Summer Forest Intrigue

Two years ago, in the summer, I found the biggest intriguer of the forest.

This happened forty kilometers from the capital of Moldova, the city of Chisinau.

I drove towards the unrecognized republic of Transnistria.

An excellent highway paved with reinforced concrete slabs that is able to withstand the movement of heavy tracked vehicles leads to that direction.

She was planned in case of war, for a quick transfer of troops.

After the war of the left and right banks of the Dniester River, this route is quite deserted.

Sometimes, here you can find trucks transporting sand from the quarry.

Usually, I press on the gas pedal and fly past a small forest by the side of the road.

But, this time, I had a camera with me, and, I decided to stop my car and do a quick exploration of this forest.

For me, what I saw there was a big surprise, intrigue.

There, I saw a huge number, very large butterflies, called the Cardinal butterfly, or, as it sounded in Latin, Argynnis pandora.

Look at the magnificence and huge size of this butterfly

This is probably the largest butterfly that I have ever met.

You can compare it with the size of a large thistle inflorescence on which, she sat.

This butterfly is bigger than Machaon and bigger than the biggest Sphingidae, called the Dead Head, which live in Moldova.

When I approached the clearing, closer, the butterflies took off and hid in the forest.

In the beginning, I was upset, and was about to continue my journey, but the butterflies began to return to the thistle flowers on which they were sitting when I saw them.

I stood motionless, and, butterflies, stopped seeing, in me, a threat.

I was able to take many pictures from a very close distance.

My camera does not have macro mode, but it has a built-in large-scale matrix that allows you to take pseudo-macro images with good resolution.

In this case, I was so close to the butterfly that my lens touched its antennae.

You can see the proboscis of a butterfly. She enjoys drinking the sweet thistle nectar.

The size of this proboscis shows how big this butterfly is.

This photograph is one of my favorite photographs.

I took a picture of a butterfly in flight when it was about to sit on a flower.

It was an excellent perspective, which, in the future, helped me a lot.

The magnificence of this creature and its name - Cardinal, made me smile.

This meeting was a real intrigue.

If we recall the times of the Renaissance, namely, the times when King Louis XIII of France, and, according to Alexander Dumas, who wrote the novel The Three Musketeers, then the key figure in those days was not the king, but, the schemer, the Cardinal of France the Richelieu.

I decided to combine the forest intrigue, the name of the butterfly and those times when men wore mustaches and swords, when the word Honor was very expensive, and I created a photo collage, whose cardinal hero was Cardinal.