Results: Orca 0-1 Frog

Skye Birds is 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!

I'm not a Toad

I'm not a Toad

I'm just a Frog

(Rush...)