Graham Hart has lived in Ariege since May 1998 and has known the area since 1991.He has a life-long interest in natural history, which started with butterflies and birds and now includes other insects (especially moths) and flowers. He leads butterfly watching holidays in the region and is writing a book on the butterflies of Ariège. When not out chasing butterflies Graham works as a vet in Ax-les-Thermes.

The weather for the most part was pretty good, the occasional light frost and quite a lot of sunny weather. As will be seen by the news about butterflies and flowers, nature seems to be rather confused about the weather this year.

BUTTERFLIES
Twenty one species seen in all in November: Large White, Small White, Green Veined White, Bath White, Clouded Yellow, Berger's Clouded Yellow, Brimstone, Cleopatra, Sooty Copper, Small Copper, Long Tailed Blue, Lang's Short Tailed Blue, Common Blue, Geranium Bronze, Small Tortoiseshell, Comma, Red Admiral, Painted Lady (on 21.11.02) , Peacock, Wall Brown, Speckled Wood.
Most of these species were seen in the first half of the month with butterflies becoming a lot less frequent during the second half. Interestingly there was a Painted Lady on the 21st--it was moderately fresh and I wonder if it had just flown over from Spain on what was a particularly sunny and warm day for the time of year.

FLOWERS
More evidence of spring flowers getting the time of year wrong, Stinking hellebore is quite widely coming into flower now, normally this is out in February and March. There is the occasional Violet and of course more leaves of Lesser Celandine and Hedge garlic. The leaves of an Arum Lilly species are to be found all over the place, this is normal for this time of year. It is a species which has dark green shiny leaves with a pattern of fine yellowish lines on. As with the species found in England, the leaves are always much more in evidence than the flowers which will appear in spring.

BIRDS
A bit of a quiet time apart from the almost tame magpie that has stayed in the neighbourhood since September when we released it after hand rearing it. It visits all the neighbours and steals cat food. Well, one day it was brought into the surgery by one of my neighbours with a broken leg, so I put a splint on it, but I couldn't re-release it like that. So it stayed in my garage for three weeks whilst the leg healed. Now it is back happily outside; it always roosts just outside the back door but during the day does the tour of the neighbourhood like before. It also comes on walks with us and our Labrador on whose back it sometimes perches.