Scillies - The End

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 Atlantic Ivy 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 Shells Tricolia 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 Bellflower Campanula portenschlagiana (but you need to pronounce that in a Cockney gangster voice, as in "you schlaaaag")

Torchlit Camp schlaaags 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.