Part 3 of a few memories of Lisbon. Part 1 is here and this is Part 2, these are our incidental Lisbon birding photos.
Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 3
Category: Photography
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”
Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 2
Part 2 of a few photographic memories of Lisbon. Part 1 is here and these are our incidental Lisbon birding photos.
Part 3 of my photo collection here.
Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 1
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.
SD cards at the lost and found
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.
Another visit to North Norfolk
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.
Birds of Lake Kerkini and surroundings
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:
- Bee-eater, European (Merops apiaster)
- Blackbird, Common (Turdus merula)
- Blackcap, Eurasian (Sylvia atricapilla)
- Bunting, Cirl (Emberiza cirlus) (heard only or Merlin)
- Buzzard, Common (Buteo buteo)
- Buzzard, Honey (Pernis apivorus)
- Chaffinch, Eurasian (Fringilla coelebs)
- Chiffchaff, Common (Phylloscopus collybita)
- Coot, Eurasian (Fulica atra)
- Cormorant, Great (Phalacrocorax carbo)
- Cormorant, Pygmy (Microcarbo pygmaeus)
- Crossbill, Red (Loxia curvirostra) (heard only or Merlin)
- Crow, Carrion (Corvus corone)
- Crow, Hooded (Corvus cornix)
- Cuckoo, Common (Cuculus canorus)
- Dove, Collared (Streptopelia decaocto)
- Dove, Turtle (Streptopelia turtur)
- Eagle, Booted (Hieraaetus pennatus) Michael d only
- Egret, Little (Egretta garzetta)
- Firecrest, Common (Regulus ignicapillus)
- Flamingo, Greater (Phoenicopterus roseus)
- Flycatcher, Spotted (Muscicapa striata)
- Goldcrest (Regulus regulus)
- Goldfinch, European (Carduelis carduelis)
- Grebe, Great Crested (Podiceps cristatus)
- Greenfinch, European (Chloris chloris) (heard only or Merlin)
- Gull, Black-headed (Chroicocephalus ridibundus)
- Gull, Caspian (Larus cachinnans)
- Gull, Yellow-legged (Larus michahellis)
- Hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes) (heard only or Merlin)
- Heron, Grey (Ardea cinerea)
- Heron, Night (Nycticorax nycticorax)
- Heron, Purple (Ardea purpurea) Niko the skipper only
- Heron, Squacco (Ardeola ralloides)
- Hobby, Eurasian (Falco subbuteo)
- Hoopoe, Eurasian (Upupa epops)
- Ibis, Glossy (Plegadis falcinellus)
- Jackdaw, Eurasian (Corvus monedula)
- Jay, Eurasian (Garrulus glandarius)
- Kestrel, Common (Falco tinnunculus)
- Kingfisher, Common (Alcedo atthis) (heard only or Merlin)
- Lark, Crested (Galerida cristata)
- Linnet, Common (Linaria cannabina)
- Martin, House (Delichon urbicum)
- Moorhen, Common (Gallinula chloropus)
- NightingaleLuscinia megarhynchos(Luscinia megarhynchos)
- Nightingale, Thrush (Luscinia luscinia) (heard only or Merlin)
- Oriole, Golden (Oriolus oriolus)
- Owl, Little (Athene noctua)
- Pelican, Dalmatian (Pelecanus crispus)
- Pelican, Great White (Pelecanus onocrotalus)
- Pigeon, Common Wood (Columba palumbus)
- Pigeon, Stock (Columba oenas)
- Raven, Common (Corvus corax)
- Redstart, Black (Phoenicurus ochruros) (heard only or Merlin)
- Robin, European (Erithacus rubecula)
- Shrike, Masked (Lanius nubicus)
- Shrike, Red-backed (Lanius collurio)
- Skylark, Eurasian (Alauda arvensis)
- Sparrow, House (Passer domesticus)
- Sparrow, Spanish (Passer hispaniolensis)
- Sparrow, Eurasian Tree (Passer montanus)
- Sparrowhawk, Eurasian (Accipiter nisus)
- Sparrowhawk, Levant (Accipiter brevipes)
- Spoonbill, Eurasian (Platalea leucorodia)
- Starling, Common (Sturnus vulgaris)
- Stork, Black (Ciconia nigra)
- Stork, White (Ciconia ciconia)
- Swallow, Barn (Hirundo rustica)
- Swallow, Red-rumped (Cecropis daurica)
- Swan, Mute (Cygnus olor)
- Swift, Pallid (Apus pallidus)
- Tern, Common (Sterna hirundo)
- Tit, Blue (Cyanistes caeruleus)
- Tit, Coal (Periparus ater)
- Tit, Great (Parus major)
- Tit, Long-tailed (Aegithalos caudatus)
- Treecreeper, Eurasian (Certhia familiaris)
- Wagtail, Grey (Motacilla cinerea)
- Wagtail, White (Motacilla alba) (heard only or Merlin)
- Warbler, Cetti’s (Cettia cetti)
- Warbler, Eastern Olivaceous (Iduna pallida) (heard only or Merlin)
- Warbler, Great Reed (Acrocephalus arundinaceus)
- Warbler, Moustached (Acrocephalus melanopogon) (heard only or Merlin)
- Warbler, Sardinian (Sylvia melanocephala) (heard only or Merlin)
- Wheatear, Northern (Oenanthe oenanthe)
- Woodpecker, Great Spotted (Dendrocopos major)
- Woodpecker, Green (Picus viridis)
- Woodpecker, Middle Spotted (Dendrocopos medius)
- Wren, Eurasian (Troglodytes troglodytes)
- Wryneck, Eurasian (Jynx torquilla) (heard only or Merlin)
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.
The last of my Greek butterflies
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
Another clutch of Greeks
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
More butterflies of northern Greece
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
Eastern Festoon, Allancastria cerisyi
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