36 years in science communication
News and views about photography, cameras, social media, as well as pointers to Dave Bradley’s photographic output. You can also find me on Imaging Storm, Instagram and Flickr as “sciencebase”
Mrs Sciencebase and I recently had a lovely time in Lisbon, celebrating our wedding anniversary late. I’ve already blogged the incidental birding we did in a couple of spots. But, here are a few of the more touristy snaps I got of the city.
Fellow bird photographer, Steve G, found a lost SD card. It was back in August, in Snettisham, Norfolk, UK, a popular birding spot. The interesting thing about the card is that it had 3700 photos from a trip to Iceland, mostly birds as I understand. Steve has been trying to track down the card’s owner ever since.
There are no people in any of the photos, not EXIF data, no geotags, no clues. Steve reached out on twitter, lots of people with sympathetic to the person who’d lost the SD card. I posted about it on my socials, got hundreds of supportive comments on Mastodon etc. There was a lead…
Someone responded via a friend of a friend to say they’d had a camera stolen with an SD card in it. It seemed to be a possible, but it turns out lots of this person’s photos were of cats. There are no cat photos on our lost card. I’m still sharing…maybe one day…it will make the headlines if we can reunite the photographer with their Icelandic memories.
Incidentally, if you’re thinking that’s an awful lot of photos, remember that modern cameras can snap 50 or so frames per second, if you’re panning across the sky to get a photo of a White-tailed Eagle over a volcano, say, you might hold that shutter down for 10 seconds, if not longer. That’d be 500 shots of just that one flypast! Multiply that by the many dozens of other birds you might have snapped and it’d be easy to get to thousands of frames.
If anything, 3700 sounds like a low number and the Iceland photographer perhaps has half a dozen SD cards that they haven’t lost with just as many photos on each one!
Oh, by the way, do connect if you think this is your SD card…
Meanwhile, one of my twitter contacts suggested we should all add a text file and/or image file to our camera cards that contains contact information in case card, or indeed camera, is lost.
Another contact on Mastodon had two very good ideas about camera cards. The first was to suggest that manufacturers might add a permanent QR code on each card they make, that could be used to register one’s contact details at a central registry for lost and found cards. The second idea was to have the camera automatically look for that “personal.info” file, the one my earlier contact suggested, each time you insert a card and to offer to fill in the data from your camera’s meta data (which would include name and phone number, or other contact method.
In August, we took a trip to Blakeney on the North Norfolk coast. Headed there on travel day via NT Blickling Hall. Visited Cley, Morston, almost to Stiffkey, Cromer.
Lake Kerkini is an astonishing place in northern Greece. Mrs Sciencebase and I visited in June 2024. I’ve put together galleries of the butterflies and moths we saw on our trip, trekking and boating in the area.
I took rather a lot of photos and have only now got around to processing the birds. We saw a lot of birds, tens of thousands of them were Common Cormorant, hundreds were Great White Pelican and Dalmation Pelican, lots were herons and egrets of various species, Spoonbills, a handful of Nightingales, fleeting glimpses of Hoopoe (sadly), a solitary Glossy Ibis, and just the vocalisations of Sardinian Warbler, Cirl Bunting, and a few others no solid sightings. Merlin app also picked up a few that we didn’t see nor hear, and are possibles but questions that will never be answered, such as Wryneck, Thrush Nightingale, Hawfinch, Red Crossbill.
Here’s a list of the 90+ bird species we saw and heard. I suspect we also saw Lesser Kestrel and Eleanora’s Falcon at some point without getting positive IDs on those two:
All my blog posts about our Greece24 trip can be found here. The bird gallery is over on my Imaging Storm site.
With thanks to Tricia, Michael “d”, Martine, and Niko for many of the first sightings and IDs of birds, butterflies, moths, and other creatures. I have added photos of several of the various invertebrates we encountered to the introductory blog posts on our 2024 trip to Greece.
I started off with several thousand photos from our recent trip to northern Greece (June 2024). A lot of those were simply burst-mode shots of the same specimen where I hoped to capture it in the perfect pose between fluttering or flapping of bird or butterfly wings. I backed up all the full SD cards on to an external hard drive and then used FastStone Viewer on my laptop to work through the collections as quickly as I could discarding obvious blurs and duds and then homing in the generally decent photos.
I think I ended up with about 500. I then processed these with DxO PureRaw 4, Topaz Sharpen, and PaintShopPro and began adding to the Sciencebase site. This is the final batch (batch 10) of butterflies from the trip and rather than break it up into several blogs, I’ve made it one long scrollable page with all the decent remaining shots from the collection.
Butterflies of Greece Batch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Amanda’s Blue, Polyommatus amandus
Great Banded Grayling, Brintesia circe
Heath Fritillary, Melitaea athalia
Scarce Swallowtail, Iphiclides podalirius
Southern White Admiral, Limenitis reducta
Painted Lady, Vanessa atalanta
Great Banded Grayling, Brintesia circe
Great Banded Grayling, Brintesia circe
Heath Fritillary, Melitaea athalia
Scarce Swallowtail, Iphiclides podalirius
Southern White Admiral, Limenitis reducta
Southern White Admiral, Limenitis reducta
Painted Lady, Vanessa atalanta
This is the rare, “helice” form of the female Clouded Yellow butterfly, Colias croceus f. helice. Not to be confused with the Pale and the Berger’s Clouded Yellow species. Spotted first on our trip Mrs Sciencebase. We get Clouded Yellow in rare irruption years in the UK, as I’ve mentioned before. Not seen this helice form before though.
Yellow-banded Skipper, Pyrgus sidae, looks a bit like Mallow Skipper from above, but has this lovely custard yellow banding on the underside of its forewings, visible in my photo.
Large Blue, Phengaris arion, quite rare in the UK and found only in specific pockets of habitat.
This skipper, the Large Skipper, Ochlodes sylvanus, is one of a handful of species we see in the UK.
We have a couple of fritillary-type butterflies in the UK, but there are a lot more species in Greece. This is one of them, the delightful Knapweed Fritillary, Melitaea phoebe.
Marbled White, Melanargia galathea, is a species we do see in the British summer. Funnily enough this mainly white-coloured species is not a “white” by family, but one of the browns, a Nymphalidae, more closely related to the Meadow Brown than the Large White, for instance.
I’ve mentioned White-letter Hairstreak, Satyrium w-album, several times on Sciencebase over the last few years, having identified a colony myself in Rampton in 2022. Very much present in the UK too. But, lovely to see the species in Greece too. The scientific name suggestive of the butterfly being a satyr, with a white (album) “w” on its wings. Also in the shot, what I believe is a Red Longhorned Beetle, Stictoleptura rubra, in flight.
Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus f. helice
Yellow-banded Skipper, Pyrgus sidae
Large Blue, Phengaris arion
Large Skipper, Ochlodes sylvanus
Knapweed Fritillary, Melitaea phoebe
Marbled White, Melanargia galathea
White-letter Hairstreak, Satyrium w-album
On our recent butterflying, birding, and mothing trip to Northern Greece, I was keen to catch sight of an Eastern Festoon, Allancastria cerisyi, and hopefully get some photographs of this amazing member of the Papillonidae. The Papillonidae family is the “swallowtails” featured elsewhere on our trip in the form of the Scarce Swallowtail and the Yellow Swallowtail.
Our intrepid guide Michael spotted the first of our Eastern Festoons in a little fallow field we were investigating that had a nice bramble border. The same field with our first European Green Lizard. Later I saw an Eastern Festoon in flight with its wings full displaying, but didn’t get a flight shot. So, these will have to do for my records of this species.
Butterflies of Greece Batch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
It has taken quite some time to work through the 1000s of photos I took of butterflies, moths, and birds in Greece. I’m trying to just pull out the single best shot of each species, but it seems a shame to waste flight shots of beautiful species like the Clouded Yellow, The Cardinal, and others, so they will feature in the various batches at least a couple of times.
Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus
European Common Blue, Polyommatus icarus
Dingy Skipper, Erynnis tages
Eastern Bath White, Pontia edusa
Eastern Rock Grayling, Hipparchia syriaca
Green Hairstreak, Callophrys rubi
The Hermit, Chazara briseis
Iolas Blue, Iolana iolas
Large Tortoiseshell, Nymphalis polychloros
Little Tiger Blue, Tarucus balkanicus
Mallow Skipper, Carcharodus alceae
As regular readers will already know Mrs Sciencebase and myself went on an expertly guided trip to Northern Greece in June 2024. We were there to see the local butterflies and birds, as well as a few moths, and any other wildlife that came into view and to enjoy the local food and drink. This is batch 4 of the butterfly photos. I am yet to process the birds, but that will happen soon, so subscribe to the newsfeed to get the word when the word is out.
The Black-veined White is the species that keeps getting mentioned in the British media when people illicitly raise them from imported eggs and release them into the wild. It used to be on the British list, but no longer. With climate change and the right wind direction it may re-appear hear naturally. It doesn’t need fake introductions into inappropriate habitat that do nothing but distort the scientific data.
I think I was the last of our group to spot this species, Lattice Brown (Kirinia roxelana), Michael, Martine, and Tricia having seen it on the second day. I didn’t get this shot until the last day of the tour.
Large Tortoiseshell, Nymphalis polychloros, used to be an extant (the opposite of extinct) species in the UK, but no longer. That said, there have been occasional sightings, these are usually captive-bred specimens. There are hints that some are vagrants that have made it across The Channel. Of course, they are very much extant in Greece and elsewhere in mainland Europe. We were unable to see this one’s legs to check whether it was the yellow-legged species, N. xanthomelas.
You might think The Cardinal, Argynnis pandora, is one of those fritillaries, it certainly looks like one, but that cardinal-red margin, marks it out as a bit different and so while it is certainly one of the Nymphalidae like the fritillaries it stands ecclesiastically apart
Black-veined White, Aporia crataeg
Lattice Brown, Kirinia roxelana
Large Tortoiseshell, Nymphalis polychloros, aka Blackleg Tortoiseshell
Lesser Fiery Copper, Lycaena thersamon
Little Tiger Blue, Tarucus balkanicus, aka the Balkan Pierrot
Blue-spot Hairstreak, Satyrium spini
The Cardinal, Argynnis Pandora
Clouded Apollo, Parnassius mnemosyne
Large Blue, Phengaris arion