Whilst trawling Birdguides this evening, I could hardly help but notice the 7:11pm report of a Blue Whale from Devon. I no longer pay to subscribe to Birdguides. Those days, along with my RBA pager subscription, are long gone I'm afraid, hence I can't readily access the precise details. But fuckaduck, there's a report of a BLUE WHALE from Devon!!! I just so happen to know a handful of Devon naturalists, plus another handful from neighbouring counties both westwards and eastwards. I can only hope that they managed to find time to attempt a sighting of this brute of a beast. Silly buggers to them if they didn't and it was just loafing offshore...
In these days of seemingly perpetual doom and gloom, it's heartening to see increasing reports of larger cetaceans in our waters. Humpback Whale was relegated to near mythological status when I was in my 20s, yet nowadays it's being seen around our coastline every year, in groups of up to 4 or 5 if recent Shetland sightings are to be believed (and the camerawork would certainly imply those numbers are correct). Purely mind-blowing, from this old school naturalist's perspective at least. But these events (which is how I'd class them) are becoming ever more commonplace. In my head, I'd love for this to be attributable to a cessation of whaling in The Atlantic and a robust bounce back in cetacean numbers. In my heart though, I fear otherwise.
Whatever the reason for this current visitation to Devon's coastline, I hope the beast is in rude health, finds plenty of food and continues on its way unmolested. Assuming, of course, that it really is a Blue Whale and not one of Biscay's overly large Bottle-nosed Dolphins popped up to say hello...they are a lot bigger than you'd expect, trust me!
Only one song springs to mind, again from my 20s when the world seemed much simpler and dodgy hairstyles were the norm
This video doubtless goes a long way to explaining my long standing fascination of ladies wearing big boots. Note also the originalUsain Bolt pose at 1:08...
Last week the Skye Nature Group visited Dorothy Jackson's croft at Tokavaig as part of an ongoing survey of the species that occur there. This is the second time Dorothy has hosted SNG, already we are raring for a return visit sometime in the late spring next year. She has over 60 acres of herb-rich grassland interspersed with oak, hazel, rowan and birch woodland, heather and wetland areas. The whole thing has deer-proof fencing around the perimeter and already there is noticeable regrowth of young trees (and less Deer TicksIxodes ricinus than we'd ordinarily encounter in this habitat). So saying, I did have my first Deer KedLipoptena cervi of the year land on me, bloody hateful things. Seeing as this may prove to be the only hippoboscid fly I'll encounter this year, I really should have potted it up and pinned it instead of swiping it away in revulsion. I don't have a single specimen from the superfamily Hippoboscoidea in my collection.
I don't have an image of a deer ked, so here's one I nabbed off the internet of a different hippoboscid
This is a species of bat ked, rather than a deer ked. It's still pretty repulsive though.
But there's nothing else repulsive about Dorothy's croft. Plenty of leaf-mining moth records including this one on Downy Birch
Oval cut out of the moth Heliozela hammoniella
Locally, this is still a damn good find with hardly any recent records. There are a mere handful of serious moth-ers up here on Skye, all of whom record what comes to their light trap rather than from purposeful fieldwork. None are particularly genned-up on microleps (or the associated feeding signs) either. This isn't intended as a slur towards them, I'm just stating how it is up here. I suspect there are a good many microlep species still to be found on Skye, it just needs more folks knowing what to look for in the field. A project for the future, perhaps.
Ridiculous as it may seem to anybody reading this in the south of England, the following pic is of another damn fine find for Skye
You're looking at the tiny spider below its spiky white egg case
This is Paidiscura pallens, the 'sputnik' egg cases are by far the easiest way to find this tiny spider, though they are not always in attendance. I've always found that the underside of oak leaves is by far the best place to look for these spiders. It's really pretty uncommon this far north-west, the Spider Recording Scheme page does show several Skye records, but they are all dated from before 1980! The flying saucer galls in the image are caused by Neuroterus quercusbaccarum, a tiny wasp which is also quite uncommon this far north-west. NBN shows a handful of Skye records, mostly in the south, which nicely mirrors the distribution of oak woodlands on Skye.
I was armed with my net and a beating tray (which I managed to break traversing The Ravine of Death, more later...) and quickly set to tonking various large limbs and dead snags beneath oak. Surprisingly little in the way of beetles, but plenty of Porcellio scaber, the Rough Woodlouse, and one other which got me all excited!
Philoscia sp. and it isn't muscorum!
This, I firmly believe, is a female Philoscia affinis. But, being female, it lacks the spur on its hindleg, the shape of which would distinguish it from Philoscia muscorum. As it stands, Steve Gregory (official British expert on woodlice) agrees that it does look to be affinis but I need to find a male to confirm. So that's two females so far, one from Dorothy's croft and one from my local woods, but no males. Yet. Third time lucky? I've had it suggested that leaf litter sieving may be a better bet for finding the males. However, in known populations of affinis it does appear that males are far less common than females.
Naturally, if I ever do find a male it will be a new species to Skye.
I also beat a couple of leaf beetles from the Hazel understorey, they turned out to be Gonioctena pallida, a lifer for me though I've seen G.viminalis and G.decemnotata before in Surrey, leaving G.olivacea (unknown from NW Scotland, though the Inverness area seems to be a hotspot for it) to complete the genus. Gonioctena pallida would seem to be new for Skye, a 2011 record from Raasay being the first published record for The Hebrides as a whole. Clearly the oak/hazel woods on Dorothy's croft are well worth future investigation!
Adrian Fowles has been in touch with various Skye-based organisations and is after weevil records for the National Recording Scheme for the Coleoptera: Curculionoidea. I, in turn, have been approached by the local records centre asking if I had weevil records that may not have made it onto NBN, and could I make a special effort to find some on this walk. Well, despite much beating and tonking, I didn't actually find that many - but several appear to be 'good' records insofar as there aren't many dots on the maps for them yet.
As if all that wasn't enough, I tapped a moth from Rowan onto the beating tray and boldly proclaimed it as the Honeysuckle MothYpsolopha dentella. To be fair, there was honeysuckle right next to us, low stuff scrambling through the woodland floor.
Ypsolopha dentella - courtesy of Stephen Bungard (coz my pics were absolute rubbish!)
Guess what - it's completely new to Skye too!
Leaving the woods, we entered an open, grassy area where we quickly racked up sightings of various butterflies, moths, dragonflies and hoverflies. We then headed to Ant Hill, site of last year's ant sighting. I know, exciting or what? Well actually it kinda was, in a way. Stephen had collected a single ant from an outcropping of rock when we were here last year. He'd then sent it off to Murdo at HBRG who said it could have been one of two species, ideally he'd need to see several more to confirm which. So we set about trying to find 'several'. I spotted one and that was it for quite a while. Eventually a second was seen. Clearly this could take some time... Thankfully, Neil then found the nest and we filled our boots (well, tubes). I took two which I determined as Formica lemani. Dorothy had several and also thought lemani. Steve had a couple but wasn't sure. Stephen had a barrelful and passed them on to Murdo who then confirmed them as Formica lemani. Phew, job done and we even agreed on the species too!
Pots, tubes and barrels being filled with Formica lemani
We had a look at the map that Dorothy had provided. Stephen, first and foremost here with his plant recording hat on, was keen to explore the ravine. Having been on quite a few of his botany walks now, I understand the attraction. Grassland, woodland and moorland are all fine and well. But if you want to inject a bit of species variety you need gorges, ravines and other dangerous habitats. Dank, gloomy, wet ledges are guaranteed to hold plant species you won't find in sensible places. And everyone loves a ravine anyway, we had to go check it out.
Awful pic, but hell yeah - that's definitely a ravine alright!
I know it appears that the image is tilted, but it isn't. The whole fissure is lopsided, one side is steep and the other one completely impossible without ropes and anchor bolts, which we didn't have. However, we leapt and slipped and stumbled from rock to rock, clung like spiders to the cliff faces where we ran out of rocks and slowly but surely made our way up the river.
On one logjam we found the largest, wettest looking Beefsteak Fungus I have ever seen. Just look at the birch leaf for scale!
A grisly looking hunk of Beefsteak Fungus if ever there was
I was doing pretty well in my not-very-waterproof-after-all hiking boots, but eventually a partly submerged rock tilted and I went in up to my shin. Dammit, that's one squelch that isn't going to dry out anytime soon (four days, as it happened). Pretty soon my other foot was wet too. I noted the others slowly working their way upstream in wellies. Fool boy!
Then I caught my beating tray in a wedge between a vertically fallen tree trunk and the cliff face. I turned the tray and tried again. Nope, still caught. I twisted some more, still caught! What I should have done is backed all the way out, collapsed the tray and carried onwards. Instead, I twisted some more, felt the net pull free and surged forwards. And snapped my tray. Doh! Neil was just looking at me with a look of incredulity on his face, shaking his head and laughing at my stupidity. I think the clever use of some steel rods should soon fix it, I'll have to get back to you on that one.
Eventually we could progress no further on foot. Neil (aka Spiderman) seemed reluctant to accept defeat, but eventually agreed we really could go no further, at least not dressed and equipped as we were.
"Aye, the water is a wee bitty deep, if only I had ma thingme..."
The alternative was to backtrack and zigzag our way up the left side of the ravine. Which we did, making the best of what appeared, potentially, to have been a hedgehog trail. Halfway up Dorothy spotted a dead fly, initially this sounds less than enthralling, but there's more to it than just that!
Note the outspread wings and legs
The fly is Calliphora vicina (pale basicosta, orange anterior spiracle, black hairs on the genae) and it has been controlled and then killed by a fungus known as Entomophthora calliphorae. Because yes, there are fungi out there that infect the brain of various flies, controls their actions and then kills them! And no, I'm not making this up. Nature is, at times, both gruesome and breathtakingly complex. If only nature could come up with a similar fungus that infects MPs and presidents...
Anyway, we made it to the top and found ourselves on the wrong side of Dorothy's deer fence. But the road was just ahead, we had almost completed our loop back to the cars. With the fenceline on our left and maybe ten feet of overgrown verge between us and the edge of the ravine, progress was good. Then the edge came closer and closer, soon we were on a trail no more than a metre wide with the drop getting ever closer. Dorothy had mentioned the fenceline met the edge and that we may need to cling to the wires with our hands whilst we crossed the narrowest part. Well guess what - the fence met the lip of the ravine, actually overhung it, for maybe five feet. Luckily Neil, Stephen and myself are all six footers, but Dorothy is far less tall. Gripping the fenceline in a deathlike grip, I inched to the gap in our trail and stretched across the void until my foot hit the other side. Then, very carefully, shifted my weight onto my arms and clambered the rest of the way across, ignoring the plunge beneath my feet. Spiderman was fine, obviously. Stephen is used to falling off of mountains, nerves of steel that man, so he was fine too. Dorothy, bless her plucky soul, just clawed her way across the fenceline until she was back on terra firma (remember - the firma the ground, the less the terra). I'm well into my forties, slowly closing in on a significant number in fact, but I'm by far the youngster in this group. Hardcore doesn't come close to describing these nutters! I hope I'm still clambering fences and ravines and trees in twenty years time.
Back at the cars, we gave our thanks to Dorothy for hosting us yet again before heading off on our separate ways. Neil and I decided to drop in to Waterloo for rock-pooling shenanigans. I mentioned the all 'round general gung-ho-ness of the folks that attend the Skye Nature Group walks and he laughed. "You mean Gung-ho-itty!" Now I don't know if that's a genuine word, but I do know that there's no way the namby-pamby softy southerner's nature groups I used to tag along on would ever get up to the type of shenanigans we do up here on Skye! All I know is that these walks are simply brilliant, I love 'em!
If there's one aspect of biological surveying that I actively enjoy, it's getting in a car and square-bashing on a grand scale. Today's assault of the squares was devoted to the genus Crocosmia and was entirely inspired by Stephen Bungard's latest blogpost.
Montbretia (Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora) is a widespread plant up here, well-naturalised across many suitable areas. At this time of year great clumps of the stuff can be seen gleaming pale orange in roadside verges and near habitation, where it has usually managed to escape from a garden or two. A couple of years back, a visiting BSBI county recorder informed me that not all Montbretia up here is the hybrid, some of it is one of the parent plants, Potts' Montbretia (Crocosmia pottsii). He had one of the latter in his grasp and explained the differences. Obviously something stuck because to this day I keep an eye out for Potts' amongst the hybrid. Clearly, it is by far the less common of the two (hybrid swarms do kinda tend to...well, swarm) but there are a couple of clumps of Potts' Montbretia close to where I live, so I can keep my eye tuned in to the differences.
Anyhow, today I decided to square-bash the entire north end of Skye in an attempt to discover which monads hold what montbretias. I took the coast road clockwise around the entire Trotternish peninsular but decided to forgo the Quiraing road; firstly because it's pretty inhospitable moorland and unlikely to be populated by any Montbretia, and secondly because I just couldn't stomach enduring the campervan mayhem that is The Quiraing in August.
This is the BSBI map for Montbretia (Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora) on The Trotternish (data as of yesterday)
Dark red squares are recent (2010 onwards) records
As you can see, it's a fairly common plant up here. The interior of the Trotternish is mostly high moorland or mountains, with no roads going east to west (apart from the Quiraing road) hence inhospitable to Crocosmia in general.
And here's the dots where I found Montbretia today. Some are duplications of those already recorded on the BSBI map, but others are new (or at least I hope they are). I deliberately ignored all Montbretia that were growing in gardens or immediately adjacent to gardens, only naturalised plants were counted. Admittedly, some of these may have been planted at some stage in the past, or more likely chucked out as garden waste but, by and large, Montbretia is a well-established plant across much of Skye and is probably only going to become more common in the future.
Dots are all at monad level (1km square)
I also found a few clumps of Potts' Montbretia (Crocosmia pottsii) in the general vicinity of habitation, often close to gardens. However, bucking that trend are the roadside verges at Staffin which are full of properly naturalised plants spreading along maybe a two mile stretch of the A855. Clearly it isn't anywhere near as widespread as Montbretia (yet!) but it is holding its own decidedly well in the grassy verges at Staffin.
Here is yesterday's BSBI map for Potts' Montbretia in The Trotternish
The two upper squares are my records
And here's the map of today's sightings of Potts' Montbretia
Dots are all at monad level (1km square)
To my mind, there's a bit of urgency regards getting this genus mapped. Whilst flowering they are relatively simple to tell apart from one another (and to spot from a moving car!) But in another month or so these plants will lose their flowers and return into obscurity, yet more greenery in a sea of green. So we really at the last chance saloon for recording Crocosmia on Skye if we want to get it into the forthcoming Atlas 2020. Should there be a future national plant atlas, and I hope there will be, it probably won't be until about 2050. By then I suspect drones and DNA sniffers will be doing almost all of the fieldwork, plus I'll be an old fart, if not dead already, by then. Hence I need to make the most of this Atlas 2020 square-bashing project while I can. Pity I've come to it so late. Anyway, that's several more dots on the map for pottsii.
There is just one other Crocosmia that has been recorded from Skye, one I've only ever seen growing planted in gardens. This is Aunt-Eliza (Crocosmia paniculata), which is the second parent of Montbretia (Potts' Montbretia being the other parent plant). Today, I spotted a few gardens that had Aunt-Eliza growing as feature plants either in large pots or in flowerbeds, maybe a dozen gardens in all. But then, as I was driving along the minor road through Achachork, I did a double-take, hit the brakes and backed up a bit. Fuckaduck - a great big healthy patch of Aunt-Eliza growing maybe fifteen feet back into an overgrown verge! Hell yeah, that's a lifer for me and a damn decent find too!
Ok, it's a crap image. But you get the general idea!
I thwacked my way closer to the plants and took a few more pics, before ripping up one whole plant to take back and key through properly. Despite looking as though this is the middle of nowhere, there are several big houses with well maintained gardens just the other side of this narrow road. Within another few hundred feet I'd spotted Montbretia and Potts' Montbretia in the verge and in gardens, plus several clumps of Aunt-Eliza a few hundred metres further up the road (in a garden). Almost certainly, this verge clump would have been dumped as garden waste at some point in the past, although I couldn't immediately see any other obvious garden plants in the ditch. However, it seems unlikely that somebody would have deliberately planted it outside of a garden, and in such an extensive stand, without introducing other species and then tending to them afterwards. It appears to be spreading by itself, vegetatively I presume.
Huge, wide, heavily ribbed and pleated leaf blades
You can see which parent plant Montbretia gets it's zigzagging flowering stem from!
Oh! Note the stamens slightly protruding from the corolla mouth. That's not right...
I now find myself in a bit of a quandary. The material I took home with me appears to differ slightly from the material in the last two images. Right at this very moment, I feel I may need to change my initial identification. Purely from looking at these two images, despite checking what I physically have on my desk in front of me. How so, I hear you ask? Well...
I used Stace 4 and Poland to key through my specimen. Poland doesn't go by flower characters, Stace does. Between them I thought I had this nailed as Aunt-Eliza. Here's a pic of the plant I brought back
Using Stace 4 (features of the flower)
Perianth-lobes c 1/2 as long as tube or less, erecto-patent; stamens shorter than perianth > paniculata
Perianth-lobes c. as long as tube, widely spreading; stamens slightly exceeding perianth > masoniorum
Clearly, going by the flower in the above image, the perianth is a lot shorter than the tube, it's laying over on its side and there's no sign of any projecting stamens > paniculata (Aunt-Eliza)
BUT...
looking at the images I took in the field, some of the lobes look to be quite long in comparison with the tube, and some of the perianths are spreading. And I can definitely see stamens poking from the end of the perianth too. But not all. So it somewhat fits Aunt-Eliza, but not perfectly.
Well guess what, there are other options. There's a thing called Giant Montbretia (Crocosmia masoniorum) which I had never heard of before this evening. Intriguingly, it has been recorded from several parts of the adjacent mainland. So is that what I have? Well, Stace's key would suggest so. But Poland has this to say regards the actual leaf blades themselves - tough > paniculata. Tender > masoniorum. Well, I have to say it's a comparative thing, and I have nothing to compare it with, making it a somewhat tricky thing to decide for sure. But after quite a bit of pulling, twisting and yanking, the leaf blade stayed intact, so I'll have to go with 'tough' over 'tender'. Which puts me back at an Aunt-Eliza that isn't quite right.
Luckily (perhaps), the final option is one put forward by Stace himself. "C.paniculata x pottsii is probably the identity of most plants of so-called C.paniculata grown in gardens, and therefore of those naturalised". Which was the exact point that Stephen Bungard queried with me several hours ago. He's good that fella.
So it seems that I may have been a bit rash in claiming Aunt-Eliza, it may be a hybrid Aunt-Eliza. An Aunt-Potts' in fact. Well whatever it is, it will still be there tomorrow. And the next day. But I do need to get back to it before it stops flowering. Stephen will want a definitive answer one way or the other. As do I.
Best not get me started on the agrimony I spotted whilst square-bashing, it seems a bit kind of inbetweeny too. Must be something in the water up here.
Lowest spines spreading horizontally or ascending (ie not reflexed) > Agrimonia eupatoria
Some of the petals are definitely notched > Agrimonia procera
During an idle moment late last night, I found myself wondering just how many insect species I've ever seen. Insects in the true sense of the word, if I were to expand it to include other 'creepy crawlies' such as spiders, millipedes, woodlice etc I'd have to categorise them as arthropods. Insects are just one subphyla in the huge entity that is Arthropoda. I'm on fairly safe ground so far, I understand what an insect is. I know what an arthropod is too.
But then I got to wondering about whether or not I could include algae in with the plants. Surely freshwater algae, of which I see plenty up here, count as primitive plants. Don't they? Yeah, must do. But what about seaweeds? I know that marine algae, as they are properly called, are divided into red, green and brown categories. And I know that one of them is very different to the other two, only very distantly related, in fact. I thought probably the browns. Or perhaps the reds. Anyway, could I include any of them in with my plant tally?
Eventually I clambered out of bed to check whether any algae, freshwater or otherwise, were classed as plants. They aren't. Cool, so what are they classed as then? Well...an hour or so later, and with about 50 tabs open on the laptop, I came to the conclusion that I should have just stayed in bed. 2am is for sleeping, not sitting in the dark, failing to comprehend what I'm reading on a small screen whilst being eaten by midges.
Anyway, this evening I cranked open the laptop and tried again. There are a surprisingly large number of versions describing how life is categorised on this planet. Essentially, nobody knows, that's the simple reason. Going back to the arthropods as an example, see if you can wrap your head around the following short paragraph (and this is only from Wikipedia, it gets a whole lot more complex the deeper you dig!)
"The phylogeny of the major extant arthropod groups has been an area of considerable interest and dispute. Recent studies strongly suggest that Crustacea, as traditionally defined, is paraphyletic, with Hexapoda having evolved from within it, so that Crustacea and Hexapoda form a clade, Pancrustacae. The position of Myriapoda, Chelicerata and Pancrustacea remains unclear as of April 2012. In some studies, Myriapoda is grouped with Chelicerata (forming Myriochelata); in other studies, Myriapoda is grouped with Pancrustacea (forming Mandibulata), or Myriapoda may be sister to Chelicerata plus Pancrustacea."
Hope we're all crystal clear on that, at least? By the way, I'm loving that word Pancrustacea. I haven't quite figured how to casually drop it into everyday conversation yet, but I will. Somehow.
And so, after much head scratching and jiggling around with various unrelated phyla, I have come up with the following breakdown for my British PSL
Protista (all algae, slime moulds and protists) - 111 species.
Fungi (encompassing both true fungi and lichens) - 562 species.
Plants (bryophytes and vascular plants combined) - 1486 species.
Molluscs (your typical slugs and snails plus squid, bivalves, chitons etc) - 138 species.
Now for the ever-so-slightly iffy bits...
"Selected Seashore Stuff" (ie randomers that don't really work elsewhere). I've thrown all sorts into here, including the tunicates which really should be elsewhere, plus the catch all that is "Worms". Ho hum.
Well that was fun, and it all correctly tallies up to 5624 species. So just another 376 to go in order to attain another nice round number. I'm probably not gonna manage that this year, not at this rate anyway (248 so far this year). Should make it sometime during 2020 though.
So what, if anything, has this wee exercise accomplished? Nothing really, nothing at all. Thanks for reading.
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Well actually, it does provide me with some extra impetus to hit a few nicely rounded numbers. 299 species of arthropods (excluding insects) is an exceptionally niggling number, just one more will put me at a far happier number. And those 1486 plants? 1500 must be easily attainable, so there's another target number to aim for.
Now then, what about those 576 vertebrates. Hmmm, yes I do like that one. I need 24 more to hit a pleasing 600 species, but finding new vertebrates doesn't come so easily nowadays. In fact, since January 2016 I've added 13 fish, 1 bird and 2 mammals to my PSL vertebrate tally - that's just 16 in the last three and a half years! I can stake out the odd bat roost (Greater Horseshoe is an 'easy' one) and I could always twitch the Loch Lomond wallabies or the reintroduced beavers. To be utterly honest though, neither of the latter two species appeal in the slightest. Harvest Mouse, Yellow-necked Mouse, Hazel Dormouse, rare birds and fish - now they appeal! Oh, and there's a fistful of amphibians that are all perfectly gettable too: Natterjack Toad, Pool and Perez' Water Frogs, Alpine Newt and Midwife Toad all beckon. Just a case of my being several hundred miles too far north for all of them. Well, I can add fish from here, but not the rest.
Pancrustacea just doesn't come much better than this! And yes, that's my hand in the pic :)
I'll end this silly post with a suitably silly song. It'll all be back to normal again soon....
