Small tortoiseshells

Where the snow melts the crocusses appear, even all over town. The town is not more than a main street going to Italy and a few hotels and holiday homes and the very few who has a shop or work in the hotels. After Easter most will close and only open in June for the summer season.
With the sun setting I can hear the children still play outside. They had a wonderful week, sunny days all the time. Good friendships must come out of this week. On Saturday they will go home and the next load will arrive, for us it will be an extremely busy day, because the new kids arrive in the morning and the old group leaves in the evening.

Today I walked to the damwall. It is just a tiny damwall to stop flooding. It was such good weather to stay inside and I had a new bird to add to my list, the northern wheatear and I saw great display of the common redstart.

On my walks today I went into Maloja’s information office to buy a map of the hiking trails. I talked to a guy there about which birds I might see here. Before on several walking trails I’ve seen places where someone is feeding the birds. He told me then that him and his wife are feeding the birds from November till almost into May. So far this year they have distributed about 400kg of bird food over these feeding spots.
These last few days I have seen many darkish butterflies flying through. Today the mistery was solved and I finally I could see which butterfly it was. It is the small tortoiseshell/kleine vos. At first I thought it was a migrating butterfly, because it is a pass here and I saw so many of them. After googling I saw it is the first butterflies that appear when it heats up. I must have seen about 15 of them!

Speaking of migrations, I see on the swifts-martins and swallows mailing list that the Common swift is already seen in various places. On the 6 april one was seen in Bordeaux and 3 in Saint Quentin. On the 8th one was seen at Breskens in Holland and also in the province of Brabant in Holland.
I’m scared they will be home before me.
On the 8th april the first one was seen in Western Swizerland.
Now the fever is rising!