Daniel Rosengren is engaged

Daniel Rosengren is hired

Since 2008 I had not seen any breakthrough in the surveys where Colias ponteni could be collected. The subject of the Bachelor River again raised my interest as my very good friend Daniel Rosengren who lives in Gävle of all places, planned to complete a bike ride around the Atlantic Ocean.

I met Daniel Rosengren and his sister Marie along the first "Butterfly-road" in Sweden which I initiated a few years earlier. A long-standing enriching friendship was thus initiated. In the picture to the right: Göran and Gun-Britt with Daniel and Marie at home on the porch outside our Avellaneda Museum.

A few years earlier, Daniel had, more or less alone, cycled from the North Cape of north Norway to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. He now planned to continue the journey on his bike northwards from Tierra del Fuego up through South America, after a visit to Antarctica. I of course became very interested when I heard about his plans and asked if he could make a detour to the mouth of the Bachelor River when he arrived in Punta Arenas. Daniel immediately snatched the idea of trying to reach this remote place without a road link. I became of course very happy as I knew that Daniel is also one of Sweden's very best nature photographers, which would result in a nice and interesting documentation of his visit.

After a few days exploring Punta Arenas, Daniel managed to find a whale watching trip whose route would round the southernmost cape of the South American mainland, Cape Froward, and then further west through the Strait of Magellan out to the Pacific Ocean. They would pass the mouth of the Bachelor River! Daniel was promised to be landed at this extremely inaccessible place, which the

organizers considered to be one of the most inaccessible places in the world with only a few visitors a year. Daniel was landed on the beach with a small rubber boat and was promised to be picked up after four days. I had previously sent him Skogman's wonderful picture from the estuary with the three peaks of Bachelor Point in the background.

I would like to enrich this article with some of Daniel Rosengren's fantastic pictures from this place that would be one of the least visited and most remote mainland places on our entire earth. It was fantastic to see and compare Daniel's photo with Skogman's drawing from the Eugenie's anchorage in the channel between Carl III's island and the Brunswick peninsula, just west of the estuary of the little Bachelor River that runs from the three peak Bachelor Point some miles into the country. That Daniel was in the same place as Skogman at the frigate Eugenie's visit there is easy to see!

Daniel experienced some wonderful days after arriving on January 14th. During the days he stayed there and walked up along the Bachelor River, he of course did not see a human being, but unfortunately neither Colias ponteni nor any other butterflies. Daniel, however, had the pleasure of seeing the extremely rare and endangered native deer, the Patagonian Huemule, Hippocamelus bisulcus and also made good contact with a curious kingfisher who fished beside the shed that served

as his "hotel" during his stay. One of the few insects he did manage to see during these days was an extremely beautiful assiduous working bumblebee but no butterflies. However, the bumblebee turned out to be very special. It was a queen of the world's southernmost bumblebee, Bombus dahlbomii. It has now become increasingly rare and threatened by introduced European species.

Below are some of Daniel's pictures from this extreme place on our earth. However, the place should not be the place where Colias ponteni was previously found. If the species had existed on this site, at least either Hiroshi or Daniel, both extremely talented nature observers and butterfly experts, should have found the butterfly when they each visited the site. However, both were highly sceptical that the butterfly could really be found in these areas as the kind of vegetation that existed, although extremely luxuriant, was not the type that would be attractive to the Colias family. The vegetation down there with constant rain is almost the same as at a temperate rainforest. All photos Daniel Rosengren.

The beach at the mouth of the Bachelor River with the three peaks of Bachelor's Peak to the right.

The "beach-meadows" seem to me more similar to wet forest marshes with wild rosemary.

I think it is great to read what Charles Darwin writes about his experiences during his stay in the forests of the Strait of Magellan. Especially as a few lines where he tells about his observations on some smaller forest birds fit well with what Daniel told and documented with his many fine photos while hunting there for the butterfly Colias ponteni. Darwin writes, among other things: "A small darkcoloured hedgehog, Scytalopus magellanicus jumps sneaking around among the felled tree trunks".

The small dark-coloured Magellanic Tapaculo: Scytalopus magellanicus.

Darwin continues: "The most common bird, however, is a tree crawler. It is found everywhere in the beech forests. This little bird certainly seems to be more common than it actually is because of its habit of curiously following every one who penetrates into the silent forests. Hereby, it flutteres with a rough twitter from tree to tree at a distance of only a few meters from the hiker's face. This bird does not conceal itself modestly as the real tree crawler, nor does it spring up the tree trunks, but jumping around like a scar and looking for insects everywhere on branches and twigs."

As far as we can understand, Charles Darwin is referring to Pygarrhichas albogularis, which in English is very suitably called White Throated Treerunner. This tree jumper followed Daniel as well as the former followed Darwin!

The lush vegetation can be called a temperate rainforest in this extremely rainy area.

I'm happy to quote Skogman when I see Daniel's pictures:

This river valley is a true paradise for these areas; one should not expect anything so covered and smiling. The clear and contagious waters of the river flow between lush forests and small green fields, where large bushes of Fuchsia, covered with flowers, seem to prefer their place and thrive.

The extremely rare and endangered Patagonian Huemul, Hippocamelus bisulcus, looks out of the dense vegetation which is dominated by all red Fuchsias. Possibly F. magellanica.

One of the area's very few insects found, the southernmost bumblebee on Earth, the rare Patagonian bumblebee or the “Flying Mouse”, Bombus dahlbomi. It is now unfortunately endangered by introduced European domestic bumble bees. The picture shows a queen of this rarity.

View of the Bachelor River mouth with Islas Carlos III in the background. It was here at the Borja Bay frigate Eugenie anchored on February 9, 1852 and landed several small boats with both scientists and officers to partly hunt and partly fill up with fresh water. However, the stay on shore in the evening as well as next morning, the 10th, became cut short because it suddenly blew an east to north-east wind during the morning that would enable Eugenie to quickly sail through the long narrow channel Long Reach. It became a wonderfully successful sailing day as the frigate Eugenie, under Captain Virgin, on a single day sailed almost a third of the entire route through the Strait of Magellan out to the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, because of this the scientists got no possibility to carry out the planned expedition up the Bachelor River on the 10th of February. So, as far as I can see, it would take 156 years before any Swedish naturalist got the chance to investigate the place again and all because of this short visit in 1852!

The beach at the mouth of the Bachelor River.

Daniel Rosengren´s "hotel" at the Bachelor River.

The sociable Ringed Kingfisher, Megaceryle torquata, at Daniel's "hotel".

Daniel was fortunately picked up by the whale watching boat and returned to Punta Arenas. He could during that voyage enjoy the rich wildlife along the Strait of Magellan but unfortunately no glimpse of any Colias ponteni.

Magellanic Penguin, Spheniscus magellanicus, in hesitation waiting to pass the resting South American fur seals, Arctocephalus australis just west of Cap Froward.

Cap Froward, the southernmost cape of the American continent.

South side of Mt. Tarn (825 m). from the Strait of Magellan. Note the dense and inaccessible forest which, according to Charles Darwin, began directly at the high-water mark and stretched up to the dwarf trees before bare rock appears near the top. Darwin climbed the mountain in February 1834 and described the forest as so wet, cold, dark and inhospitable that even mushrooms, mosses or ferns could not thrive! Daniel Rosengren's picture of Mt. Tarn photographed from the whale watching boat on the Strait of Magellan verifies, with desirable clarity, Charles Darwin's description of the mountain's south side.

The rather bare top of Mt. Tarn photographed from the whale watching boat on the Strait of Magellan.

Jan Isidorsson, another member of our Entomological Society of Gästrikland, organised a trip to the area looking for Colias ponteni and he got his boy's dream fulfilled when, in connection with his visit, he also got the opportunity to have a quiet and beautiful day at the wheel with a rented sailboat around Cape Horn! However, no clarity of Colias ponteni’s origins resulted from his journey if one do not, as I see it, see any "failure" in not finding the butterfly along the Strait of Magellan as a sign that my theories that the Hawaiian Islands after all is the right place for Colias ponteni.

Nowadays, starting from some signs and new information, I increasingly question the accepted hypothesis that the butterflies Butler described as Colias imperialis 1871, which he is said to have found in the so called Banksian cabinet, really existed there from the beginning, i.e. that they should have come from Captain King's voyages to Tierra del Fuego in the early 1800s. Some conditions indicate that the butterflies may well have been introduced at a later time, i.e. sometime between 1830 and 1871 when they were found and described by Butler. However, this new information hardly contributes to any solution to the question of the origin of the butterflies. I wonder if one can't as well assume that the three butterflies described by Butler 1871 could not have been placed in the Banksian cabinet before the plants from King's trip were deposited there? Nearly 50 years have passed between Cooks death and Kings voyage to the Strait of Magellan.

The butterflies themselves may well have been collected before Captain King's research voyage in 1830, but nothing says that this collection would have taken place along the Strait of Magellan at, for example, Port Famine. We must remember that this was long before the arrival of the Panama Canal. For example, all ships that visited the Hawaii Islands had two choices home to England. Either you sail around South Africa or around South America. The majority of ships that visited Hawaii and perhaps made smaller collections also returned to England via the Strait of Magellan and they certainly visited Port Famine for stocking up with water and supplies. It is not at all unlikely that these butterflies, if they were collected in Hawaii, during the home trip or even more likely at their return to England, were confused with material from Tierra del Fuego or other areas along the Strait of Magellan.

We must also remember that at this time, they were not as accurate with the local collection details as we are today. I am completely open to the fact that the butterflies may have been collected in Hawaii before the plants were collected during Captain King's exploration of the fields around the Strait of Magellan, but someone during King's visit to Port Famine has come across these butterflies and placed them in the herbarium prepared for the plants collected on his research travels and which Butler found more than 40 years later in the Bank's Cabinet. The name of this cabinet comes, as everyone understands, from the great traveler and botanist Joseph Banks who together with James Cook was involved in exploring especially the Southern Pacific and Australia during Cook's first big voyage in 1768-1771 when also one of Linné´s disciples Daniel Solander participated.