So that's it, 2020 is officially done. And thank f*ck for that, I imagine a great many people will be saying. I reckon that I've gotten away very lightly with the whole covid thing, there are definitely worse places to be locked down than on the beautiful Trotternish Peninsular. A well-stocked shop and my beloved Uig Wood are both just a few minutes walk down the hill, my job remains fundamentally secure and I have buzzards, ravens and the occasional eagle overhead. Yep, there are definitely worse places to live and circumstances in which to find oneself. I'm very glad I no longer live in South London, covid or otherwise.
Skye has escaped the coronavirus largely unscathed - one very notable exception being a nursing home which decided to draft in extra staff from Glasgow, quickly resulting in several elderly residents dying from it. In hindsight, possibly not the greatest managerial decision ever taken. For myself, I know one guy in Sussex who died of/with covid in the early days of it arriving in Britain, though his sons are fighting it being registered as the cause of death on his certificate, seeing as he was already seriously unwell and about to die anyway. And I lost a good friend just a few months back, he committed suicide due to various changes of circumstance brought about due to the coronavirus. I miss both of these men, and it saddens me that I never said goodbye to either of them. But in the grand scheme of things, I know that 2020 could have been a lot worse for me than it actually was. I have the natural world to help keep me sane, a fact that has only become increasingly clear to me over the course of the last few months. I've written more on that elsewhere.
I'm resisting the urge to compose the traditional 'end of year round up' thing that all wildlife bloggers seem compelled to do. Frankly I'm too knackered and frazzled to bother, and far too keen to make a start on the 2021 craziness that I've been planning for weeks now. 2020 is behind us, probably a good thing too, and I'm looking ahead now.
That's right, dear reader. I have a new Challenge for 2021 and a new Blog to document the adventures and mishaps I encounter along the way. I shall of course be keeping this Skye's the Limit blog going too, it's been running for slightly over four years now and I've no plans to either ditch it or stop adding to it.
If you look at the tabs below the banner pic at the top of this page, you'll notice there's one that says 2021 Challenge. Click on that and you shall be magically transported to the new Blog. Who knows what you may find there...
Right, I'm gonna try and get my head down (don't ask!) for a couple of hours before it all kicks off. Have a great New Year everybody, fingers crossed this bastard covid does one sometime soon and we can start rebuilding a semblance of normality once more.
Random pic of a place I like. This is Loch Cill Chriosd, site of the immature Moorhen I successfully twitched a few weeks back. It's the first one to be reported on Skye since I moved here. Had to be done.
I woke up to the noise of banging at around 6am. It was Tiny, presumably packing his rucksack ready for the off. So much for his 5am stomp, I thought. After he'd drained the coffee maker (twice), he eventually quit the cottage by about 6:30am. Fairplay to him, I remember being excited at the prospect of seeing my first Richard's Pipit too. Mind you, I had one calling right over my tent here on The Garrison some years back, which saw me explode out of my sleeping bag pretty damn sharp! It was strutting around on the football pitch when I found it, very smart birds indeed and I hoped he'd see the Porth Hellick bird today.
I was essentially packed already, as was The Ghost, so we dropped our bags in the collection area and did a quick bit of cleaning up Tiny's spilled coffee and breakfast mess before waving adios to Cedar Cottage and heading out for our final morning on Scilly. We found a yellow and white flowered Greater Snapdragon in an alleyway gutter, not a lifer for either of us but nice to see all the same, before parting company just outside Hugh Town. We agreed to rendezvous at the Old Town Bay/Tolmans Point area late morning - eek, the brotherhood were now entirely split up for the first time since arriving, scary times!
I strode my way up Rocky Hill Lane, finding a Yellow-browed Warbler near the Kangaroo-fern patch, before continuing uphill towards the cottages near Four Lanes. Despite lots of checking, there was no sign of any Locust Flies on the AtlanticIvy blossom. In fact, thanks to the rather dull weather, there wasn't much sign of anything other than a handful of Ivy Bees and some Eristalis pertinax hoverflies. Pretty soon I reached my target search area and eased down to a slow walk. Did I dip? Did I heck...
This is the mighty Coriander sativum plant that The Ghost and Tiny had rampantly suppressed from me a couple of days earlier. Well I've had the last laugh lads, there were TWO plants growing in that weedy verge, not one, mwaah-ha-haa! That'll teach them to try and get one up on The Gibster! Feeling immensely happy with myself, I tootled back down Rocky Hill Lane and headed towards Old Town via Lower Moors. At Shooters Pool I found another Yellow-browed Warbler plus saw a Blackcap and several Red Admirals on Ivy blossom, but still no Locust Flies. My net-swiping antics had by now caught the attention of a bunch of birders, I quietly readied myself for a verbal onslaught but was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all quite interested in what I was after. "Flies? Oh right!" Were the flies here special, had I seen any good ones, how many species are there in Britain, was I an expert (ha!), how many had I seen, had I seen the odd fella with the leaf-blower machine, what was that all about, etc etc. All very birder-themed questions, I admit, but I was pleased to divulge the little I knew. One chap began telling me about the leggy flies with white wingtips on his garden pond, he put a picture up on Twitter and got a response. Now he knows what a Semaphore Fly is and has even started to look at dragonflies too. You see, there really is a pan-species lister inside everybody!
I eventually arrived at Old Town Bay and spotted Tiny and The Ghost quite a way out into the bay. I clambered my way across the slippery rocks and soon the brotherhood were united once more. Unfortunately the news was not great. "Really hard going, mate. It's either big boulders or nothing" said Tiny. Hmmm. "Did you get the pipit though?" I asked. The look I received said it all, apparently there had been no sign of it since yesterday evening. Oh dear, it had been a bit of a 'dippety doo dah, dippety day' kinda morning for Tiny...
My wellies were in my big rucksack, currently sat in a shipping container waiting to be loaded onto the boat, so I just loitered in the shallows whilst Tiny waded in deeper waters. The Ghost, also sans wellies, looked a bit nonplussed by it all, so we two headed to Tolmans Point and hand searched through some high up rockpools, leaving Tiny to his somewhat fruitless wading in the sea below. We all realised that we should have returned to Porth Mellon, but even had we left straight away the tide would be turning by the time we arrived, so we opted to stay here instead.
But it wasn't all bad news, we still found loads of stuff!
Shore Clingfish (or Cornish Sucker, if you prefer) in a tiny rockpool
The business end of a Green Shore Urchin
Lamellaria perspicua - a sea snail that looks like a sea slug
We also found a couple of large sea slugs beneath a rock. Tiny called them as Grey Sea Slug Aeolidia papillosa, which is a common and distinctive species that we'd all seen before. But these looked wrong to me, too bright maybe. Too white perhaps. Not at all the same as the ones I'm now used to seeing up on Skye, which are duller and greyer. I queried this, Tiny said they looked perfectly normal to him, nobody took any photos of them and that was that. Or so we thought. A bit of subsequent detective work on my part led to a very interesting discovery - Grey Sea Slug has recently (2016) been split into several species! There's a really interesting paper here which details the discovery of these 'new' species and guess what - the paler ones along the rocky shores of southern England are actually Aeolidia filomenae sp. nov, meaning we each of us needed to adjust our PSLs accordingly and, in my case, keep the 'original' species which occurs here on Skye, how very marvellous!
Less contentious was the ID of an elongated isopod I spotted clinging to the edge of a rock Tiny had just heaved onto it's side. Unfortunately my camera was acting up and the lens simply refused to focus properly. I managed three shots of the isopod and gave up. Thankfully iRecord's marine isopod verifier gleaned enough detail to confirm the ID. Somehow. Just try not to laugh too hard...
This is Astacilla danmoniensis (stop laughing, it IS!)
There aren't very many records for this creature on the NBN Atlas and the iRecord verifier has never seen one for himself, so a bit of a lucky spot all in all. There's a fat spine halfway along the creature's abdomen, clearly visible (ahem...) in the upper image, which nails the species. Other goodies included my first Pheasant ShellsTricolia pullus, the first Bootlace Worm I've seen in years and an assortment of bryozoans and scaleworms.
Sadly our time was running out, we simply had to start heading back to Hugh Town and our boat back to the mainland. We cut through the Dump Clump, hearing but not seeing another Yellow-browed Warbler and found something I was ridiculously happy to see
I only saw a single Small White in 2020 - and this is it
It's crazy what you miss living up in NW Scotland, it's just one of the reasons I so enjoy these madcap trips down south.
We boarded nice and early in order to secure a seat on the outside deck and before too long we were waving farewell to these magical isles. It's made me realise quite how much I miss it here, along with some of the folks that call Marys home, most notably Higgo, Spider, Ren and Bob. It has been four years since I quit living here, had circumstances been slightly different...
Our trip across to Penzance was largely uneventful, a couple of distant shearwaters could have been Sooties, a few sightings of Common Dolphins kept us on our toes, but we were well into the final hours of an utterly brilliant week, and every second brought that end closer. I had one last target once we'd berthed at Penzance, red hot gen from The Ghost regards a plant I should have secured years back yet had somehow eluded all of my attempts to find. We shook hands, clapped backs, maybe hugged a bit (but definitely no kissing. Not with tongues anyway) and bade our farewells. Tiny jumped into The Ghost's car and they were off. I had a plant to tick. In the darkness.
Walking to the dry dock area, I soon found the long wall in question and began spotlighting it from the steps below. Sure enough, the gen was indeed 'red hot' and there, in all of it's glory, perched several clumps of Adria BellflowerCampanula portenschlagiana (but you need to pronounce that in a Cockney gangster voice, as in "you schlaaaag")
Torchlit Campschlaaags on a wall - how very, very lovely :)
Returning to my car I wondered firstly would it start, secondly how far would I make it before the need to sleep hit me, and lastly - how the heck could I work things so that I can get myself back down south in the height of summer and spend another week with these crazy mad guys that I call friends.
My week on Scillies had easily exceeded all of my expectations. I had gained some sixty lifers (including a bird, not often that happens nowadays!) out of a total of some 573 species recorded throughout our stay. With further IDs secured once back home, that tally would easily top 600 species. I think Tiny said we'd walked over 70 miles during the week, or was it 170? The memories made will last me forever, from The Ghost's broken finger and cider-drenched burger to Tiny's squeal of "I need that!" as he ran off to tick a stringy grotfinch. Thank you both for agreeing so wholeheartedly to join me on this romp across the isles, adventures such as this don't come often and I'm so glad I was in on this one.
It really is about high time I put this tale to bed, so this shall be one half of the concluding episode of a fantastic week on the Scillies. Maybe then I'll even start writing about the things I've found here on Skye, by way of a change.
Day 7 (Fri 16th October)
Today was all about wading through the rockpools, or to be more precise, wading through very shallow seas over rocky ledges. We were all pretty keen to hit Porth Mellon at low tide seeing as Bob had suggested it was a great spot for marine life. I'd never rockpooled here before, indeed it was new territory for all of us. Would it live up to the hype though?
The tide was falling as we arrived, so without further ado we waded in and split up in search of weirdness, of which we found plenty. The lifers were soon coming in thick and fast, particularly for Tiny who hadn't really spent much time in the waters of the far south west before this trip. Even I managed a modest fistful of lifers, mostly in the crustacean department.
We were in an area dominated by Snakelocks Anemones and I spent quite a bit of time peering into their tentacles in search of either the crab or the shrimp which call these anemones home. No joy, despite lots of effort on my part. I was interrupted by Tiny calling me over to come look at the swanky shrimp and weird hermit crab he'd just found. I splashed my way across and was presented with this delightful shrimp
Just check out that shovel-head and the amazing neon blue halfmoons!
We had no idea what this was, but internet trawls that evening showed it to be Philocheras fasciatus, a lifer for all of us. There were multitudes of small mysid shrimps in the shallows but previous experience has taught me to leave them alone, they aren't easy buggers to get to species.
Tiny's hermit crab was actually three. The ubiquituous Pagurus bernhardus being the first followed by an initially camera shy individual with a largely pale claw and bluish banded legs. Couple of pics of the latter below
This is Anapagurus hyndmanni - another lifer for all three of us
But then I looked at the third hermit crab and became just a little bit excited. Oh my days!!! I'm just going to swamp you with images now, because this little beggar was undoubtedly the find of the day, maybe even find of the entire trip.
Unusual choice of shell. And is that a bright red antenna and a red and blue striped leg I see???
What-the-fuuuu...........?!?!?!
Just LOOK at its eyes, it's like something out of The Muppets!
Contact initiated! I come in peace (well, a shell), earthman...
I had never seen anything like this before! Turns out that this is St Piran's Hermit CrabClibanarius erythropus, a warm water species of crab that is usually only found to the south of Britain. It was first discovered in British waters in the early spring of 1960 at several sites in the south-west. Most of its populations were killed off thanks to the Torrey Canyon disaster and the subsequent clean-up operation, with just two fragile populations subsequently clinging on into the 1980s, after which it became lost as a British species.
Then in 2016, several populations were more or less simultaneously discovered around both the north and south coasts of Cornwall. All animals discovered were of the same size/age class which would indicate they all arrived during a single colonisation event a year or two earlier. Hence, once again, Clibanarius is on the British list. As far as I can tell, this is the first record for Scillies. Quite a thrilling find, in all honesty! I was so captivated by the beast, I even took a bit of video footage.
Eventually I popped it back in the sand and left it to continue on it's way. What a crazily cool beast!
Whilst I'd been busily 'communing' with the crab, the chapshad located me another marine lifer and this time it was new for me but not for them. Sweet!
Snot on a rock, how very lovely. Thanks for sharing, guys.
I actually had no idea what this was, though clearly both Tiny and The Ghost did. "It's a Sea Gherkin, mate" said Tiny. What? Really? No way. "Yep, sure looks like one to me" grumbled The Ghost. Oh right. I quickly had a look in the book and had to agree with them. My picture doesn't show it very well, but there are distinct yellow dots along the flaccid white body which helps clinch it as Pawsonia saxicola aka the Sea Gherkin. I have to say, if I found one of those in my Big Mac I'd be pretty unimpressed. Mind you, as a vegetarian living several hours drive from the nearest McDonalds, I'm not likely to eat many Big Macs anytime soon, though I do like gherkins. The green pickled ones, at least.
Velvet Swimming Crab - vicious bastards with a very strong nip. Note the vampire teeth.
There were good numbers of Olive Squat Lobsters Galathea squamifera huddled on the underside of rocks, I don't recall ever seeing so many in one site before. Despite checking quite a few, I couldn't find any other species with them. The bigger red and blue squatties look amazing, I would definitely like to find those at some point.
Once described by a chuckling Mark Telfer as "the most ridiculous animal I've ever seen"
By now I'd long since given up looking for spider crabs amongst the Snakelocks Anemones, so was really rather pleased when we quite unexpectedly found one beneath a rock!
Leach's Spider Crab Inachus phalangium covered in a sponge
I've never seen this crab before and was pleasantly surprised to see just how sizeable it was (I thought it would be about the size of a 50p coin!) I popped it back into the water whereby it adopted a strangely erect stance with one pair of legs held outstretched in a defensive (offensive?) fashion. Crabs are just weird, who knows what goes through their minds.
I had hoped to be a sneaky bugger and tick off the sponge specific to these crabs, but it turns out there are lots of sponges that grow on them. Ho hum, that'll teach me to be greedy. And then, just as unexpectedly as the first, we found a second Leach's Spider Crab also beneath a rock!
Clearly utilising a very different sponge than the first individual
As if all this crabby shenanigans wasn't enough, we found the usual Green Shore Crab, some quite large Edible Crabs, loads of Broad-clawed Porcelain-crabs, a few Long-clawed Porcelain-crabs, Risso's Crabs and this freaky bugger too
A difficult creature to make sense of, in or out of the water
This is the Long-legged Spider Crab Macropodia rostrata. I took a lot of pictures and fluked one of a feature on the underside of the rostrum which allows a specific identification to be made. They really are frustratingly awkward to photograph well.
As proof that there were non-crustaceans also present, here's the sponge Ophlitaspongia papilla
This is probably a sponge too, though I don't know which. It looks quite distinctive but I've yet to be convinced by anything I've seen online.
In fact, there are probably five and maybe six unidentified species in this image!
The very lowest tides of our trip were happening tomorrow, which was our final day on these glorious islands. We were still undecided about which rockpools to target, but we intended to hit them hard wherever we ended up.
By now we were all a bit knackered, so headed up the hill back to our cottage on The Garrison. I set about trying to ID a few mystery species from earlier whilst The Ghost checked his pager - "There's a Richard's Pipit at Porth Hellick Downs" he casually mentioned. "I need that!" screamed Tiny, "How far is that from here?" I just laughed, "Quite a way buddy. You gonna stomp it in your wellies?" Tiny was knackered, we all were in truth, but he also wanted that bird. "I'm going to get up at 5am and head off, get it at dawn" he stated. "Good luck, I'm not going" replied The Ghost. 5am, I thought. Fuck that, I'll still be asleep. I had to be heading nearly 800 miles back to Skye tomorrow evening.
Our plan was that Tiny would stomp to the Richard's Pipit at 5am, whilst The Ghost and I would take our time, put all of our luggage, including Tiny's, in the collection area and clean the cottage before heading out by about eight or nine. By that time Tiny should have skored the pipit and we could all do some rockpooling together. Old Town Bay was mooted as the best bet, we would meet there late morning, grab a few hours in the water, and then hustle our way back into town for our 3pm boarding on the Scillonian.
Plus I had a plant that I needed to claw back from the boys. Yes, I knew exactly where I'd be heading in the morning...
