Place of Strife

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 all Thoracochaeta 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!)