new blog - butterflies etc

I've set this up to see if it's any use as a way of planning, organising or documenting our projects

As sam and I found this morning, the Spanish gatekeeper, Pyronia bathseba differs from the Gatekeeper P. tithonus and the Southern Gatekeeper P cecilia mainly in having a prominent cream colored band on the rear underwing, as the picture max took shows clearly. The upper wings are quite similar in the 3 species. All three species appear in Catalunya.

The name of the Gatekeeper has changed quite a bit:

two butterflies, known to early entomologists as the Selvedged Heath Eye and the Golden Heath Eye, were later discovered to be the male and female of a single species. This "new" species became known as the Gatekeeper, but is now called the Small Heath. Meanwhile it's former name Gatekeeper became applied to an entirely different species which has variously been known as the Hedge Brown, Hedge Eye, or Large Heath ! It gets worse - the name Large Heath is currently applied to yet another species, previously known as the Manchester Argus, or Marsh Ringlet ! 

This is from a site by Adrian Hoskins, which has some useful information about butterfly taxonomy. Butterflies are mainly classified according to the shapes of their genitalia, apparently:

http://www.learnaboutbutterflies.com/Taxonomy.htm

not sure if we want to put together a short text to send in to the Darwin photo competition? info on that here:

http://www.horniman.ac.uk/darwin/competition.html

some butterfly links:

The following have good pictures for identifying butterflies in Europe:

http://www.leps.it/

http://www.eurobutterflies.com/species_pages/tithonus.htm

http://www.britishbutterflies.co.uk/asp/species.asp?vernacular=Gatekeeper

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/species.php?vernacular_name=Gatekeeper&referer=www.britishbutterflies.co.uk

this is the online list of gatekeeper specimens at the natural history museum:

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/research-curation/research/projects/cockayne/list.dsml?searchtype=specimen&searchPageURL=search-specimen.dsml&taxonname=pyronia+tithonus&nametype=scientific&typestatus=&countryID=&countyID=&locality=&localityqtype=contains&collector=&collectorqtype=contains&provenance=all&format=gallery&sort=taxon-euro&recLimit=20

this is about butterfly conservation

http://www.bc-europe.org/category.asp?catid=14