Botanical Delights

June came and went without my finding a Rose-coloured Starling, though I did try for one at Staffin a couple of times. In a way I'm glad I failed on both attempts, seeing as the whole idea was to find my own and not to twitch somebody else's bird. My self-found Pink Stink will have to wait a bit longer, though I've previously found a juvenile bird in Dorset (record accepted, largely thanks to Martin Cade's excellent images) hence I'm not exactly rabid about finding another one just yet. 

But it wasn't all crap birdwise. I jammed into a singing Common Rosefinch at Kilmarie, though I then had to leave it and drive ten miles up the road in order to gain phone signal so I could put the word out. Nobody else had it that day, but two guys managed to photograph it the following morning, after which it was never seen or heard from again. This image, courtesy of local birder Ian Hinchcliff, perfectly captures the sheer beauty of my rosefinch. Ha!

Young male Common Rosefinch - they very rarely come any drabber than that!

If ever you've wondered why rosefinches are sometimes known as grotfinches, well there's your answer. Luckily the song is very distinctive and quite pretty, because this individual really doesn't have much else going for it. Phil Knott had one a week or so earlier in another part of southern Skye. It's entirely likely that this is that very same bird, hence the finder's accounts for both sightings have been submitted together, the SOC can decide for themselves if one or two individuals were involved.  

I'm starting to lose a small degree of enthusiasm for capturing and identifying inverts just now. I'll look at a fly and question whether or not I can be arsed to capture it, knowing that it will probably just sit on a pin for weeks until I drum up enough interest to run it through the keys. I'm definitely in the doldrums regards miscroscopy, and this is having a significant knock-on effect on my wanting to net flies/beetles/bugs/spiders etc. I think I'll just ride it out, see what happens. There's no point in my amassing hundreds of specimens and then staring at them in a state of mild horror, knowing I'll be at the microscope for days on end. So I'm deliberately holding back and not chasing anything that doesn't catch my eye. 

Happily, there are plants to be searched for or stumbled across. This is Skye, the island where there's always something unexpected to be found!

Orange-ball Tree Buddleja globosa

This sprawling patch of Orange-ball Tree is growing opposite a large house with a well-tended garden. It's quite a mature patch and has obviously been there for a number of years. It is also surrounded by fresh grass clippings leading me to believe that it has been thrown out, either as lopped branches or in its entirety, at some point in the past. Happily, in a way, it has survived to become a magnificent bush and is the first one I've ever seen that is (more or less) tickable. I ticked it anyway, tart that I am. My own personal thoughts are that folks who flytip garden waste, or allow their gardeners to flytip garden waste, should be heavily fined in all instances. But on the other hand, it does certainly juice up the local botanical interest at times. Purist? Moi? Hell, I have Lady A Pheasant on my list, you don't need to talk to me about ticking dodgy shit.

Pick-a-back-Plant (Tolmiea menziesii) forming carpets along a roadside verge

A single bush of Yellow Azalea found growing in the middle of a woodland

But it wasn't all about ticking plastic crap and slum botany. I found some 'real' plants too

Rough Horsetail (aka Dutch Rush) alongside Wood Horsetail in a roadside ditch

Northern Buckler-fern Dryopteris expansa beneath a boulder up a high hill

There were several dozen ferns growing amongst the rocks, not all of which were Northern Bucklers. In fact, this wasn't even on my radar and it was Nick who brought the possibility to our attention. We oiked a couple of likely looking fronds out into the open and pored over the latest fern guide. Some plants didn't conform, others did, several seemed a bit kinda intermediate. In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure if the fern in the image above actually is a Northern Buckler-fern, but if not another close by certainy was. Northern Buckler-fern is a new plant for me, so I should have taken better images including some to highlight the diagnostic features. But I didn't. However, that could just be your first clue as to something I plan to attempt in 2022.....

Alpine Clubmoss Diphasiastrum alpinum. Not sure I've ever seen its fertile cones before...

Dwarf Willow. Seen for the first time a month ago, this patch was on a different mountain top 

Scots Lovage with Roseroot (sounds like a soup flavour!) growing on a clifftop near Kilmuir

All of the plants above were found in June. In the first week of July I've been looking at yet more plants, including one that, for me at least, is very special indeed. But first I need to show you my Green Tiger Beetle pics. Not because it's a rare beetle, but because they turned out really well and I'm stupidly happy with that. I promise you right now, these are straight off the card and I haven't altered anything, they're not even cropped! 

Green Tiger Beetles. I'm actually pretty damned chuffed with those images! 

For the beetles playing piggyback, I set my Olympus TG-6 to 'microscope' stack mode, dropped the ISO to 150, turned the LED and flash off, spot-centred the focus, slowly edged the camera to within about 10cm from the beetles, zoomed in a little bit and pressed the button. And that was it. Most of the time I use my TG-6 for record shots, but with a little tweaking of the settings it really can produce some pretty decent images. I should probably spend a bit more time trying out different modes and settings rather than continue with the 'point, shoot, hope for the best' technique I ordinarily rely upon. After all, I'll need to start using it properly for my 2022 plans.......

Right, back to plants. 

Despite the fact that this next plant isn't particulary common on Skye, it won't impress any of you southern readers. This is Enchanter's Nightshade, a familiar sight in many woodlands throughout England. It has a gorgeous stiltbug associated with it, sadly that doesn't occur this far north and it's been a good few years since I last saw it. But anyway, here's the Enchanter's Nightshade for you

Enchanter's Nightshade - note the smooth leaf margins

I found a small patch growing near the woods in Portree, and immediately knew it was a damn good find for this part of Skye. Grinning from ear to ear, I took a barrage of pics intending to pass on the news of my find to BSBI Recorder Stephen Bungard. I went home afterwards, leapt onto the BSBI database only to discover that some bugger has already seen it in Portree earlier this very year! Gah!!! (insert well-known phrase concerning wind and sails, maybe something about stolen thunder too). Turns out that bloomin' Bungard fella had beaten me to it by a matter of days. He can be consistently annoying like that, at times. Here's a pic of the 'usual' enchanter's nightshade that we have on Skye. This is the hybrid between Enchanter's Nightshade and Alpine Enchanter's Nightshade, dubbed Upland Enchanter's Nightshade. How many more times can I insert the words 'enchanter's nightshade' into this paragraph? None. 

Upland Enchanter's Nightshade - note the obviously toothed leaf margins

I have absolutely no idea how this plant gained its vernacular name but I bet there must be a great (if fanciful) explanation. 

Three years ago I heard talk about there being a colony of Lesser Butterfly-orchids on a certain grassy verge at Sligachan, here on Skye. I also heard talk about Greater and Lesser Butterfly-orchids being lumped into one species, so I essentially put very little effort into tracking down the Lessers, even though it was a (sub)species I'd never before seen. Greater Butterfly-orchid is fairly widespread in rank grasslands on Skye. It grows here in Uig and has even popped up in an area of the hotel grounds that I'm slowly turning into a hay meadow. Up until a week ago, it appeared that Skye was enjoying far fewer orchids than usual. And then they all appeared en masse. I headed to a patch of grassland and went in search of any orchids that weren't Heath Spotted, which is the default orchid across much of Skye. I found a few...

This is Greater Butterfly-orchid with its obviously divergent pollenia

And a few miles away, in acidic grassland, I found three plants that were clearly similar but different...

And these are Lesser Butterfly-orchids with their parallel pollenia

These Lesser Butterfly-orchids were very noticeably less robust than any plants in the Greater Butterfly-orchid colony just a few miles away - though there is known to be a considerable size overlap between the smallest Greaters and the largest Lessers. On this occasion though, the Lessers were distinctly 'lesser'. The flowering spike held less flowers, resulting in a more open look. The spurs behind the flowerheads were held more horizontally than the Greaters (which curved downwards). In fact, the whole jizz of these plants was very different to that of the larger Greater Butterfly-orchids. Lesser Butterfly-orchid is one of four orchid species I'd hoped to see for the first time this year, the others being Frog Orchid, Bog Orchid and Small White Orchid. I'm still hopeful of seeing at least one of the remaining three, but I'd need very great luck (or gen...) to scoop all three this summer, I think. Time will tell. 

I'd heard that Ophioglossum azoricum (Small Adder's-tongue Fern) occurs on Raasay in good numbers. It's a plant that is occasionally known from the southern part of Skye, as well as a single solitary spike from Earlish in 2014, Earlish being up here at the Top End. I had it in mind to make the effort to track the plant down this summer. Stephen Bungard, BSBI Recorder and professional botanist, lives on Raasay, hence it didn't take me too long to formulate a plan. We (...I) plotted into the dead of night, eventually the day of reckoning drew close. Nick and Neil joined me this morning as we boarded the ferry across to Raasay where Stephen was patiently waiting to take us off on The Great Ophioglossum Hunt. An hour or so later, we were at a clifftop and searching the cropped grass for our target plant. The more eyes the merrier, I say and within a few short moments Stephen had effortlessly located the small colony to be found on an unassuming stony outcropping. I quickly pushed my way to the front of the scrum and shoved my camera into the midst of my first ever Small Adder's-tongues. How very bloody marvellous! 

Small (but perfectly formed) Adder's-tongue Ophioglossum azoricum with fertile spike. Huzzah!!!

I was pretty chuffed with that, but within ten minutes we were all on hands and knees gawping (well ok, probably I was the only one gawping, as such) at the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of Small Adder's-tongues poking up through the short grassy sward. I may have taken a couple more photos.....

These two plants have fully mature fertile spikes. A delicate tap of the spikes resulted in a tiny cloud of spores being released, I'm not sure why but I found this quite magical. Nobody mention small minds being easily amused...

 

It quickly became apparent that many plants were growing in pairs, something I've never seen occur in the larger Common Adder's-tongue (Ophioglossum vulgatum). Stephen explained that Small Adder's-tongue does typically grow 'in pairs' and that the plants were connected to each other "at a quite surprising depth, often several inches below the surface". We took stock of our surroundings and guestimated there to be easily a thousand Small Adder's-tongues within an area maybe 20 ft by 10ft. Even within this area there were obvious 'bare' patches yet there were several spots with a density of maybe over a hundred plants per square foot. Quite incredible. Nick had the bit between his teeth and determined to find a new colony. An hour later he did precisely that, with seven or eight plants huddled together beneath a rock outcropping. Soon after that, I decided a certain patch of short-cropped, westward facing bit of grass was too good to bypass, clambered a few rocks and self-found a brand new colony of Small Adder's-tongues new for the maps! 

It has to be said that at this time of year the leaf blades are fading from yellowy-green to a purer yellow colour, which makes them stand out a little more obviously than they would earlier in the season. It still takes a while to get your eye in, but once you have I believe these diminutive ferns are relatively straightforward to pick out in the short turf. They seem to loosely associate with Early Hair-grass, English Stonecrop and Heath Bedstraw with westward-facing slopes being the ideal spots for them. I'm definitely going to be searching various Skye coastal grasslands for it later this week. 

I think this may be my favourite image of the Small Adder's tongue. It's a great plant (if you're a plant nerd!) and I'm so happy to have finally clapped eyes on it and added a new site for it too. Many thanks to Stephen and The Musketeers for yet another hugely enjoyable day.

 

YouTube doesn't appear to have much in the way of Small Adder's-tongue related music, so have these three tracks which, between them, kind of have it covered.