An Odd Week

February has been full of ups and downs so far. I've just completed a two week stint at work, all of the jobs on my indoors worksheet have been completed and I've done what I sensibly can outdoors, although there's still quite a bit needs doing before re-opening. Mostly I just need it to stay dry and to warm up so I can crack on with some painting, varnishing, tarmacking and building stuff. Quite when re-opening will happen is anybody's guess, though late April is currently being touted as about the earliest possibility. 

It's been very cold here in Uig, so cold in fact that I've had my bedroom window closed of a night. It may just be that I'm getting old(er) and noticing the cold more than I used to, though the weather site I use says it's been regularly feeling like minus four in the daytime and minus seven at night. All I know is that my woolly hat has been seeing far more use of late than it has for quite some time. I haven't worn it in bed so far...

I had a phone call from a mate this morning, he'd noticed a dolphin close inshore whilst walking his dog along the beach road. Ten minutes later I was on site and staring at a Bottle-nosed Dolphin with what appeared to be a rope wrapped around it's beak. The impression I got was that it couldn't open its mouth. Hmmm...that's not so cool. My immediate thought was that it has entered shallow, calm waters due to it being weakened through starvation and clearly needed to be untangled. I made a couple of quick phone calls, within ten minutes there was a small crowd of us strung along the roadside verge. One of the locals quickly ran home, donned a wetsuit and swam out to the dolphin with some cutters in her hand. Here she is, with her son close behind

  

You can't see the dolphin in this image because it submerged as Vicki neared. She hoped that it would recognise her as a helper and let her approach. Sadly that was not the case and, after about twenty minutes or so, she turned back without ever coming closer than fifty feet from the wary animal. 

Tiny, I know. But that's the high dorsal of a Bottle-nosed Dolphin in about 6ft depth of water

By now somebody had managed to contact a marine rescue team member and he duly arrived with girlfriend, puppy and wetsuit and instantly proved himself to be useless as he slurped from his flask of coffee. A local chap headed out in a kayak, I'm not sure what his plan was but it didn't work. Eventually I grew too cold and headed back indoors to hug a radiator. 

Fast forward a few more hours, the coastguard were on site, though they don't actually go into the water. I think they were just there in case the dolphin beached itself and folks started running over to pat it, or something! Thankfully, some six hours after I'd initially spotted the rope around its beak, a van pulled up into the layby opposite my window with a Whale Entanglement Divers sign emblazoned across the trailer. I ran out and gave the guy directions ("Y'see those flashing lights across the bay? That's the coastguard, head there...") He said the rest of his team were an hour away but that he had all the kit in the trailer, ninety minutes later it was dark. Thirty minutes after that my mate, the one who initially spotted the dolphin, texted me "Have they given up and gone?" My reply was simple, "No idea mate, I can't see anything from here but you overlook the bay, you tell me!" His response was "too dark to see" so I'm hoping they managed to get out there and free it from the rope in quick time. There are plenty of fish in the bay - mostly escaped farm salmon admittedly - so it should be able to feed up if it's strong enough to hunt. If not, there are flatties and crabs in the mud, they certainly won't put up much of a fight. Low tide is at 8:30am, I'm going to have a scout around once it's light. Fingers crossed I won't see sign of it or the rescue crew. If it is washed up dead I'll be upset, though there might be some nice parasitic copepods for me to check!

My spider and fly hunting activities have been effectively put on hold so far this month with a single Protophormia terraenovae (aka the Blackbottle or Northern Blowfly) disturbed from it's hibernation as I put up a load of shelving in an unheated out-building, it's the first one I've seen this year. I also disturbed a particularly large Amaurobius similis at the same time, but that's been it for my Spider and Fly Challenge so far this month. 

A rotten wall in a shed had to come out, which provided me with my first Skye encounter of Limacus maculatus, not a common slug up here at all with just two records on the NBN Map

I'm now wondering if I've ever seen Oniscus asellus at the hotel before. I must have...surely???

The other 'event' that happened this week, apart from my bathroom being taken out of action for the second time due to a fucking useless faulty water pump, is that I've been unceremoniously knocked out of the Top 50 on the PSL Recorder Rankings per Category page for Hymenoptera. This is the very first time I've been outside the top 50 ranked listers for any category since the site went live some years back. That sucks, and I didn't even see it coming! I'd like to think that I'm a halfway decent naturalist into pretty much everything that's out there. Without a doubt some groups enthuse me more than others, and Hymenoptera (along with Hemiptera and, dare I say it, bryophytes) grab me rather less than most. I don't know why this should be, I guess I just never really got into bumblebees which are the usual gateway into Hymenoptera. I've always viewed aculeates in general as being just too damn hard to crack. But then, I always thought that about Diptera too, which I now realise are entirely manageable if you break them down into small enough assemblages.

Lagynodes pallidus - a wingless wasp that rocks in at a tiny 1.5mm body length

I sieved this tiny wasp a few days back whilst searching for spiders in leaf-litter. I had no idea what it was (a female wingless wasp was as far as I managed) but hunting through Google Images I wondered if it was from the family Ceraphronidae. I popped the image onto a FB Group who confirmed this and they quickly suggested a genus. I then found a Ukrainian key which led me to species. Amazingly, to me at least, I now had a name for this 1.5mm beastie and added it to my Hymenoptera tally on the PSL site. Which is when I realised I'd been knocked out of the Top 50 in that category. My reaction was instantaneous and entirely understandable - I downed a bottle of scotch in one swig before embarking on an all-night booze-fuelled bender, smashing up the town, consumed by berserker rage. Or actually no, I think I watched The Vast of Night on my laptop. It's a slow-burner sci-fi set in rural America in the late 50s, but very definitely worth a look in my opinion. Then I pondered my feelings regards being out of the Top 50 in a category. My own fault, you can't essentially ignore a group and just hope that everyone else ignores it too! Maybe 2022 will be the year I try and break into bees, ants, wasps and sawflies. Maybe...

As of tomorrow I'm back on flexi-furlough hours, just covering essential maintenance checks and whatnot. A couple of hours twice a week, plus a week's worth of work when the weather warms up and decides to stay dry. I'm very much looking forward to seeing in the Spring without having to faff arse around being stuck at work five days a week. My boss was mentioning to me that several members of staff are now 'furlough happy' and want to stay furloughed forever. Well yeah, I can entirely understand that haha! But in summer the daylight hours here go on forever, there are hours and hours of daylight before I start work and even more once I finish. But it would be lovely for me to have the shorter springtime days happen without work getting in the way too much. I still have almost my entire 5MR to explore before the screaming hordes of tourists descend once more.

I haven't listened to much music this week, but I did stumble across this bunch which I find most agreeable. Hope you enjoy!