Hola 2018!

Finally the clock struck midnight, metaphorically speaking (there are no clocks in this house, apart from the one on the cooker display) and I dashed outside to start my big natural history year with a bang. Species number one fell quickly enough

Male Winter Moth. One down, just another 1349 to go

A peer around the various security lights was pretty fruitless. Anyone would think it was midwinter or something. The outbuilding was a bit better with a lacewing on the ceiling. Zero out of ten for technical ability, I was in a rush...

Haha, it may be a  new year but it's the same crap quality pics as ever!

I potted it up and keyed it through using the FSC's Key to British Lacewings (currently available on Amazon for just 50p!!!) With lacewings it's all about the positioning, colour and hairiness of the veins in the wings. Plus a few other bits n bobs, but the veins are pretty important. Anyway, I quickly narrowed this specimen down to the genus Chrysoperla. Here's a pic of the critical veins in the forewing

Apex of cell IMC in forewing not extending as far as cross vein RMCV - check!

I checked both forewings to be sure (lacewings can be a bit odd like that), add the fact that the only one that turns from green to brown and hibernates as an adult is Chrysoperla carnea and I think it's a safe ID. This remains the only species of lacewing I've ever recorded from here, must try harder in the summertime.

The only other thing of interest I noted on my prowl around the buildings were a few spiders in window recesses, they all proved to be the ubiquitous Zygiella x-notata

This is the same species which spins webs across your car wing mirrors, in case you've ever wondered

Back indoors I hunted the cupboards and checked around the skirting boards until I finally found a Pholcus phalangioides hiding in plain sight up by the ceiling. Outside a Tawny Owl started calling, my first vert for the year. Then I finished off the bottle of red I'd opened and promptly went to kip.

It was a stunning morning outside when I stirred next, blue skies with the sun bathing the far hills in glorious light, colours aglow. I leapt out of bed and was soon wandering down to the beach, yearlisting every step of the way! Xmas can go disappear on a one-way trip down the nearest drain for all I care, pointless crap anyway (unless you're into your Scandinavian paganism), but the start of a new year is different, it is for we natural historians anyway. Well, some of us at least. Y'know, those who are mad keen yearlisters who set themselves ridiculous targets to try and keep. Alright, it's me. I'm a nutter. So what, you think this is news to me?  :)

I quit the house and headed into the world. As the first car drove past me I was on 31 species for the year, hence human was number 32 instead of the usual number 1. By the time I reached the bottom of the hill I was nearing 50 species. 

The sun had yet to reach this side of the bay, but the hillside above Idrigill was positively afire! 

Sometimes I actually have to pinch myself

I gave the bay some serious attention but couldn't drum up anything better than a single Great Northern Diver. The gull flock held no surprises, no white winger today. I'm sure I'll see it again before the month is out, though. My fingers were cold again, fooled by the blue skies. The frozen puddles had produced the most incredible swirling patterns, so eye-catching that I simply had to stop and appreciate them for a moment. Big namby jessie that I am

Beauty encapsulated - until the first bastard car drives through it...

Heading into the woods I found myself turning rocks and logs in search of the denizens of such dark places. I was happy to find the alien flatworm Kontikia andersoni beneath one rock. What I didn't expect was to find a second and then a third beneath nearby rocks!

Kontikia andersoni - I've never seen more than one in a day before, nevermind three!

Beneath the capstone of a wall I was thrilled to find this wee fella

If these bad boys were the size of spaniels, nobody would ever leave their house for fear of attack!

This is the pseudoscorpion Neobisium carcinoides, still the only pseudoscorp I've recorded up here so far.  I'm really pleased with the new camera's abilities, there's no way my old camera would have managed an image like this. All the images you see now have been taken with an Olympus TG-4, my laptop won't process the images in RAW (16 million pixels) so I'm using it in its dumbed-down 8 million pixels setting for the moment. But it'll be awesome when I do get the software!

ANYWAY......

January is my Bryophyte Month. So far there's been nary a sniff of anything non invert/bird orientated. Well, first up my fingers were really cold. And I was busy yearlisting. And I was hungry...and...and...ok, alright, enough already! I did manage to identify a few (eight) species of bryophytes. I'm waiting for a warm day, like when my fingers are working again, but I decided for no good reason that this cushion was not going to beat me.

Sat all pretty on an Elder at the top of the beach

My first thought was that it was an Orthotrichum. I took a fragment home, whacked it under the microscope and started keying. I went wrong. It was all going fine up until the couplet which asked how the dried leaves behaved - did they curl up and frazzle or stay pretty much straight? They looked pretty straight to me, and the keys laughed at me! Suddenly I noticed a small fragment that had properly dried out under the lamp and was looking decidedly corkscrewed and frazzled. Back to the keys...Ulota phyllantha came out as the culprit. But wait, I've seen this before - often, in fact. Where were the red tips to the leaves???? Well, it turns out that only the young leaves are tipped in reddish gemmae, the older leaves just have orange-hued tips where the gemmae used to be before being washed away. Looking closer I soon found quite a few young leaves buried in the cushion with a full complement of gemmae clusters. Here's a couple of images I managed down the barrel of my compound microscope

Gemmae bundles on the tips of young leaves - weird huh?

So what you're seeing are bundles of gemmae, each attached to the tip of a young leaf. Most mosses hold their spores in capsules borne on the end of long stalks called seta. In a few species, these stalks are quite short, the capsules may not even project above the leaves of the moss in question. And sometimes, as in this instance, the moss decides to buck the trend and just grow the spores (gemmae) directly out of the leaf tissue. I don't know why, I'm sure somebody does, but not me. All I know is that I was rather surprised to learn that good ol' Ulota phyllantha fooled me, the one Acrocarpous moss I thought I knew. Here's a pic of a single gemma followed by a picture from the book

Looks about right to me

After discovering that Ulota phyllantha can be a sneaky bugger and look like an Orthotrichum, I was tempted (momentarily!) to jack in the whole Bryophyte Month shenanigans. But then I realised that I'd just expanded my knowledge of a species I thought I was familiar with. Surely this is the whole point of allocating a month to an order, to allow myself to work through the bottlenecks and come out the other side wiser and an authority on each subject matter. No? Oh ok, well at least I can maybe learn something along the way. Ulota phyllantha does not always exhibit red tips to the leaves, fact. And I now realise that, fact. I learned something! Fact. Cool, anyway - at the end of play I'd managed to scramble together a grand total of 171 species. I could have easily topped 200 but what's the rush? Surprise omissions were Raven and Buzzard (!), Goldfinch, Goldcrest and Coal Tit. Where they went to I have no idea, but clearly it was 'elsewhere'.

One final slice of my day for you to laugh at...I clicked on the Skye Birds site and discovered that Bob MacMillan was in Uig today (the hub of Skye birding and the guy who runs the Skye Birds website), at the beach it appears. MY beach, and he saw MY juvenile Iceland Gull. I did not see my juvenile Iceland Gull. Do you have any idea how badly that smarts? A visiting birder drops into MY patch, sees MY bird, in MY square and I only learn of it when logging in later that night! Humphhh - Bob's right off of my xmas card list from now on...haha!

The next post will (hopefully) be more bryophyte orientated and might even be written whilst I'm in a slightly more sober state. Probably best not to lay good money on that, though...

Sheesh - I almost forgot! I'm gonna start signing off with a toon or two, no special meaning to it, just whatever I happen to be listening to whilst blogging away. At the end of this year I will be able to look back and laugh at the crap I've been listening to.  Meanwhile you get to listen to some stuff you may not have heard before. So here's tonight's offerings, in two different versions. Ray is so the man! Hope you like KoЯn, here they are anyways...

Seeing as I was chatting paganistic stuff, I was going to unleash Bjork's Pagan Poetry at you, but I'm just not that bloody-minded. So maybe have a go with this, instead? Personally speaking,  I absolutely love these sisters, such an amazing talent