on mountain and ski resort Golte (1500 something meters). Here is only a small part of pictures I took.

A butt load of pictures under the fold.

A brown Mantis religiosa.

This deer wasn’t afraid at all. He was casually wondering between houses.

You can see a list, along Slovene and English names, of our butterflies here.

One of our most threatened species of butterflies - Lycaena dispar (močvirski cekinček - Large Copper.

This is the same butterfly but from the top. This is a female. Males are a lot more reddish (like copper I guess).

Melitaea didyma. You can notice them by their bright reddish color.

Lysandra coridon (kraški modrin - Chalk-hill Blue). One of the brightest of the common blues.

Melanargia galathea (šahar - Marble White) and a few visitors - parasitic mites.

Another endangered species of butterflies. Maculinea telejus (strašničin mravljiščar - Scarce Large Blue).

Hamearis lucina (rjavi šekavček - Duke of Burgundy Fritillary).

Erebia euryale (svetlolisi rjavček - Large Ringlet).

Rosalia alpina. Just marvelous beetle.

Sympetrum vulgatum

A young (and stupid?) Tetrao urogallus (divji petelin - Capercaillie).

And this is the view from Golte.

At the top, you will find mountain meadows like this one here. Usually, if weather permits, you will find Erebia pronoe flying around. Unfortunatelly this wasn’t the case upon our visit, as cluds were giving us trouble.

And a lovely Campanula

When time permited, I joined another group that net and tagged birds.

The good doc giving us a run donw on bird anatomy.

The coolest thing was when we rousted barn swallows (domača lastovka - Hirundo rustica). After a sound bite of their calls, birds started flocking around the trees in our vicinity. As the night fell, they immediately plunged to the lower vegetation where our nets would catch them.