I was FB chatting with me old mate Danny the Pirate last night when he asked if I'd seen Uranus yet, which is showing very well this month. Relatively speaking. I've always assumed you'd need a girt big telescope to see this distant planet, but actually all you need for the moment are clear night skies and a set of bog standard 10x binoculars. I have those! It's currently situated very close to Mars, visually not physically obviously, so find Mars and look a little down and to the left. Uranus is the slightly blurry-looking 'star' that doesn't twinkle. It's faint and through binoculars you won't discern any detail. But if you have a telescope you might be able to see that it's a pale bluish disc rather than a point of light. Anyway, it's not every day you get to see a new planet so I was quite pleased to have made the substantial effort of standing in the doorway and looking up. Sadly I utterly failed to find it in the camera.
It clouded over before midnight and soon started snowing. This morning I was happy to see that it had settled and headed out for a bit of a kick around. Gotta love a bit of snow!
I don't think I'll ever grow bored of the view up to Beinn Edra
One thing about snow that I really like is you can read it like a story book. Well, sometimes you can.
Fox tracks. The footprints had iced over inside, so these are already several hours old
Foxes are a rare sight around these parts, I've seen just one in four years, plus a couple of roadkills. There's a fella called Scott the Fox (possibly not his actual surname, I'm not sure) who shoots them to appease the local crofters, because obviously a fox loves nothing more than to eat all the lambs of a springtime, ignoring the multitudes of voles and rabbits that are absolutely everywhere. I followed the tracks for a short way before crossing more signs.
Almost certainly Hooded Crow
These could belong to a Raven, I guess. But they seemed a bit small and Ravens are usually in pairs or more on the ground. I'm going with Hooded Crow, you can see the rocking waddle in it's stride!
Rabbit tracks - you can see where it sat down before bounding back to cover
This is a male human wearing size 10 slip-proof DeWalt boots
This is a guy walking his dog moments before being run over by a car with a very wide tyre on one side and a normal tyre on the other
Bloody things get everywhere...
And the white stuff is still laying as I type this. Unfortunately for me, I start work again tomorrow. I'll wave to it through the window. Think I'll concentrate on the indoor jobs before tackling the painting that needs doing outside. I plan to get back out next weekend though, stay tuned!
Feeling like I need a decent tune to get my head a bobbing. How do you guys feel about screams? If you don't know Jinjer you're in for a treat!!
I absolutely adore this song. The drummer has such insane talent and as for Tatiana.... enjoy!
In my previous post I showed you the view looking down across Earlish, which translated from Scots Gaelic means 'place of strife'. Incidentally, if ever you're in a Gaelic speaking part of the world please don't do what I did and pronounce the word incorrectly. The Scottish language is pronounced 'ga-lick' not 'gay-lick', the Irish language however is pronounced 'gay-lick'. Neither of them are pronounced 'gar-lick', that's just asking to get your head kicked in. One other thing to get your head around, Scotland translates as Land of the Scots, pretty obvious really. But the original Scots people came from the north of Ireland and claimed ownership of their newly conquered land, naming it after themselves. Bet you didn't know that!
The weather wasn't great for invertebrate hunting, it was pretty cold and windy outside, but it didn't look as though it was going to rain anytime soon. I took myself down to Earlish to see what I could find. Here's the view from the clifftop path, looking down into the bay of Camas Beag. Incidentally, there's a geocache here somewhere, the clue says 'in a small cave'. I wish I'd known that before I set off, I love finding those and then moving them...
I aimed for the shore in front of the boat shed
The trail down to the shore was heavily sheep-poached and water-filled, I nearly fell arse over tit trying to avoid the muddiest section, but pretty soon I was down on the flat and wondering where best to cross the river. It couldn't have been much more than ten feet wide, but the water was well over ankle depth and I wasn't wearing wellies. I headed upstream to see if I could cross more easily.
Be funny if the geocache cave was once up there
Apparently there's been a bit of a rockfall at some point in the recent past...! It's hard to judge scale from the image, but that rockfall goes back for about a hundred feet, they really are substantially large boulders, must have made the most incredible noise when it fell. I do hope there weren't any sheep up there at the time. Anyway, I wasn't crossing there so I retreated back towards the shore and simply jumped from rock to rock which soon put me on the other side. There were three sheep in the field, just laying there doing nothing.
Not enough meat on the bones to attract flies and no beetles beneath the skull either
I did find quite a bit of Otter scat, and a Common Seal bobbed just offshore, watching me with curious eyes. Even though it really was too cold and windy to expect much in the way of flies or spiders, I still checked beneath a few rocks, plus along the walls of the boatshed. No joy apart from a lone Deroceras reticulatum beneath one stone, possibly Britain's commonest slug.
The Uig ferry heading back out to the Uists
I turned my attention to the rotting piles of seaweed that had formed long wrack lines along the top of the beach. This really is as good a time of year as any to search for Coelopa pilipes and Coelopa frigida, two large kelp flies that live in and around wrack lines. Donald Smith, the national organiser for the newly-formed Kelp Fly Recording Scheme, is keen for records. I submitted a couple of C.frigida from Skye the other night, he quickly verified them on iRecord and then asked if I had pilipes here too. Like I say, he's keen! So, more in hope than expectation, I began kicking through the wrack line hoping to flush a few into flight. The wind had already filled my net, billowing it out sideways like an airsock, so I just held it beside the pile and kicked. This resulted in quite a lot of weed and hoppers entering the net, but no flies. Then it started hailing, sideways obviously, so I soon had quite a bit of that in the net too. I took shelter behind the boat house until it passed, then gave it another try. Eventually, I managed to secure three very small sphaerocerids but no kelp flies. I took quite a few pics of them through the sides of the glass tube I'd popped them into before quitting the beach and heading inland a tad.
I'm keeping an eye open for plants whilst I'm invert-hunting through the monads in my 5MR, which is how I spotted a Chromatomyia primulae mine in the leaf of a Primrose. Oh cool, Barry Warrington from the Agromyzidae Recording Scheme would like to have that record. I crouched down to take a pic, checked it had turned out alright and.... "No Picture" showed on the screen. Huh? I adjusted the controls and tried again on a different setting. "No Picture". Bollocks, what's happening here then? I took it off of microscope mode and took a pic of the sea on Automatic mode. "No Picture". Shite. It wouldn't let me review any of the previous images either. Then it started saying "Card Error". Bloody hell, I've only had the camera for less than a year! I briefly contemplated hurling it into the sea, but instead slipped it back into my pocket and hoped it would sort itself out once it reached room temperature back indoors.
Thankfully, in a way, I didn't see anything else of interest for the remainder of my outing so the camera stayed in my pocket. Back indoors I tried all the usual tricks (remove card, blow, put card back in, kick the tyres, scratch head in puzzlement and do it all again) but nothing worked. Bugger. I found an old SD card and inserted that - bingo! Images all present, all viewable too. I deleted a few and took new images - yep, they were fine too. Put today's SD card in again - "No Picture". Hmmm, so it's the card and not the camera. I can live with that. I popped the card into the slot in my laptop and was disappointed to find that all of the images I'd taken of the flies in the tube were missing. Hey ho, could be worse. I popped down to the shop and added an SD card to the basket of food. Back indoors I tried it out. It works just fine.
Flippin' Earlish, now I know why it's called 'Place of Strife'. The problem is, I need to go back there again, I only spent a very limited amount of time in just one of the four monads in that area. Great. I can hardly wait....
Still, I did manage to add Song Thrush to my year list at last, not sure it's ever taken me three whole weeks to see one of those before!
Number of people encountered during this outing: zero
Next day edit: the three small flies from the wrack were allThoracochaeta zosterae, sphaerocerids that habitually occur in decomposing seaweed and only rarely found inland from a beach. Two long setae on the hind tibia being the clinching feature from related species which have just one. New to Skye according to the NBN, though they are on North and South Uist (just about visible on the horizon in the pic of the ferry above!)
It was absolutely lovely today, there was no way I was going to stay stuck indoors whilst my 5MR invertebrate survey beckoned. I looked at the map and decided today was the day I would finally clap eyes on Loch Mòr, just a couple of miles to the south of me. My route would take me through three monads shared between two adjacent tetrads, so I was hopeful of picking up something to record along the way.
Very 'rough n ready' map of my route from roadside to lochside
And what it looked like in real life. That's the Uists on the horizon
I headed up the trail across the moor, carefully stepping around the black ice that had formed as the meltwater had frozen once more. Made for some spectacular looking patterns in the frozen over puddles though!
These reminded me of contour lines on a map
That's the village of Idrigill squatting beneath Creag Liath, a good site for Golden Eagles
I wasn't hustling along too quickly, though I certainly wasn't dawdling either, but I soon found myself sweating beneath my four layers. Pity I'd forgotten to bring my hat, it was uncomfortably chilly around the ol' ears! Satisfied that my sweating was due to a lack of fitness rather than an imminent heart attack, I pushed onwards. The path steadily climbed upwards, never steep but always upwards, and soon I was in the second tetrad with nothing of invertebrate interest seen so far. A Golden Plover called, the first animal I'd encountered other than a few sheep and a bunch of cattle. Then a Wren called, wow - my excitement levels were soaring by now! Finally I rounded a bend and found myself out of the cold north wind - and saw flies! Winter gnats were bouncing up and down in the air above a tiny stream. I quickly netted a male and a female, a glance through the handlens confirmed them as Trichocera, probably regelationis due to what looked like a very weak cloud over a certain cross-vein. Anyway, whatever they were I was fairly confident they would be 'new' for the square. Which was NG4061 in tetrad NG46A, just in case anybody had a burning need to know.
Happy that my walk had now proven useful, as well as invigorating, I continued uphill before cresting a rise and finding myself looking down onto Loch Mòr itself. It was bigger than I was expecting (mòr translates as "great" - as in size - so I don't know why I was surprised)
I expect divers nest on this, it's stocked with trout
I wandered down to the nearest edge and had a quick squint about for signs of life. I half-hoped there would be stoneflies basking on rocks, certainly some are active at this time of the year. I spied a wooden post, a favoured sunbathing stonefly habitat if ever there was!
Note the mooring ring, this is within a few metres of the water's edge
Sadly, there was bugger all on it, though I bet it's heaving with stoneflies a little later into the season. The shallow water here was very clear, a jumble of large stones easily visible on the muddy bed
Good stonefly nymph habbo that!
There was lots of what I suspect was Quillwort washed up a little further around the shoreline. I should have taken some to examine once back indoors, but I had nothing to put them in and didn't fancy wet insides to my rucksack. One for another time, when I'm better prepared.
Ice bound!
I'm definitely going to be coming back here again throughout the season. It's a lovely spot and, apart from the occasional fly fisherman, I should have the place entirely to myself. I do like this open moorland terrain, it has a sense of freedom to it that I enjoy. Plus there are lots of little streams and crags to explore, there could be almost anything out there just waiting to be discovered. Like this
The tyres are intact - a sure sign there are no trolls in the area (go watch Trollhunter...)
I had a bit of a wander, but the wind was pretty cold in my uncovered ears so I soon beat a retreat back along the track I'd already walked along, finding blessed shelter in the valleys. Looking northwards I had a smile to myself. I could see the summit of Beinn Edra jutting out above the hills beside me. Another few months and I'll be heading up that in search of some very special plants.
I'm so looking forward to summiting that!
Heading back down towards the road, the temperature had raised just enough that I found more winter gnats dancing in the first tetrad, so not the complete blank I'd feared it would be for NG3961. Again they looked to be Trichocera regelationis, but would undoubtedly prove 'new' to the square. I potted a male and a female to check indoors.
Looking down towards the settlement of Earlish, which means "place of strife"
I'm not sure what strife occurred there to have earned Earlish its name, possibly it's something to do with the Viking invasions? Uig, which is where I live, is the Viking word for "bay". So I guess Uig Bay is a bit of a nonsensical name when you think about it. I wonder how many of the Skyefolk would have taken their families and livestock up to Loch Mòr in an attempt to flee the invaders, and how successful they would have been had they tried. Hopefully I won't find myself in any strife when I wander in and around Earlish this season as part of my quest to add biological records throughout the entirety of my 5MR.
Number of people encountered during this outing: zero
I forgot to say, the winter gnats were all Trichocera regelationis, a common species across much of Britain. I had a look at the NBN map to see if it had been recorded from this part of Skye before. Oh..!
I think I need to write this one final post regards what I plan to do with my 5MR this year (see previous two posts if this is new to you) and why I'm doing it, just to clarify the ins and outs of it all.
I'll be spending this coming summer/autumn wandering the hills, moors, coastline, bogs, villages and wooded ravines that occur within a five mile radius of my door. I say summer/autumn, but realistically I think I'll be well underway before that. So, back to basics...
What is my 5MR?
I've drawn a circle with a 5Mile Radius on an OS map with my humble abode positioned slap bang in the centre of that circle. Most of everything to the west and south west of me is positioned over the sea, so I'm ignoring that part. The portion of circle that falls over the land is my '5MR' and I've split this area into its pre-existing tetrads, which I have named using their OS codes. Below is a part of my 5MR with the yellow dot positioned over where I live. Each bold square is a tetrad (2km x 2km square) and is itself composed of four monads (1km x 1km squares). Put another way, each bold square is about a mile and a quarter across and a little over 1.5 square miles in area. All told, there are roughly sixty square miles of land inside my 5MR and I intend to wander a large percentage of that this year.
The red dot is Beinn Edra, I'm REALLY looking forward to being up there!
Why have I plotted this 5MR?
I need some sort of a project to keep me occupied during this lockdown and exploring my 5MR is something that will repeatedly force me out into the hills. Uig Wood is all very well and good, but there is so much more to my area and much of it I have never yet explored. There is no haphazardness to my map. The recording compartments are all beautifully and simply defined yet many of them have zero biological records other than of plants. I have an urge to redress this imbalance. I have now provided myself with the framework for my time spent out in the field, all that's really left to do is to get out there and explore it. Also, I seem to have developed a definite gut over the winter period and I'm hoping that a bit of legwork and scrambling into the hills may help shift that...
What will I be looking for in each tetrad?
Last year I was in contact with Craig Macadam, the guy who runs the national recording schemes for stoneflies and mayflies. He's asked me to collect various stonefly species for barcoding work (one of the species here doesn't really conform with the mainland specimens and could potentially be very interesting indeed. The others he just wants for general barcoding purposes) and if there's one thing that the Trotternish Ridge is really good for, it's upland streams and rivers running across open moorland and hillsides - the perfect habitat for stoneflies! So I shall be targeting those for sure.
Secondly, I'll be looking at plants. Using the BSBI website, I can produce species lists for each of the tetrads in my 5MR and I can further split these lists into plants found before and after any date of my choosing. For example, I could set the year at 2000 and input the tetrad code which would produce a list of all plants seen since 2000 plus a second list of plants which have historical records from that tetrad, but none yet for this century. And it's the species on those second lists that I shall be especially targeting. Happily for me, the local BSBI Recorder has offered to share what knowledge he has of the 'missing' plants with me in the hope that, seeing as I'm out and about anyway, I may stumble across one or two of them. Plus there are shedloads of really great plants that I've never even seen yet that occur along the Trotternish Ridge, so I'm bound to pick up a few lifers whilst at height. Finally, there's my 'potentially new to science' Hieracium that needs to be collected from more sites before being formally described, assuming it really is something different and not just an aberrant known species. So I shall be very carefully documenting the hawkweeds I find and collecting some for the BSBI Referee.
Plus I shall of course be looking at the spiders and flies that occur out there. These two orders constitute my 2021 Challenge, so I simply have to study them in some depth. My concern is that I too, in turn, may be studied in some depth by them. Yep, I'm on about clegs, deerflies and midges. Usually I'm alright with midges, and they shouldn't present any problems at all at altitude - the wind will keep them away. I often find clegs on my arms/legs but they don't ever seem to bite, or I don't feel it if they do. But those bastard deerflies panic the bejeez out of me. Again, I've yet to be bitten by one, but they are relentless little feckers and have to be netted/potted/swatted because they do not give up! They work in teams too, grrrrr. The only bit of good news is that they've yet to be recorded on the top half of Skye. I hope it stays that way too. And let's not forget the ticks which are prevalent in this part of the world. Will this be the year I finally start tucking my trousers into my socks and officially become an old man? (Could it also be the year I finally identify a tick that isn't Ixodes ricinus??)
And remind me, why are you doing this??
Because I can, and because I'm really looking forward to exploring parts of Skye that I've never been to before, even though they are all, quite literally, within five miles of my door. This is an opportunity for me to spend a far greater time outdoors than I currently manage. I'm going to be actively recording too, rather than just aimlessly wandering. I have targets in mind and the simple act of crossing from one tetrad (or monad) to the next will act as a reset button and I get to do it all over again! I find that immensely attractive just in itself. The days are very long here in the summertime, when/if (when!) the hotel reopens for the season, I shall still have several hours worth of daylight remaining at the end of my shift. And if it doesn't reopen until well into the season...heck, I think there are about 19 hours of decent daylight in midsummer with only about two and a half hours of proper darkness. That should give me ample time to hit the outer reaches of my 5MR.
So there you have it. I'm going to be traipsing the hills, glens, bogs, woods, shorelines and villages within a five mile radius of my door in search of some plants and various invertebrates in order to produce a wealth of biological records from a massively under-recorded part of the world. I fully expect to be nominated for an OBE once I'm done, but I shall politely decline. Heck, I don't even believe in astral projections......
Continuing on from yesterday's post, this week I have been mostly scribbling all over my North Skye OS map and have now plotted my 5MR, broken down into tetrad level. If you're none too sure of what a tetrad is, or how they are numbered, have a look at this BTO webpage which explains how to read co-ordinates on an OS map, what a monad, tetrad and 100km square are, what DINTY means and how they each fit into the national grid system. I know that nowadays everybody, including the emergency services, rants on about what3words, but for survey work in the field you really do need to use established, plottable co-ordinates. Plus an OS map won't run out of power halfway up a mountain and leave you bumbling along clueless as to precisely where you are.
Here's what my 5MR looks like drawn onto an OS map
Try to ignore the outer arc
I started drawing the circumference of my 5MR and suddenly realised it seemed somewhat larger than expected. Looking at the scale bar, I soon discovered my error - I was using nautical miles instead of land miles, doh! I haven't managed to find an eraser yet (do they even exist outside of school equipment stores?) (Actually, do they even use pencils in schools nowadays???) so the outer arc stays for the time being. I would use a bit of bread, but it's quite a lot of pencil to rub out and I only have a few slices left at present.
I eagerly tallied up the number of tetrads that fall inside my 5MR, including those where only a tiny fraction falls within the zone. Such as these two, for instance
I see you, 36P and 37K. I shall be visiting you both this summer
I've actually been to the Camas Mor slip before. There was a lady doing tai chi in the car park, but she immediately stopped when she saw me turn up. I recorded Sea Slater and I think Porcellio scaber - that's all I can remember! I'll make more of a concerted effort next time I'm up that way.
In total there are fifty two tetrads in my 5MR. Many of these only encroach to a small degree (or to a positively tiny degree in the case of 36P and 37K above) but that just adds to the silliness of visiting every last one of them. I work well with clearly defined boundaries, this daft venture is right up my street.
However, there are three tetrads that I won't be including. And here they are
Bottom left corner - 35S, 35N and 35T
Although these do fall within my five mile radius, I will not be including them, not whilst we're in lockdown at least. Here's another image for you showing how far I need to detour to reach them. It takes me over twenty minutes to drive to Lyndale House (visible just below where I've scribbled '35S' in the pic above) and it's an eighteen mile drive to get there. I don't count that as a 'local' or an 'essential' journey, hence it just isn't happening.
So I have 49 tetrads to visit this year. Shame I can't scrape up one more for a nice round number, but there you go. One final image for you, just to place 'me' in the whole plot. I'm the yellow dot in 36W, which just so happens to be the best tetrad on the whole Trotternish. Happy days, though I'll certainly be straying out of it plenty of times this coming season.
Some interesting looking contour lines to the east of me. Reaching 46R could be a giggle...
It stands for Five Mile Radius and is something that has been around for a while now. Back in the glorious bad ol' days there were thousands of bird twitchers careening one way or another up, down and across the length and breadth of the country in a rabid quest to clap eyes on a rare bird that somebody else had just discovered. I'm not exaggerating, I was part of that horde for a good few years. A thousand miles in a day, you say? Hell yeah, I did that several times twitching Scotland and back from South London. Did I care? Did I hell, it was brilliant! Me and a few mates, setting off at some crazy early hour long before the sun rose, getting back just in time for a celebratory few beers at last orders, I absolutely loved it! The big awkward issue that barely anybody was even considering back then was the damage our antics were causing to the environment. Back then a person's carbon footprint was something produced by walking through charcoal and onto a white carpet.
The concept behind 5MR is that you stay local to your home and see what you can find for yourself, and without burning up tonnes of pollutants in the process. Local, in this instance, being within a five mile radius of where you live. Lockdown number whatever the heck this one is would have the British populace 'stay local' whenever out and about. For myself, I live in a beautiful part of the world and have open hillsides, a Sphagnum bog, some deciduous woodland and several hundred metres of shore in my home monad (a 1km square). And it's the monad that keeps on giving! I could probably spend my entire natural history time in NG3963 and adjacent NG4063 and still find loads to keep me amused. Small minds and all that....
However, I was intrigued to discover what my own 5MR zone looked like, so I went and found out. And here it is
I was pleased to see that the better part of two thirds is on dry land, that always helps. Less pleased to see that much of it is a fair way from the nearest access point, so I'm going to have to get used to a bit of legwork this coming summer. To put my 5MR into a bit of context, here it is on a smaller scale map
As the astute amongst you will by now know, 2021 is the year I'm concentrating on getting a handle on spiders and flies. Well, I already have a vague clue about flies, but spiders are a new can of...er...worms for me. More legs and eyes than worms, I do know that much, but a can of worms nonetheless. For the less observant, there's a tab at the top of this page that says 2021 Challenge. Click on that and be transported to my other equally wondrous blog (vague disclaimer - it may not actually fully qualify as 'wondrous'...same goes for this one too).
My plan for this season is to count up how many tetrads are in my 5MR and to then make biological recordings in each of them, paying particularly attention to spiders and flies. The plants have already been done across all of Skye at tetrad level, but seeing as I'm good friends with the BSBI Recorder, I can probably ask him to generate target lists per tetrad and see if I can find a few of them. Also, I'm definitely going to have to figure some way of attaching my sieve and tray to the outside of my rucksack whilst wandering the hills. Bungees to the rescue, I suspect. I have an OS Map, I just need to find a bit of string and draw the 5MR circle onto it. Could be a bold endeavour, but it's another bit of craziness to help keep myself sane. If that makes sense.
Random tunage alert. It's taken me a while to find something from this guy that I positively enjoy, but here it is.
Followed by this one, which I've unashamedly stolen straight from the Mighty Skev himself. Never heard it before, completely love it and such an incredible video!!
I went down to the shore today in search of sublittoral spiders. No luck this time around, though it was nice to see my first Sea SlatersLigia oceanica of the year. Genetic studies have recently moved these critters away from the woodlice, they are now known to be marine isopods (see p5 of this newsletter).
The Sea Slater - no longer a woodlouse
Heading back indoors empty-handed this afternoon, I figured I would try to identify yesterday's mystery fleas beneath my compound microscope. I wasn't expecting to get very far, but by shining my desk lamp on the slide from above, and with the built in light illuminating from below, I actually managed some fairly passable images. I managed to progress the specimen through the keys without anywhere near as much difficulty as I'd feared.
I'll run this specimen through a highly abridged version of the key for you, just to give you a taster of what to expect should you find yourself keying a flea at some point in the future. Don't snigger, it could happen! First up is the key to families, remember there are 62 species of flea spread across seven families and numerous subgenera in this particular RES Handbook.
1 - Hind coxa with setae on inner face and only one row of setae on the tergites >> Pulicidae.
- No setae on inner face of hind coxa, each tergite with more than one row of setae >>2
Both hind coxae, splayed so you can see inner and outer surfaces - no setae
Tergites (the back plates, if you like) showing two rows of large and small setae on each
Ok, so clearly the first part of couplet 1 doesn't work, so we take the second option which does work, which takes us to couplet 2.
2 - At least one comb present, setae on tergites normal >>3
- No combs present, setae on tergites notably long and coarse >> Vermipsyllidae.
The comb mentioned pertains to a dense row of thick spines, looking like the teeth on a comb in fact, which occur where the back of the head meets the body and also around the mouth area. One or both of these combs may be absent, or they may both be present. Here's a somewhat poor picture of the head area of my flea
It's not really balancing a ball on its head - that's an air bubble in the slide
We can clearly see that there is a strong comb at the back of the head and there's a short comb below the head too. By following the options in couplet 2 we move onwards to couplet 3.
3 - Genal comb consisting of two downward pointing spines >> Ischnopsyllidae
- Genal comb either absent or not like this >>4
The genal comb is the lower one in the image, we can see that it consists of three spines and they aren't pointing downwards. So we move on to the next couplet.
4 - Genal comb absent, only pronotal comb present >>5
- Genal comb and pronotal comb present >>6
Well we have both on our specimen, the pronotal comb being the big set of spines at the back of the head where it meets the body. So we go to couplet 6.
6 - Genal comb vertical with 2 or 4 blunt spines, frons is angular >> Leptopsyllidae
- Genal comb either not vertical, or vertical with lanceolate spines, frons is rounded >>7
Our specimen has three lanceolate spines, not two or four blunt ones, and they aren't set in a vertical arrangement. The frons is the front part of the top of the head. Our specimen has a rounded profile. Moving on we arrive at couplet 7
7 - Genal comb 3 to 5 lanceolate spines, pronotal comb no more than 18 spines >> Ctenophthalmidae
By my reckoning, we drop out of the key at Ctenophthalmidae. At the very last couplet of the family key too.
Tuning to page 117, we get to start all over with the key to species in the family Ctenophthalmidae. The introduction to the family tells us that these fleas are found on small mammals, occasionally birds, with a broad range of host species. I found these fleas in a small mammal run, so far so good...
1 - Club of antennae fused, appearing to have 7 or 8 segments >> Rhadinopsylla
- Club of antennae not fused, with 9 distinct segments >> 4
Now this is a real pig to see in the images I took, though in real life where everything is in 3D not 2D it's a lot easier to make out how many segments there are to the club. Here's the best pic I managed
Believe it or not, there are nine clear segments to this club. The depth of field is very shallow on the compound microscope so the basal segments, which are the narrowest, don't show up particularly well in this image. But they are there! So we move on to couplet 4.
4 - Genal comb of four well-developed spines, none of which are behind the eye >>Doratopsylla
- Genal comb of 3 or 5 spines, with one situated behind the eye >>Ctenophthalmidae >>5
The eye is the elongated dark mark above the rear of the three black spines in the image above. We're getting somewhere now, our flea is in Ctenophthalminae which has just five species in two subgenera.
5 - Genal comb of four spines >> Palaeopsylla
- Genal comb of three spines >> Ctenophthalmus >>9
Excellent, we have our flea to genus level now - Ctenophthalmus it is!
9 - Spiracular fossa of tergum VIII broad with a convex outer margin >> Ctenophthalmus congener
- Spiracular fossa of tergum VIII Y-shaped >>10
What the heck is a spiracular fossa?!?! I hope I hear you cry, because that's what I did. It's not that tricky once you know what you're looking for and it's surprisingly clear to see the spiracular fossa in this next image. Look at the huge black bristle pointing towards 2 o'clock offscreen. Beneath the base of this bristle, actually inside the orange body itself, you'll see a long convoluted 'tube' or 'pipe' which is darker near the top of the image than at the bottom of the image. This is the spiracular fossa and you can see that it splits into two as it reaches the upper surface of the body; one fattened part seems to head into the base of the large bristle, whilst a shorter, narrower section quickly fizzles out as it heads to the right. So our spiracular fossa is Y-shaped which takes us to couplet 10. Again, this is a lot easier to appreciate with the book in front of you, illustrating the differences.
10 -"check invisible minutiae of the genitalia, which only become visible after you've soaked the flea in chemicals for several days. Only then can you progress towards it being either Ctenophthalmus bisoctodentatus or Ctenophthalmus nobilis. Bad luck Gibster, sucks to be you." Well, that's not quite how the text worded it, but that's the end result either way. Bugger.
I read through the species accounts for both possibilities. C.bisoctodentalis is predominantly a mole specialist, though it also occurs on small mammals such as voles and Wood Mice. Moles aren't native to Skye, they were fairly recently introduced to one part of the island, and have effectively 'filled up' that area which is bordered by impassable (to a mole) mountains on one side, a river to the other and the open sea in the other direction. They're stuck down there, they simply don't occur up on the Trotternish where I am. Voles and Wood Mice do occur here, commonly. The flea itself has not been recorded from the Inner Hebrides, though that's not to say it isn't here.
C.nobilis is common on all types of small rodents, including voles and Wood Mice and has been recorded from Mull in the Inner Hebrides, hence is likely to be on Skye too. On Mull it was found on Hedgehogs and Bank Voles, We only have Field Voles on Skye, bizarrely, but they've spilled into woodland and have filled the Bank Vole niche.
On the face of it, my flea is probably Ctenophthalmus nobilis, but without looking at the genitalia I can't prove that. Maybe I can dissect one...doh, why didn't I think of that earlier?
Stay tuned, I wish to get to the bottom of this. And then I can take a look at the bigger species I also collected.
Who knows the connection to this next track (it's not a tough one, to be fair...I just love the video!)
Update: not the easiest thing I've ever done, by I managed to remove part of the external shell of the flea and reveal the necessary features - partly. Partly, but enough to clinch a specific ID!
See that lobe I've arrowed? You'll see that is it quite narrow and has a rounded tip with half a dozen or so short hairs on top of it. Humour me, I know it's a poor pic... The shape of this lobe, part of the movable process of the clasper on a male flea, tells us that this is indeed Ctenophthalmus nobilis and not Ctenophthalmus bisoctodentatus which has a far broader tip this lobe.
Excellent, Ctenophthalmus nobilis is a lifer for me and was totally unexpected. Two of the fleas I collected are definitely of a different species, but the remaining five look identical to this. I shall key them through anyway, no reason to think there's a third species involved, but I won't know for sure unless I check! Hopefully the rest are females, you don't need to open those up to differentiate between the two.
The year has started off absolutely beautifully here on Skye with wall to wall sunshine on New Year's Day, a little bit of rain yesterday morning, which soon cleared, followed by another near-cloudless sky today. I'm not sure how long it'll last, but it's absolutely gorgeous out there for now. This was the view looking up Glen Conon towards snow-capped Beinn Edra a few miles away, taken early this afternoon. I live about 400 metres downhill from where I took this pic. Lucky, lucky meeee!
Although this is the first post of the year for this blog, I've already made a good start with my 'other' brand new blog. I use this blog to showcase the wonderful nature I discover across Skye, whilst the other blog will solely concern itself with my 2021 attempt to get to grips with a load of spiders and flies. If you haven't seen this second blog, click on the 2021 Challenge tab just below the header image at the top of this page. I won't bang on about it for much longer, but I am planning to keep both blogs running concurrently with as little content overlap as possible. The 2020 Vision blog has now ended, though it's still online to view should you so wish.
With the weather as gorgeous as this, there was never any doubt I was going to be out and about and Uig Wood seemed the sensible option. I had a sieve, a tray and a pooter filled with alcohol. That's pure alcohol, not the drinking type!
Last year I undertook a beetles and flies challenge, this year it's a spiders and flies challenge. In order to find spiders in the winter time you need to employ some sneaky tactics and filling a sieve with leaf litter, moss or grass tussocks and shaking the whole lot into a deep white tray is one way to hopefully find them. Despite putting in quite a bit of effort, the rewards were few and far between. This was all I'd retained after an hour's worth of sieving
Six money spiders, a harvestman, two springtails, a hopper nymph and a tiny fly
The larger of the two springtails is around 4mm in length, which gives you some indication of the size of everything else in there! To be fair, I also sieved quite a few beetles, almost all staphylinids or featherwings, plus a handful of snails, slugs and other odd assortments which I wasn't interested in keeping.
Othius punctulatus - at 12mm this was by far the largest invert I found today
I found a disused mammal run beneath one tussock and gave the debris a good sieving, more out of curiosity than any real expectation. Guess what...
That's more fleas than I've previously ever seen in the wild!
Poor vole/mouse must have been scritching and scratching like a goodun! I have the RES Handbook to Fleas, which is also available as a free download from here, so thought I'd have a quick go. Er...no! I need more magnification, though maybe I'd do better with my compound microscope. Hmmm, I may well try that later. There are 62 species listed in the RES key, clearly these are mammal fleas so I can probably discount the bird fleas for starters, plus they're unlikely to be squirrel, otter or mole fleas, but without keying it's pointless guesswork. For now they are safe and sound in a tube of alcohol. If nothing else, I now know likely spots to search for more of them, should I somehow get hooked on flea ID. Ah, there's a FB page dedicated to flea recording, maybe the guys there would want them? I'll try the compound, see how I get on with that before sending them off to the grown-ups.
I collected the springtails for two reasons. Firstly they looked big and distinctive and I'm bound to see loads more of them whilst sieving - so it would be good to know what they are and which lookalikes are out there too. Secondly, I'm now using alcohol to store soft-bodied spiders. You can't pin a springtail (or a spider) in the way you can pin a beetle or a fly, they shrivel up and fall to pieces. That's probably the main reason I've never seriously attempted to get to grips with springtails before, But now I'm finding that alcohol storage is pretty easy and not as space-consuming as I thought it would be, I may start making more of an effort with them. This is a pic from the other blog (I know I just said I would try to avoid content cross-over, but hey ho) showing the storage unit for my alcohol tubes.
My beautiful wall-mounted alcohol storage system
This unit has 60 drawers, and each drawer has a divider. In effect I have 120 compartments in which to store my tubes of specimens in alcohol. I can fit something like 3600 of the smaller tubes or about 1200 of the bigger sized ones in it, so it should keep me going for a wee while!
The weather tomorrow is looking cold but sunny. There's a spider that lives on the shore here that I'd like to find, plus there may be small flies in the washed up seaweed. I shall take my binoculars out with me for the first time this year (!) in case there are any white-wingers in the gull flock. Last week I found four Iceland Gulls amongst the commoner gulls. Four! I've never seen that many together before and there's every likelihood that numbers will increase as the month progresses. Be nice to get a Glauc in there too, I need one to send down to Skev. Naturally the local bird recorder had to take things a little too far. He told me to find a Ross' Gull next...
Stay tuned for more winter sunlit shenanigans, folks. I am back and I am positively raring to go!
EDIT: I sussed the springtails. Rather disappointingly (for me, at least) they turned out to be the exceedingly common Pogonognathellus longicornis, which is one I've seen before. Here's a quick pic of the claw at the end of the foot. Note the long wispy thing to the left of the claw - that's called the empodium and you'll see that it's length exceeds that of the claw.
And this is a (poor) pic of the tip of the furca showing several teeth along the top edge and many hairs along the mucro itself. Crap pic but it does slam home the fact that this springtail is Pogonognathellus longicornis and not anything new to me.
