No, nothing too untoward. I'm just trying out the new Blogger again. I had intended to stick with the old style Blogger, but it seems it will be entirely phased out in about a month's time. Already I can see improvements to new Blogger since I last tried it (at least I can easily find the 'New Post' option now...) Justifying the text is easier too. So far so good. Now, what about adding and positioning images, which seems problematical to many
Well that looks fine, but how do I add a caption? Arse, one for later.
Aha, found out how to add a caption! How to resize though...
Ok folks, so how do I italicise and resize the caption??? Bugger, here have another fly whilst I calm down (above fly is Sciapus platypterus, btw).
Leucozona glaucia - female AND italicised
Glad I sussed that, I was getting a tad arsey!
Female Morellia simplex - boldand in a suitably small font. Cool, I'm a bit happier now
Well, everything seems fine enough. I can't say I like the new layout of the toolbar, why is it just dull grey and so damn big? Maybe I can do something about that in the settings. Hope so...
Oooh I like the Preview button! It's enabled me to see that this blog looks fine on a desktop, but is too wide for a tablet and mobile phone, even with the screen rotated.
Folks, if you're reading this blog via a tablet or phone, can you let me know if it needs jigging. I may need to tweak things if it's currently knackered. Comments below, please.
Skye Birdsis the local website dedicated to reporting the birdlife on Skye and the adjacent area of mainland. Occasionally it also makes mention of non-bird sightings, which up here usually relate to cetaceans. I tend to check it most evenings, just to be sure I'm not missing out on something mega like Ivory Gull, American Redstart or Mute Swan. A few nights back I logged on and saw this -
25th Jul 2020 -
Orca
- the large bull Aquarius has been seen between Kilt Rock and Rona in the last few days
Naturally I was simultaneously excited and pissed off. Kilt Rock is a mere 25 mins over The Quiraing, slow-moving campervans and cautious tourists notwithstanding. But why had it taken the news so damned long to be made public? Orca is right up there on my Most Wanted list, the fact that this one had been identified to individual meant it must have been pretty bloody close to land. Grrrr...
The next day I was working, plus the weather was shocking, so I gave it a skip. At Kilt Rock lookout you are a long way above the waves, decent visibility is an absolute must. However, the following day was my day off and the weather was perfect for a concerted bout of sea-watching. I arrived at Kilt Rock, utterly deserted apart from maybe a million tourists, plonked myself in the centre of the only bench (ha!) and began scanning the sea between me and Rona. Flat calm, I could even see auks and shags sat on the sea a good mile out. Excellent, this shouldn't take too long.
I could see Gannets plunging about a mile and a half out, and I soon spotted dolphins leaping about beneath them. I suspect Bottle-nosed Dolphins as they were quite acrobatic and numbered just a few individuals. Common Dolphins up here usually travel about in decent sized pods and although they often clear the water as they swim, they aren't usually very acrobatic. Two close in Harbour Porpoise and a moderately close Minke Whale were also noted, along with some 200-250 Manxies rafting and wheeling way out across the sound. But no sign of Aquarius, or of any other Orca. Dammit. Eventually the midges and the tourists drove me nuts and I departed for anywhere else.
'Anywhere else' ended up being a muddy edge of the top road, somewhere between Duntulm and Kilmaluag. Right next to this charming wee holiday cottage, in fact
Corrugated tin has a certain je ne sais quoi, wouldn't you agree?
Comes with all mod cons (it has a drawbridge. And there's a road...)
But never mind the beautiful cottage, just look at the kerbside vegetation!
Oh yeah, now we're talking...
Welcome to Juncusville - NVC community: S1 (Scary Grade 1)
A couple of years back, I tagged along on a Wild Flower Society get-together here on Skye. I'm not a WFS member, but I gate-crashed anyway seeing as I knew one of the chaps attending and afterwards I took them to Uig Wood to see the Mitella ovalis that I'd recently discovered as new to Britain. Anyway, the day prior to me joining them, the leader Ian Green (BSBI Recorder for Moray) found Frog Rush on the edge of a road. Frog Rush is almost identical to the annoyingly ubiquitous Toad Rush (pictured above) which is at home along any wet/muddy/gritty road edge across probably the entire Trotternish Peninsular. Frog Rush, along with Orca, is right up there on my Most Wanted list. Well ok, maybe not quite as high up as Orca, but it's up there anyway. Mostly because I've examined countless Toad Rush plants in search of it and have always failed dismally.
The key macro feature that differentiates the scarce Frog Rush from the common Toad Rush concerns the length and shape of the inner tepals. It's a small feature on a small plant, but suddenly I found myself looking at inner tepals that fitted Frog and not Toad Rush. Holy shit! I checked again. Holy shit!! FROG RUSH!!!! A modest punching-of-the-air moment ensued, before rushing back to the car in order to check it properly. Yup, I'm happy with that. Marvellous, as Pete would say.
This was the image I so very proudly popped onto the Skye Naturalists' FB page
Pretty definitive, no? Well apparently not, because Stephen Bungard (BSBI Recorder for Skye) came back with
Not 100% happy with that Seth. Would like fruits as well to confirm in due course. Fussy, moi?
Whaaaaaat??? There was no way I was about to relinquish my brilliant find just because some fella or another said it wasn't good enough (by 'some fella or another' I mean a truly brilliant field botanist...) Shit, had I ballsed this up? That would be a nice double whammy of a crap day. No orca, no Frog Rush. Bugger.
But then I stopped doubting myself and took the plant to the microscope for some proper grilling. And then added a proper barrage of images to that particular FB thread.
This isn't one of the images I added, I quickly drew this for somebody else but it serves a purpose so I'll use it here too. The outer tepals are long and pointy and arrowed in red. The inner tepals are short and rounded and the one in view is arrowed in yellow. The blue line shows the top of the seed capsule. It's a bit rough 'n ready, but you get the general idea.
I bombarded Stephen with the following pics
Nice, clear view of the rounded inner tepal showing the mucronate tip
Note the truncated top to the long, green seed capsule (not acute or sub-acute)
Note also that the inner tepals do not over-top the seed capsule. This is an important feature, the inner tepals of Toad Rush are longer than (rarely the same height as) the seed capsule, whereas in Frog Rush they are shorter than (rarely as long as) the seed capsule.
Plus the seed capsule itself is rather shorter in Toad Rush and exhibits an acute or sub-acute (rarely truncated) profile to the tip. In Frog Rush the capsule is truncated (rarely sub-acute, never acute) and noticeably elongated in general shape. However, due to these individual variations, there may rarely be an overlap in tepal/seed capsule ratios, so next we need to examine the micro-sculpturing of a seed. Yep, I shit you not. Each seed is barely visible to the naked eye so I needed full zoom on my microscope, followed by full zoom on my camera (itself held up to the microscope eyepiece) and then I needed to zoom and crop the resulting image...but I think I got there in the end! Would be much easier if I owned a scanning electron microscope.
The ripest capsule, delicately flattened by a fingernail to expose the seeds inside
And the final image with the clarity bumped all the way up to highlight any surface micro-sculpturing
I reckon there's a faint network of depressions across the surface of each seed. Toad Rush exhibits a coarse network of ridges across the entire surface whereas Frog Rush has a far finer mesh of dimples and no coarse ridges. The seed shape also seems marginally better for Frog than Toad Rush, but seeing as they aren't fully formed all of those points may be rendered moot.
And after all of that, Stephen has accepted it as Frog Rush. Phew! Frog Rush is the 1334th vascular plant species on my PSL. Covid has put my plans of hitting 1350 species into jeopardy for this year. It's still eminently do-able, I just need to get into new habbo before the season is over. I need altitude on Skye and various places need to be visited on the mainland. I also need to try again for Orca, not sure where yet but somewhere!
In other good news, I found a juvenile Whinchat at Idrigill this morning. Whinchat, rather surprisingly, is a new Skye bird for me. I added it to my BUBO Skye Bird List, naturally!
Regular readers of this blog (yep, all three of you...) will by now know that I have dedicated this year towards improving my beetle and fly recognition skills. I am in loose cahoots with beetle-bothering guru Mark Telfer, dipteran demigod Tim Hodge and all 'round loser nice fella Gilbert's Ghost. Between us, we have been seeing and identifying a fair few of the dipteran species and families on offer. I'm just happy not to be at the back of the pack at this midway stage in the year. Surprised, but happy.
Living this far north, I have had to reconcile myself to the fact that there are several beetle and fly families of a more southernly disposition that just do not occur up here, whilst other families that do extend this far north may only have a handful of species available for grabs. Today I encountered just one such example.
Scanning through my 'missing' British dipteran families, I quickly realised that I was in severe danger of entirely missing seeing a beefly or a robberfly this year. A ridiculous, possibly even unthinkable, situation were I still living in the south of England. But up here..?
Today I found myself in a ruined churchyard near Dunvegan, the site of a great many MacLeod burials. Thanks to Covid-19, the whole area has remained unmown/strimmed this year, resulting in a lovely grass-dominated meadowscape full of flies and bugs (and ticks...) All of a sudden, I found myself eye-balling a smallish robberfly sat on a headstone. Robberfly! That was on my shortlist of absentees, I needed this beast in a tube. I quickly looked around, there were no living, grave-visiting MacLeod's in sight. I unlimbered my net, swung...and missed! Damnit! Headstones, it transpires, are not ideal objects with which to swing a net into/across. Who knew...
Muttering at my inept use of the net, I wandered back and forth before spying a second robberfly sat on a low metal railing. Another eminently awkward-to-swipe-a-net-over object which would doubtless result in another miss. Happily, it relocated into long grasses and the net performed its job admirably.
At this stage I had no idea what I was looking at, other than it being some sort of a small robberfly. But check out those hind tarsal segments - you ever seen anything like that before? I certainly hadn't. A quick flick through my copy of British Soldierflies and their Allies offered up Leptarthrus as a likely candidate and indeed this is what it keyed through to.
There are only two British species in this genus. One has entirely black tarsi and the other exhibits largely orange tarsi. Unusually, there is a strong sexual dimorphism to be found in one of these species, whereby the males have a quite ridiculously thin and elongated hind metatarsus
Looks good for "a quite ridiculously thin and elongated hind metatarsus" to me!
This is a male Leptarthrus brevirostris, the only species of robberfly currently known to occur on Skye. Down south it is mostly associated with calcareous grasslands, whereas up here it is more of a woodland edge/long grass species. It would probably be very useful to DNA the populations, just in case there is more than one species involved here.
I would definitely disqualify this fly from competing in any track events - I mean just look at the Oscar Pistorius blades it's packing! Probably best to keep it away from closed bathroom doors too....
So why am I now officially 10% professional? Well because Leptarthrus brevirostris is the 318th species of fly on my British PSL. Dave Gibbs is the Top Ranked dipterist on the site with a massive 3184 species of fly to his name. Hence I'm an entire tenth of my way there. Sheesh, it could take a wee while to catch him up!
