Clouded Yellow in Tuscany

Vines in a Chianti landscape

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Vines, olive groves and hill-top settlements pattern the Chianti landscape. Our walk gives perspectives on the lovely villa where we stayed some thirty years ago at this same time of year. I remember that first golden freshness of oaks in flower. I hope to rediscover golden mistletoe  but  we find none.  
This April day there is fair-weather cloud with sunbursts, and the interplay of sunlight and butterflies is the highlight.  With  orchids intent on deception. 

Winter has seemed long, being wet and gloomy, and late April in Cumbria is unusually cold.  So this glorious interlude is a reawakening, my first butterflies this year.  On sunny days in early spring, over-wintering Brimstone  can emerge from hibernation, lovely but familiar. Clouded Yellow is a migratory species from North Africa and Europe, more likely to be found in the south of England in small numbers.  There are  'Clouded Yellow years’ when mass migrations occur but I don't remember one. So it's a rare treat to see them.
 By chance, the sun breaks free of cloud and butterflies come in flights of yellow and gold.  There's a farmstead with a walled reservoir, sheltered by olive trees in silvery evergreen, and oaks coming into flower.   A stone embankment shelters a hollow where rosemary is in flower and down in the dip there's a mass of blue periwinkle.  Sunlight pours down upon  flowers, a signal to butterflies there is pollen and nectar on offer. Flowers are not passive,  they depend on pollination so over millennia  they've co-evolved with pollinators to their mutual benefit.  Scents and electrical impulses pass between them, signals hidden from us so there's a sense of mystery. With each sunburst comes a sudden rush of butterflies so we linger and become immersed in rhythms created by an interplay of sunlight and cloud which brings gusts of chill wind.  The moment cloud masks the sun the butterflies vanish. We watch the moving cloud and settle in, focused and still, to wait for the next sunburst.  
So, here's what we discover on a lovely day in Chianti, set in the context of the science of pollination.
This Natural History Museum item on pollinators is introduced with a superb image of a Humming-bird hawk moth.   
                      
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/insect-pollination

I had come to Tuscany hoping for Clouded Yellow and we see them almost every day,  glimpsed fleetingly as they map out territories, rarely settling for a moment.  Now butterflies come in a rush, seeking nectar and pollen from rosemary flowers, so here's an opportunity for a lingering close-encounter.
Deep gold on the  Clouded Yellow upper-wing shows in flight.  Clouded Yellow and Brimstone are similar species. Both settle with wings closed  and  under-wings have a greenish hue that helps camouflage them against leaves.  Sunlight dazzles, giving gloss and sheen to leaves and wings are translucent, blazed out of colour or dimmed with shadows.   Butterflies  try to confuse predators with wing-shape that has evolved to resemble leaf-shape.   Wing or leaf, it can confuse photographers too. 

Butterflies are vulnerable to predation when nectaring and it's suggested they are aware of how best to hide and camouflage themselves amongst foliage, how to blend in.  Down in the butterfly glade, we watch butterflies approach and alight on periwinkle flowers.  Sunlight affects how we see colour, and casts shadows.  They're down amongst leaves and flowers so sometimes hard to discover.  During our time in Tuscany we see tiny bright blue butterflies.  I glimpse Humming bird hawk moths in flight and down in this  butterfly glade we photograph one, its wing-beats so rapid it's rather a blur. 

Butterflies seek nectar and pollen. They also need mineral salts,  and human sweat is something that can attract them. So off with shoes and socks which lie on the ground beside a sit-mat.  A Clouded Yellow circles and circles over the sit mat, casting a precise shadow showing the shape of its wings.  Butterfly vision is unlike ours, so it's more likely to be the allure of sweat rather than colour.

There are orchids  beneath oak trees along our way and we puzzle over them.  I'm sure they're not fly orchids but this flower mimics an insect, fly, bee or spider. Co-evolution is at work here.  An insect pollinator spies what looks like  a female to mate with and investigates, an act of pseudo-copulation because it's alighted on a flower where its fumbling dusts it with pollen which transfers to the next flower it visits - just what the flowers require.
It seems there's been confusion over some time because this orchid is a hybrid. It's from the Ophrys group of which there are many similar species, all very variable in shape and form. It belongs to a group called mammosa or sphegodes, found widely across Southern Europe.
Olive trees are being pruned and discarded branches are piled on the ground between them.  A scene popular in medieval sculptures showing the labours of the months.  Late in the afternoon we sit beneath cypress trees listening to the singing of an unfamiliar bird hidden in its foliage and looking across to the villa where we stayed in  1995.  There 's a blustery wind and if we passed by our butterfly glade right now all would be quiet and we'd see nothing. 

At a Butterfly Conservation AGM in Cumbria in June someone asked if anyone had seen Humming Bird Hawk Moth. 'Yes, in Tuscany' I piped up.   It was such a cold wet spring that no-one else had seen the moth.  We'd seen several in flight and had a rather poor photograph of one nectaring.