A female Argynnis paphia f. valesina, one out of a handful I observed on the 25th. It appears to be the dominating variant among females in my area.
Speaking of "females", I am in the midst of re-evaluating my past observations of what I initially considered to be several individuals of A. agestis. It turns out that only two individuals actually were A. agestis, whereas the rest happened to be females of P. icarus and P. bellargus, respectively. This is my third year in which I study my local flora and fauna and, after some amount of thinking, reading and waves of unnecessary waves of frustration, most literature published after the 80‘s – books and online guides by German lepidopterists – and databases are quite poor quality-wise and a lot of misidentifactions are both to blame on my own lack of knowledge AND on non-peer-reviewed local data (both Tagfalter Thüringen & Tagfalter in Bayern in particular, which extends to the database maintained by the UFZ and science4you) and lack of proper descriptions that easily reveal misidentifications on behalf of experienced observers (which Lepiforum providing nothing but photos is notoriously guilty of, while the UFZ provides guides with multiple issues randing from poor or missing photos to very sparse descriptions based on flawed data). Although my "due dilligence" was set to be practiced at the end of this season, I did share a shot of one such misidentified female last week and thus deleted it to re-upload it with a better description during off-season, when I‘m done re-checking all observations from this season.
#lepidoptera #butterfly #silverwashedfritillary #germany #canoneos700d
Felix
Menno Boogaard
Menno Boogaard
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Magdalena
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