Today we went up the adjacent hill to the Mirador but before that Yosiel made an important find of a larva on a vine called Mucuna pruriens near the entrance to the hotel. Doug then reared the larva and it turned out to be a Caribbean Yellow-tipped Flasher Telegonus anausis. Larvae have been found previously in Cuba but only on Lablab purpureus (Fabaceae). The finding has been written up and you can read it here.
Duviel drove us to the top of the hill from where we explored a bit in the grounds of the rebuilt hotel Castillo en Las Nubes that was largely destroyed by the Hurricane Ike in September 2008. It lay derelict for a few years and last time we were here in June 2015 workmen were just finishing off the rebuild. I presume it opened for business after that but then Covid struck and it has certainly been closed since 2020 and was not yet open for business in August 2022. It is a small hotel with just six rooms and had it been open we would certainly have stayed here as the mothing would have been brilliant. You can see details of our last visit here.
Castillo en las Nubes 3 Aug 2022 © Tim Norriss
We started by exploring the garden here where a Cuban Green Anole Anolis porcatus was hunting butterflies. There were also lots of spiders on one of the conifer trees. I'm not sure of the species but it looks very similar to one that we saw commonly in Costa Rica now called Triconephila clavipes or Golden Silk Spider.
There were quite a few butterflies including the endemic Orange-washed Sulphur Phoebis avellaneda though distant. We started walking back down the hill and stopping at various points on the way. And we stopped also for a Bella moth Utetheisa ornatrix but it was slightly breezy which made getting a decent picture difficult. Nearby was a Crotalaria sp plant with a group of eggs on the flower which might well be from the moth as this is the foodplant.
I stopped for a while to photograph a Cuban Peewee - a rather frazzled moulting adult feeding a fresher youngster.
We saw 50 butterfly species today...
.... and found several more species as larvae or eggs.
I managed to photograph several Odonata species none of which I could identify at the time being a bit rusty, though I had seen the Antillean Skimmer Orthemis sp before. Having been through Dennis Paulson's books on Dragonflies in the US the first photo seems to be a close match to Erithrodiplax miniscula Little Blue Dragonlet but this doesn't appear on the list that I have for Cuba so I'll have to send this and the other (which Yosiel caught in his net so that I could get pictures before releasing it) to an expert in Cuba for verification.
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