Dragonfly and butterfly

Following yesterday’s Common White butterfly, some less common sightings by the lake at Vailhan this morning:

A Scarlet Dragonfly (Crocothemis erythraea), posing on a reed. It seems to be using its proboscis to extract the inside of the reed. These dragonflies can be seen all over southern Europe and North Africa and there are many of them along the shore of this lake at the Barrage des Olivettes.

And a few metres from the shore I saw my first ever Two-tailed Pasha (Charaxes jasius). It’s a large butterfly, as big as a small bird, whose grubs feed on arbutus leaves, which explains its presence here where the surrounding hillsides are covered with arbutus as well as holm oaks.

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