Archive for the 'd. maculata' Category
Finally
I’ll be off on a short holiday now, probably no Internet access. I will be able to send tweets from my mobile though, my latest tweet can be seen here in the blog lower down in the right margin. Now you’ll be wondering why on earth I have Twitter when hardly anyone is reading this blog either, but I figured it would be nice to have – I can update it from my mobile so I can send tweets about my whereabouts. In case I fall down and hit my head and can’t call anyone, the latest tweet will tell the rescue patrol approximately where I am. Provided that anyone reads this blog, anyway, because I forgot to tell anyone in person that this is my new safety line. LOL!
Had one last look at the lesser butterfly orchids. They are finally starting to open, but out of the 21 individuals that I found (11 of them about 100 meters from my house, I think this is a new location for them, very exciting!), 
2 were in full bloom and the rest were varying degrees of buds. So I can stop worrying now, there will be butterfly orchids left for me to photograph even when I come back from my vacation. The reason I’m making such a big deal out of them is that I haven’t photographed them with the 150mm macro yet, and then there’s the fact that they are just so beautiful! What more reason do I need?
The heath spotted orchids are also starting to bloom. It’s the most common orchid in this region, but I’ll never be blasé about any orchid!
2 commentsThe hunt is back on
This is turning out to be one busy holiday. Day after I came back from Gotland, my sister came for a visit. I had promised to show her my favourite stomping grounds – the mountains. So we drove up, regardless of the weather (raining), did some hiking and came back and did some local sightseeing before she left. Then I just had time to re-pack and took off – to the mountains again!
There are two more orchids that I haven’t yet seen in the Härjedalen mountain region, one is the black vanilla orchid (Nigritella nigra) and the other the alpine chamorchis (Chamorchis alpina). I knew where to find the alpine chamorchis already last year but I failed to spot them. I got a tip for the black vanilla orchid earlier this year, and I knew that they should probably be in bloom now so I headed straight there. The black vanilla orchid grows in open meadows, so when I got to the meadow, I stepped off the trail with the idea that I would zig-zag the area to make sure that I had it completely covered. If there was an orchid in this meadow, I was going to find it! 
And I did. I hadn’t even come to the first zag when this dark flower stood up from the sunlit grass! I had a look around but this was the only individual I could find. It had just started blooming, so I figured that it’s an early riser because surely it can’t be all alone.
When I had taken the pictures, I started zig-zagging again because I just refused to believe that I had come across the one and only individual of the black vanilla orchid. After a long search, I spotted three more close together, one of them had opened up more than the first I saw and the other two were just buds. So now I had four confirmed individuals, and I hope that there will be more as it looks like this is fairly early for them.
One this same excursion, I found a few strange looking heath spotted orchids (Dactylorhiza maculata). What caught my eye at first was the abnormally dark pattern, and then when I looked closer, I saw the stem covered with spots and there’s some random spots even on the underside of the leaves. Either it’s a very dark and spotty heath spotted orchid, or a hybrid of a sort?
