Chequered Love

On my way to the south of France it was cold and until Valence it was raining non-stop, after I passed Valence the temperature was rising and the sky turned from grey into blue. When I left the highway I noticed that not a single butterfly was flying near the road. After arrival I inspected the wild meadow of the accommodation and indeed….not a single resting butterfly (except some Small Heaths). The variety of plants and flowers were the same as usual so I guess that most of the butterflies were not emerged yet. Fortunately the sun was shining and from the second evening I found some butterflies; still low numbers and countable on one hand. But, finding them back was this year a new kind of adventure and brain training for me.
Since years I use big Mikado sticks to mark (vertical) resting butterflies, orchids or other interesting things and that trick worked well….until this year. None of my sticks were visible anymore and after a while I found the first stick back in the grass with biting marks of a fox in it. The next morning the same thing had happened again….all my Mikado sticks were disappeared in the grass and not visible anymore and it costs me more time to find the resting butterfly back. That evening I put some dog cookie in front of every Mikado stick and was very happy to find out that this worked, the cookie was gone and the stick was intact and visible. For the foxes that trick worked very well for some days but then the wild boars came….the cookie was gone including everything what was growing/resting/available within a square metre around the cookie. End of the cookie story!

The morning that I was lying in the grass waiting for the sun for the image below I heard them coming....mother wild boar with 6 or 7 youngsters (which were almost fully grown). I counted their footsteps and waited curiously where they planned to enter ‘my’ meadow….and suddenly there she was, a few metres in front of me, her head and front legs appears between some low bushes. I doubted what to do but decided to chase her away with a loud ‘boooooooaaaaa’. Fortunately she understood my call and disappeared together with her offspring. Quietness returned and some minutes later when the sun gave the dry grass in the background a warm colour, I photographed this Chequered Blue!

Chequered Blue - Canon 7DMKII, tripod, remote release, 180 mm, 1/40 sec, F 9, ISO 100