Hi Lepsoccers
Thought I'd kick off and do a post on our SABCA BCW survey.
Jayne and I went down to Port Edward and stayed with Alexandre Viossat and Michel Barau. Our team was called the 'Port Edward Prowlers'. The first thing we did was to head down to the Old Pont, and 'lurk balefully in the dense riverine' (to quote Rob Pare).
Down here, we found some interesting butterflies. Jeremy Dobson had told us we might find Yellow-banded Evening Brown
Gnophodes betsimena diversa here, and in fact the first shady tree produced a specimen. We managed to get a shot of this female:
We tried to catch her for eggs but she had other ideas.
There were lots of the usual KZN coastal butterflies about, like this Dusky Acraea
Telchinia esebria f.
protea:
And Dusky-veined Acraea
Telchinia igola, this one a nice female:
We are pretty sure (Alex and I) that we saw Deceptive Diadem
Hypolimnas deceptor but we could not get a good view, or catch it - so it stayed off the list.
We'd originally planned to go up the Fish Eagle trail and transect the reserve that way, but after some heavy duty bushwhacking we realised we'd bitten off more than Jayne (our scribe) could chew, so we got in the Subaru and drove to the other end of the trail near the Ranger's house. But by this time the weather had other ideas. With 3hrs under our belts, we drove off back to the farm. We had about 50 species logged so far.
This is the view from Alex and Michel's verandah:
And inside, Alex cooked his special Crab Creole. Jayne had been wanting to do this for ages, so this was a special treat for her:
You can see what a rough time we had of it on the BCW weekend...
Believe it or not we were not up early on Sunday! It didn't matter that much anyway - we only had to get to the reserve at about 10am. It was much sunnier on Sunday but still cool. We went first to the top part of the reserve, where we'd hoped to get another 50 species. We kicked off well with a male Natal Opal
Chrysoritis natalensis:
And then a digital first for me, a female White-tipped Blue
Eicochrysops hippocrates:
Yes I know she's a scruff but she WAS a first! But we didn't get as many species as we'd hoped - no Modest Sylph
Astictopterus inornatus or Bicolored Skipper
Abantis bicolor. We went back down to the bottom, where I got a good shot of a Venus Turntail
Pacydara venustissima, but as it's a moth it didn't count!
And as we were walking back along the path, this glorious male Yellow-banded Evening Brown popped out of the undergrowth and posed for a photo:
All in all this was a superb weekend and thanks to Alex and Michel for their companionship, the fantastic food (I should have photographed the Springbok Bouguignon we had on Friday, but you'll just have to imagine it) and for putting us up.
See if you can see which pix were taken with the D80, and which with a Blackberry Curve...
Cheers
Steve
