Peter Jones Wildlife blog

I have the Collins wildflower guide and the Wildflower key. Both excellent, but I have all too often resorted to skimming through the pages looking for a pictorial match! Or even worse, going straight to a photo, and onto inaturalist, which is becoming very lazy and in danger of teaching me nothing along the way. My problem is that the keys, especially the initial key, in both books ask questions that I have no idea what the answer is! Once I'm at the right family, then I'm happy to follow the text and work the species out. So I stumbled across the "Pocket guide to wildflower families" So far, this seems to answer my prayers, asking simpler questions in order to focus me into the right area of the field guides. It also has page references for the relevant pages of the main field guides. So far, so good with a fairly straightforward path through the Q&A to one of my more common garden flowers, confirmed as Cleavers! Hopefully onto some more challenges i

  Provence Orchid Tau Emperor A short, but busy few days in the French Alps. The emphasis was on Butterflies, Wildflowers, and the Moth trap. Vercors National Park is a fairly large, and spectacular range of mountains and forested valleys South West of Grenoble. Several operators run dedicated trips to the area, in particular Naturetrek and Greenwings, plus a couple of independent operators, so plenty of useful info is available on the internet. iNaturalist also continues to be a very useful source of information, particularly if you can interrogate the database and download species with waypoints. The downside of this is that I set off with a whole list of waypoints for target species of flowers but never really got a grip on where the villages and hotspots actually were in relation to each other. Nevertheless, pretty much all of the time was spent in flower-rich meadows, and the overnight moth traps were successful. Butterflies were more of a struggle and I didn't see that many s