The Tale of the Broken Finger

 Day 4 (Tue 13th October)

I awoke to find that, by way of a change, I wasn't massively hungry. Then I noticed the destroyed pillow. Ah, right. So that would explain the dry throat and fluff stuck between my teeth...

Naturally, I was once again the last to rise. The Ghost was grumbling on about how folks nowadays are all useless twats, apart from the f*cking morons obviously, and that's why this generation's birders are all a bunch of clueless muppets etc etc. Hurray! He was back to normal again! The headache had at last passed and we had our dearest grumbling friend back! I could have kissed him, except I'd never have heard the end of it. I was so happy, in fact, that I made us all my (in)famous scrambled egg mish mash on toast. The Ghost took one look and declined, but Tiny and I packed away a fair lump of the stuff, swilled down with coffee so strong I actually had to chew it. Bloody marvellous.  

It looked to be a fine day outside, so we planned to catch the 10:15am boat to St Martins and look for its endemic ant plus a few plants. The Ghost had some specimens to pin and for once we didn't have to worry about finding food, hence we had a bit of time to kill. What to do? I took Tiny on a whistle-stop tour around The Garrison, finding Chasmanthe ("Chas, man?" "Yeah man, Chas!") Wild Leek, Tall Tutsan and a few other bits and bobs including a calling Yellow-browed Warbler at Morning Point. By the time we returned to our accommodation, The Ghost was ready to rumble and we struck off towards the quay for our boat to St Martins.

I've never really fallen in love with St Martins, despite enjoying some decent birds out there. I suspect this goes back to the time I twitched an Arctic Warbler on the early morning jet boat, possibly the wettest thing I've ever done in my entire life. The chap holding log call the previous evening said he'd "rather walk across than take the jet boat as it will be drier". Holy shit but he wasn't kiddin! We arrived, absolutely saturated, and stared at some trees. Meanwhile, back on Marys, the ID was retracted, pics showed it to be a "funny Chiff" instead. Which we still dipped. After shivering for an eternity, the scheduled morning boat arrived to save us and I promptly returned to my cold tent on The Garrison to change into dry clothes before hypothermia set in. Somehow, I managed to leave the wet clothes on top of my sleeping bag, so that night was almost as much fun too...The finder of the 'funny Chiff' is a well-respected birder, and has found some very decent stuff over the years. I'll probably forgive him one of these days. Probably.

But today we were taking a nice, slow, comfortable and leisurely tripper boat across. No risk of drowning, no risk of hypothermia, no risk of wanting to set fire to my own clothes without taking them off first just to stay warm. Not this day. We landed by the cricket pitch end and headed east through the dunes. Tiny had brought his suction sampler and put it to good work in the marrams, finding several Lesser Cockroaches and a good number of very small spiders, mostly "Linys" which, despite being very small, are surprisingly easy to get to grips with even in the field. Well, they are when Tiny's there telling you what to look at. I have various annotations in my notebook against the names, for example Hahnia nava has 'four mudflaps for spinnerets' and Parapelecopsis nemoraloides will forever be known to me as 'the bobble-headed liny'. Poor pics of the latter below. Bear in mind the whole thing is only a couple of millimetres long, and it was stuck in a dirty glass tube too

Parapelecopsis nemoraloides to the experts. 'Bobble-headed Liny' for the rest of us

Other spiders (the ones I studied well enough to tick, at least) include this lot. There were an awful lot of names thrown at The Ghost and myself, most of which made little sense at the time and make even less sense now. I didn't tick any of those. These are all 'macro-spiders' as opposed to linys (money spiders)

Episinus angulatus - weird body shape and obviously white-banded legs - very distinctive!

Tiny's most exciting spider find! This is an adult male Porrhoclubiona genevensis

This is a very range-restricted species and, although already known from the Scillies, is still a great find. You can read about it by clicking here.

My Ero! (coz I found this one) this is Ero furcata, I believe.

Scotina gracilipes - like a lovely velvety Pardosa, according to my notes 

There were loads more spiders, though I didn't catch the name of most of them. BUT...off the back of all this Linyphiidae shenanigans, I'm going to start tackling spiders more this winter. Many money spiders are winter active as adults (and with spiders you do generally need an adult to determine species as immatures don't exhibit the full complement of identification features) hence they are an ideal family to study at this time of year. Except I don't have literature for them.

What I really need is The Spiders of Britain & Ireland (the 2 volume compact edition), the best price for which appears to be £120 as available here. However, I think I've managed to sort things so that I have all I need for free. How? Well, Tiny has a trashed copy of Vol 2 (the linys) which he says I can have (it has no cover and is in many, many parts - but it's all there) and I already own a copy of The Spiders of Britan and Northern Europe by Roberts which deals with all of the non-linys. Between them I'm sorted! There's a print shop here on Skye, I'll see if they can rebind Tiny's Vol 2 when it arrives, maybe put a cover on it too. Sweet, 2021 may be more arachnid-orientated than I previously envisioned. There are roughly 670 species of spider known in Britain with around 400 of them occurring up here in Scotland. Plenty to keep me interested should I feel inclined to tackle them in earnest.

Edit: I went ahead and treated myself to The Spiders of Britain & Ireland...

But we weren't on Martins for cockroaches and spiders. Hell no, there was an ant to be found! Bob Dawson, as well as being pretty damn good on his birds, moths, stick insects, harvestmen and spiders, is also heavily into his ants. St Martins has an endemic ant, Formica rufibarbis aka the Red-barbed Ant or, more simply, St Martins Ant. Until recently, this was probably mainland Britain's rarest animal with the entire population reducing to single figure numbers of queens each winter. Sadly, the mainland colonies have now been lost, meaning that the only place to see this species in Britain is on the eastern side of St Martins. And that's it. Tiny was busily suction sampling any and all suitable looking south-facing stretches of maritime turf in the search for more spiders and quite possibly in with a chance of finding the ants. I decided that the nearest rock to my left looked as likely a spot as any to begin my own search for the ant. I lifted the small rock - shit a brick, there were  loads of Formica ants beneath!!! - and quickly lowered it again. "Err, chaps? I've found the ants!" I yelled. Clearly they thought I was kidding, I mean under the very first stone lifted? No chance. But kidding I wasn't. They hurried over, I raised the rock, and sure enough there was a nest of the St Martins Ant ready to be oohed and aahed over. We quickly took some pics before I gently lowered the rock back into place. Well, that was rather unexpected!

Formica rufibarbis - the St Martins Ant

We were in a lovely bit of coastal grassland with an incredible view across the Eastern Isles. Even I, stalwart St Martins-aphobe that I am, had to admit it was quite incredible. Tiny and I quickly decided it would make an ideal spot for a lunch break. Now, where was Ghostie...

The Ghost was quietly huddled by some big rocks. He didn't seem very happy, but then he never really does. "You alright mate?" asked Tiny. "Not really, no. I just dropped a rock on my finger. I think I've broken it" came the reply. I wondered how he could possibly have broken a rock with just his finger, before I realised what he meant. "Shit, for real?" I asked. The withering look he gave me told me he wasn't making it up. Holy crap, he was only just over three days of headache, and now he'd broken his finger. "Can you bend it? Does it hurt if you prod the tip? Can you put pressure on it? Has it gone numb? Can you feel any bone sticking through?" I asked. "I can still do this with it" he proclaimed, holding it aloft and aiming it in my direction. It had to be his middle finger, didn't it. Just had to be... Feeling a bit kind of helpless, Tiny and I quietly ate lunch and hoped The Ghost didn't expect us to carry his bag for him. Or need to be airlifted to a hospital, obviously that too. His bag did look heavy though. 

Lunch duly finished, and with the pressure off (apart from in The Ghost's fingertip...), we continued up to the heathy areas below the Daymark, suction sampling all the way and finding a selection of small beetles, spiders and a few groundbugs too. Our main plant target was Lesser New Zealand Flax, which has gone absolutely berserk down in the Great Bay area. The Wildlife Trust have given up trying to control it now; every time they removed a section, seedlings immediately establish in the cleared areas. I suspect napalm is the only sensible way forward now. So we wandered the track, idly chatting about broken bones and stuff, when I suddenly realised we were bypassing Great Bay itself! Happily (or not...) there were a couple of Lesser New Zealand Flax to be found growing amongst the nearby gorse. Tiny needed this for a lifer, but soon decided he didn't need it so badly that he was going to push through 200ft of deep gorse and back to see it properly. Such a wuss...

All that was left to do was to pop into the stores for ice creams and then head back to the boat. Far smaller and yet far more efficient than either the co-op or Tresco Stores, St Martins Stores gets my winning vote hands down. Every once in a while I caught The Ghost checking his finger. Poor fella was certainly going through it this week.

Back on St Marys, Tiny was keen to see more of the island. We had a quick look along the top of the beaches for Scilly Shrew but couldn't find any. Plenty of time yet, I was certain we'd see them soon. I decided we should head down the track that leads to The Dump and then on to Dump Clump, as I call the small woodland nearby. There are plenty of weird and wonderful plants to be found on the huge earthen bank that surrounds The Dump and the woods could hold migrant birds. But first we watched Tiny shove his suction sampler into a huge tussock (oo-er missus!), which he then emptied into his tray. A very small moth flew out, evaded Tiny's attempt to knock it back into the tray, and landed on his collar. I found myself looking at a very distinctively marked micro-moth, one I instantly recognised from the images we'd been looking at just a couple of nights back. "Grab it!!!" screamed The Ghost. "Don't move" I told Tiny, as I expertly potted it from his coat. And then rather inexpertly took it's picture

Oinophila v-flava aka the Yellow-V Moth

This tiny moth occurs as an occasional and accidental import to Britain where it ordinarily occurs indoors, reputedly in cellars and warehouses and suchlike. Apart from here on the Scillies, where it occurs both indoors (Bob gets them in his porch) and outdoors too. The Ghost had this as possibly his number one target for the entire trip (or maybe Blue Shark) and the MVL at our accommodation had thus far failed to attract any (moths, that is, not sharks). Hence his rather frantic "Grab it!!!" scream was quite understandable. Well, grab it I did, team effort and top result! It was far smaller than I was expecting, more like a Phyllonorycter size than the Endrosis sarcitrella size I was expecting it to be. After we'd passed it around between ourselves, The Ghost asked the obvious question, "So why isn't it called the Yellow-W Moth?" Fair comment, well made. 

Moth sorted, we continued towards The Dump, home to acre upon acre of Nasturtium and some really rather odd shrubs too. The bad news was that none were very close. The good news was I already knew what they were.

Digi-binned shot of a large purplish flower!

The lower pic is taken from outside the perimeter fence, looking up at the top of the earthen mound maybe 50 feet away. Amongst the veritable sea of Nasturtium leaves is a bush with elongated greenish ripening to orange berries. Not easy to see, I admit. But anyway, both images are of Kangaroo-apple Solanum laciniatum, which was a lifer for both The Ghost and Tiny(Lister). A very short distance away we found more odd plants including lots of Pale Gallingale Cyperus eragrostis and some larger, darker headed Cyperus which botanist extraordinaire John Martin tracked down as being Giant Umbrella-sedge Cyperus ustulatus, the latter being a lifer for all of us. Other throw out plants here included Bear's Breech, Russian Ivy, Giant Viper's Bugloss, a whole host of Osteospermums and the largest Toothed Medick plants any of us have ever seen. I suspect they must be a giant form used as a nitrogen-fixing crop or for fodder, they are far too robust to be naturally occurring plants.  

Gigantic form of Toothed Medick Medicago polymorpha ssp blimey!

The woods were quiet, so we broke through at Nowhere and eventually found ourselves heading towards the lighthouse at the end of 'Panini Head', as Tiny initially thought it was called. The rare and surprisingly spectacular lichen Teloschistes flavicans, aka the Golden Hair Lichen, grows on several of the huge granite outcroppings on Peninnis Head and Tiny(Lister) obviously needed it. Luckily, I know the very rock that holds loads of it, quite a spectacular rock it is too. Here's Tiny papping the lichen, with The Ghost in the foreground for scale

Hey, Ghost! So does your finger still hurt? (heh heh heh...)

Back indoors that evening we figured that it was high time we caught the boat across to St Agnes in search of the near-mythical Least Adder's-tongue. We all three of us needed the plant, and St Agnes is the only place in Britain you can find it. That's unless you include the Channel Islands as being part of Britain which, biogeographically and for the purposes of my PSL, I don't. I don't count Gibraltar either. Tomorrow we would do precisely that. With a bit of luck we could cross onto Gugh at low tide, thus we will have visited every inhabited island on the Scillies in one week, something I have never before achieved (or tried, to be fair). Tiny was up for that, The Ghost was up for it too. Happy days - all we needed were sharp eyes and a bit of luck. What could possibly go wrong?