Got the Hump

An early morning WhatsApp message came through from the local cetacean sightings group stating: 

Hi, big Humpback spotted this morning Braes, spotted around Upper Ollach, close in. 

Well, that was more than enough to get this shirker out of bed and onto the road instead of into a room to finish the interior painting. Can't think why it's taking me so long...

I arrived at my usual viewpoint at Gedintailor, maybe half a mile south of Upper Ollach, but after half an hour I'd failed to see anything larger than a Gannet. I decided to shift position and tried another quarter mile north. I parked up and walked to the clifftop, and quickly realised that the view here was far better and expansive than at Gedintailor. One to remember for next time.

I wasn't sure how far out the Humpback Whale would be, it was reported as being "close in" but that was over an hour ago. By now it could be halfway to Applecross, for all I knew. I scanned around with my binoculars when suddenly, just a few hundred metres away, a huge grey shape broke the surface before quickly diving down again. "Muck Fe, Seth" was more or less what I uttered in awe. A lot closer than I was expecting! I replaced my binoculars with my camera and held it about an inch from my eye, raised and in position to click the shutter like a loony as soon as the whale reappeared. Which it didn't. 

After about fifteen minutes of playing statues, just my eyeballs moving whilst the rest of me remained motionless, I had to lower the camera and stretch my back. Yep, you guessed it..."nooo waaaaay!!" I cried as almost immediately the whale surfaced some distance ahead of me. I swung the camera upwards and barely captured the arse end as it disappearing back beneath the waves.

Submerging tail flukes heading left to right 

Well, that wasn't exactly ideal. I wondered if it had been watching me, just waiting for me to drop my arms. Probably not. Everyone knows that whales are highly intelligent but they're presumably not deliberately mischievous or camera shy. 

I returned to being a statue once more, camera poised just in front of my nose, and waited. And waited some more. And then there it was!!! I swivelled my body slightly to the right, lined myself up and hit the button - all within the space of about one second. I saw the whale in my viewfinder, I could hear the shutter clicking away, I'd already checked the settings and knew they were about right. Sweet, I just kept pressing that button and hoped for the best!

Well, the best wasn't precisely 'awesome' but the images I captured were certainly the best I'd ever taken of a Humpback, or of any whale for that matter. I'm very pleased anyway.

Taken amongst a series of shallow dives before it did another lengthy dive

I remembered that Humpbacks typically come up from a long dive with a big bushy blow and then sink two or three times, each for just a few seconds, before going on another long dive. So after it sank for the first time, I panned the camera in the same direction and at the same speed as the swimming whale and sure enough it surfaced right in my viewfinder as hoped. Fabulous! 

The nostrils are visible in the lower image

It was a bit of a wait until it came up next, by which time it had moved further away from my viewpoint. I'd already notified the WhatsApp group that it was still present, and even done a little map for them. I put up a pic and local whale enthusiast Rigell asked if I could send him some images in an attempt to match it with a known individual. 

Rigell has a drone and a big camera, he captures some incredible cetacean footage. He has a video clip of a different Humpback lunge-feeding through a shoal of fish and accidentally scooping up three immature Herring Gulls at the same time. A few seconds later it turns sideways and spits the gulls out, which then fly off!!! Breath-taking footage, and it makes you wonder how a feeding whale can distinguish three gulls amongst a mouthful of writhing fish and then spit them out without losing any fish. It's just boggling!  

Anyway, I've emailed him the best of my somewhat mediocre images. Zoomed right in tight, there are a few marks on the flukes that can be seen, and there's an odd black dot on the side of the dorsal hump. Rigell actually said he thinks he recognises the hump, though he could be mistaken because he's seen so many! It's been an hour and I haven't heard back yet other than to say he received them. He's either laughing his socks off or has given himself a migraine trying to pick out details I guess. Hopefully somebody will grab some decent images of it soon.  

One thing is certain though, all of the previous Humpbacks in Skye waters this winter have been youngsters. Still big beasts, but not massive. This thing was MASSIVE. So, whether or not it gets matched up to a known individual, it shows that Humpbacks are still moving through Skye's waters even at this time of year. As an aside, the area where this Humpback is located is precisely the same patch of sea that held the Sperm Whale that I saw in February of last year. Without a doubt, this is now my favourite patch of water around Skye! Oddly enough, I've yet to see a Minke here, and they're supposed to be the common ones.

Apologies to everyone I pinged images to in the first few minutes after I came away from the clilfftop. I was sat in the car reviewing the back-of-camera images and was so full of excitement I just had to share! I definitely didn't mean to grip anyone (apart from Ghostie, heh heh). 

Just because this is what's playing as I type this. And it's amazing :) 

Wacky Jacky

I popped down to Portree this afternoon to grab some food and also to check the gull flock at the river mouth. It's getting towards that time of year when something decent might suddenly appear; maybe a Med Gull, maybe a northbound Glauc or Iceland Gull - of which we've had precious few this winter. A single adult Lesser Black-backed Gull was as good as it got though, they are still relatively few and far between so far this spring. I say spring, yet more hail and strong winds interspersed with patches of blue again today, though it seems to have settled down a bit this evening. 

Highlight amongst the birds was a pied Jackdaw in amongst maybe ten standard Jackdaws. They dropped in for a short while before disappearing once more. By the time I'd unlimbered the camera I only had time for half a dozen crappy shots and then they were gone. 

And the winner of this week's Blurry Bird Pic Contest is....

One of the other Jackdaws had a bright white outer tail feather, I didn't manage a pic of that bird at all. There's some weird genetics going on in Portree I reckon (and I'm not just on about the Jackdaws...) Neil watches this site quite often so I asked him if he'd seen this bird before. He hadn't, though he did think he'd seen one with a white tail feather before. 

I very briefly popped back up to the Ostrich Fern colony that I'd visited yesterday. My hope was to discover the fungus that associates with Ostrich Fern but despite a good ol' nose around I couldn't see anything resembling Woldmaria filicina. I'll keep checking anyway. 

Of Ostriches and Men

We've had numerous bouts of intense hail over the past few days, some so hard that I (almost) felt a little bit sorry for the marauding flocks of woolly maggots roaming the nearby hillsides. This afternoon the sun came out and so I gleefully threw down my paintbrush and roller and headed out for some fun. I have another two weeks until I'm back on a fixed rota, these opportunities for escape won't be around very much longer. 

I stayed local, just nipping across to Dunvegan Woods for a quick wander. Lots of groundwater running down the roadsides. I contemplated donning wellies but decided to stick with my boots and struck off into the trees. Too chilly for any dipteran activity, but a further suite of plants have started to emerge and it didn't take long to find my first Meadowsweet of the year popping up amongst the ubiquitous Broad-leaved Dock, Bluebell and Water Avens leaves.  

There are several acres of Salmonberry thickets along the road verges at Dunvegan Woods and many were coming into flower. All pretty battered, to be fair, presumably by the hailstorms I mentioned. Here's one that made me look twice, note the anthers are brown instead of pale coloured. 

Original and cropped versions of the same image

I expect I would have missed this if all of the petals were intact. I'm not at all certain but I think this could be the fungus Hapalosphaeria deformans. It's a very common fungus on bramble flowers (ie the same genus as Salmonberry) but I can't find reference to it on Rubus spectabilis. I ought to have taken it back for microscopy. One for tomorrow, perhaps. 

A typically drooping flowerhead of Salmonberry

Note the clean and pale anthers in this uninfected flowerhead

But it wasn't the Salmonberry that I was here to see, I was here for Ostrich Fern. For the past couple of weeks I've been staring forlornly at a patch of woodland floor, waiting for the first signs of greenery erupting from last year's dead crowns. Today my wait ended and I was very pleased to see a good number of freshly emerged croziers sprouting across the entire patch and, indeed, a couple that seemed to be in a new area. This Ostrich Fern colony was first recorded here in the autumn of 1976, it would be nice to think they may have extended their range by a further ten feet in the four years that I've known them. Happy 50 years old, by the way!

The utterly fabulous Ostrich Fern Matteuccia struthiopteris

I found a patch of these in Grantown-on-Spey a couple of weeks back, only the second site in that VC (record now accepted) but that was just the fertile spikes left over from last year. It's the croziers that I love so much. They are still a bit small at the moment, maybe 20cm at the most, but once they are over two feet in height they really do resemble a snake's head. I shall undoubtedly take more pics nearer the time to show you! Then, once the fronds unfurl, they form a beautiful shuttlecock of the most amazing pale green, a totally different shade of green from any of the surrounding ferns. Again, I'll take pics to show you. 

I did a little online research this evening and discovered two interesting facts that I didn't know about Ostrich Fern. Firstly, the very young croziers are edible (though you need to strip away any brown scales) and are a delicious asparagus/nutty flavour after being boiled for 10-15 minutes. Apparently. Much more importantly though, there's an associated fungus that grows on the dead parts which is entirely host-specific to Ostrich Fern. It's called Woldmaria filicina and there are four records of it on the NBN Atlas. It's very distinctive looking too, I'm definitely going to check closely next time I'm here. If you have any Ostrich Fern near you, maybe go see if you can find the fungus. Failing that, you'll definitely have Hapalosphaeria deformans infecting a bramble flower near you this summer.

Edit: no sign of Woldmaria during a check the following day. Hey ho. 

As mentioned when I found the Grantown plants, Ostrich Fern is my favourite fern after Holly-fern (which is amaaaazing...) The only other record of Ostrich Fern in this VC relates to some well-established plants in the corner of Raasay House's walled garden that were first noticed by a botanist in 1994. They're still there, apparently. Long live the Ostrich!

Equinoctial Excitement

The lowest tides of the year happened over the last two days, and I hit the shore on both days. Neil and I jumped into Stephen's car and headed up to Staffin Bay on the first day. Neil is a self-confessed rockpool nutjob whereas Stephen is relatively new to marine life, being more of a serious botanist than a seashore botherer. Neil assured us that we would be sheltered from the strong SW winds, this being on the northeast coast, but somehow we were tricked. Rounding a bend we were hit full-on by some seriously strong gusts which, given that we were clambering across exceptionally slippery kelp draped over boulders, was not precisely welcomed! At least it wasn't a cold wind, that would probably have seen us throw in the towel and try elsewhere.

Some sort of shelled creatures moving slowly across the kelp

Staffin Bay was hard work, with zero chance of catching any fish amongst the embedded boulders but with a high chance of falling over. Stephen took a slo-mo tumble and got wet, I knelt in the sea and filled a welly full of water whilst Neil, as per usual, seemed to stay upright and dry throughout. 

There were huge quantities of Corallina officinalis in the shallower pools

The largest Lacuna vincta Banded Chink Shell any of us have ever seen

One of two Asterina phyllactica found under a rock

Quite a few Cellepora pumicosa, an encrusting bryozoan, on rocks

The marine flatworm Leptoplana tremellaris. The black dots are its eyes

It's always lovely to find an Orange-clubbed Sea-slug Limacia clavigera

Codium tomentosum (I checked the utricles beneath a microscope to confirm)

I came away from Staffin with a mere fifty or so species listed in my notebook, plus one very wet sock. Stephen wasn't able to join us the following day which was a real pity because it was much, much better!

Day two was spent at beautiful Ord down on the Sleat Peninsular. I've never been to this particular coral beach before, but I certainly intend to visit again when the tides are sufficiently low. To say I was blown away (and not by the wind this time) would be an understatement. So blown away that I didn't take a single habitat shot! Here's one I pinched off the internet

We entered far left, skirted through the shallows and crossed the sandbar to reach the island

The whole of the bay is covered in a deep layer of maerl, which is a type of coralline algae. Maerl forms knobbly lego-sized nodules and is a deep pinky-purple colour when alive. It's a strange sensation walking across deep beds of maerl, you sink into it a little way and it makes crunching sounds as you pass through. These maerl beds are home to a frankly staggering array of species, and are particularly rich in young bivalves, snails and worms which bury themselves deep within it. 

Maerl bed, along with a couple of empty mollusc shells

There are at least three species of coralline algae that form maerl beds in Skye's waters. Apparently they are difficult to get to species, certainly I don't have any of them listed on my PSL. I'll need to research how to go about getting them to species, I really ought to at least make an attempt at identifying one of them! Maerl typically grows at a rate of less than 1mm per year and many nodules will be well over 100 years old before they die. 

Edit: I've just been made aware of this paper. Maybe it'll still be a while before I get to grips with maerl ID after all 

The seabed here is essentially a huge flat plateau, few seaweeds have colonised the open water and the impression I had was that to a marine creature it would be akin to an underwater savannah or prairie, vast open spaces stretching right out to the distant horizon. The only interruption being the rolling hill of the raised sandbar which Neil and I planned to utilise as a causeway to the island. We'd met a local lady who told us that the sandbar had shifted a little to the north in recent years and we'd be lucky to have much more than five minutes on the island before having to return before our route back was submerged once more. Neil seemed unfazed, so I wasn't overly concerned we'd be stranded overnight. Fool that I am...

We found some Eelgrass patches and, as per usual, I stopped and stared into the swaying blades in search of seahorses. One day I'll find one, but today was not that day. I did note plenty of Rhodophysema georgei, an epiphytic red weed which grows along the edge of Eelgrass blades. You can see a bit of it in this image below, the main object of which is the sea squirt Diplosoma listerianum which has grown around an Eelgrass blade.

Diplosoma listerianum. Note the reddish Rhodophysema georgei lining the Eelgrass blades

We did pot up a few bits and bobs that were mostly found on the underside of boulders at the edge of the bay, plus quite a few fish including several each of Butterfish, Shore Rockling and Five-bearded Rockling, two Long-spined Sea Scorpions plus a Worm Pipefish which I missed. 

Both of these sea-slugs are the rather hefty Aeolidia filomenae

Risso's Crab Xantho pilipes with its hairy hindlegs and rear margins of the carapace

Pretty soon we were approaching the freshly emerged sandbar. The water was halfway up our wellies as we crossed to it. We took a side each and, in water barely six inches deep, walked the length of it until we reached the island. Two things quickly struck me, there were a lot of Common Starfish strewn across the mearl bed and they were mostly coloured some kind of shade of blue. 

One that most certainly was not some shade of blue was this little stunner. I recognised it immediately from an illustration in one of my books, a species that I've never seen before and it did not disappoint! 

The Sand Star Astropecten iregularis. What an absolute beauty!!

I have to admit, it was high and dry and caked in debris when first spotted, so I washed it and popped it back into deeper water before taking this pic. I mean it's a lifer, it needs to look the part! What was almost comical was the way it stayed rigidly flat throughout the whole process of being picked up and sluiced in the water. Flat like a frozen fritter! But what a fritter at that, a beautiful animal. I'm proper stoked to have finally seen a Sand Star for myself. 

Neil was calling to me, something about burrowing anemones. I looked down and within a few more feet saw the unmistakeable mop of tentacles of a burrowing anemone underfoot. Then another. And another! I've only ever seen about three Burrowing Anemones before, yet here I was standing in a forest of them! I may have become a little enamoured of them, these are just a handful of the images I took! None have been altered, these are all straight off the card. Just look at the variation in colours and patterns! Note also the fine tentacles in the mouth area, the Sarlacc ain't got nothing on these guys! 

Being whooshed around in the slow current

Pure white row of outer tentacles with darker inners

Variegated dark outer tentacles, pale creamy/white inners

I love this pic! Just look at the expansive wide open 'prairie' scene behind it!

Eventually we arrived at the island where several mounds of stones (mountains on the savannah as I called them) revealed large numbers of Ascidia mentula attached to the hard surfaces. Different habitats mean different inhabitants. I took a few pics but they're mostly a bit crap

These were rather sizeable. I doubt I'd be able to fit two of them on my open palm

It was around about this point in time that Neil suddenly announced "We need to go. We need to go right now" and marched off towards his rucksack laying on the beach. Neil was a teacher for forty years (to the day!) and this was the first time I'd heard those forty years of authority used in his tone of voice. It absolutely brooked no argument whatsoever. I looked at the sand bar and noticed that some of it was missing. Shit. I grabbed my rucksack, made sure it was zipped up tight, checked I had my notebook, camera, handlens and glasses in my pockets and started to run! A glance backwards and I saw Neil was also running just behind me. We didn't stop until the sand ran out. The beach was maybe 100ft ahead of us, a fast running channel between it and us. I figured we were about to get wet. My phone and keys were already out of my trousers and safely on my back inside the rucksack. My camera and handlens were waterproof anyway. My notebook was my main concern. Holding my coat bottoms aloft, I waded into the water on tiptoes in my wellies, wondering how far I would make it before the inevitable happened. Well, somehow, I made it! Neil had chosen an even better route and I don't think the sea came up any closer than two inches from the tops of his wellies! "Bloody hell, we could have stayed out there for easily another 35 seconds" I quipped, much to Neil's amusement. We'd managed a lot longer than the five minutes the lady had reckoned we'd have. But yeah, a couple minutes more and we'd have been wading into thigh deep water I reckon. This happened to me on the north Norfolk coast one winter's day many years ago. I think I was at Holkham watching Shorelarks or maybe Snow Buntings. Anyway, I was on a raised dune in the middle of a flat beach when I looked up to find I'd been cut off from the land. I splashed through the shallows but reached a deeper channel where I had no real choice but to strip off my boots, socks and trousers and wade across. In the middle of winter in Norfolk! I'm surprised I didn't get frostbite somewhere I don't ever want to get frostbite, but I survived. Today's little panic at being cut off was precisely that, just a little panic and there was never any danger involved. The perfect end to a wonderfully memorable day. Those Burrowing Anemones are something else, if you've never seen one do try and make time for them someday, they're just great. Maybe even better than a Sand Star. 

No need to warm me Cockles by the fire this time

Music time folks. I'm typically into various genres and flavours of rock or metal, but tonight I'm feeling energised so have some of this. As ever, hope you enjoy 

Just Popping to the Storr

Today was absolutely stunningly beautiful, clear blue skies and not a breath of wind. It's not often that the weather on Skye is fabulous, but when it is advantages need to be taken. I had a quick ponder and figured now was the ideal time to ascend the Old Man of Storr in search of a rare caterpillar. 

Is it ok to say 'epic'?

Somewhere around 60 million years ago, back when I were a lad, Skye was wracked by volcanic explosions and huge lava flows. At this site, the lava solidified into very hard rock, far heavier and harder than the rock beneath it. Eventually the softer rock could take no more and a huge landslide occurred, I'm talking many millions of tonnes along several miles of ridge. Some parts remained essentially upright whilst the landscape around them slid away, two such survivors are the Old Man and Needle Rock. Needle Rock was my search area for today's target species. Well, two species in fact. See that pointy little rock at the far right of the image above. The 'small' one...

Needle Rock. It just keeps getting bigger the closer you are to it

Please do a Google Image search for Needle Rock (also sometimes called Cathedral Rock) and the Old Man of Storr. My pics are crap, you'll be blown away by some of the images that are online. And even more blown away if you ever come up here and see them for yourself. Talking of blown away, I was definitely huffing and puffing on the way up. I actually sat down for a rest twice! I definitely need to up my fitness levels this year. 

Much of the path that leads around Needle Rock is roped off, specifically to reduce footfall and erosion of the surrounding area. So it was inevitable that a ranger would call up to me to "Hello you, please come down off the rock and return to the path"... sigh... I waved a couple of times but in the end he came up to me to see what I was up to. He may be a ranger, but that doesn't mean a whole lot of anything up here in Scotland where the access rights are as liberal as just about anywhere in the world. He knows he's powerless to force or insist that somebody gets off Needle Rock, he just has to hope that the person he's talking to doesn't know it too. Sadly for him, I did. I explained that I was surveying for a rare moth, showed him some images of the caterpillar plus its foodplant and in the end we had a good old natter. Shaking my hand, he apologised for "just doing his job" and wished me happy hunting. I continued my search, hoping it would indeed get happier because I hadn't seen any caterpillars yet.

Purple Saxifrage is just about coming into flower

Four small cushions of Northern Rock-cress, this being my target plant

Eventually I found a section of rockface with numerous tiny cushions of Northern Rock-cress, the sole known foodplant for Plutella haasi, my target moth, and immediately got stuck in. 

As a bit of background regards the history of this moth in Britain, one single specimen was collected from Benn Eighe (approximately 35 miles across the sea from the Old Man of Storr) in 1954 and that was it until 2009 when more were found at the same place. It was during this 2009 search that, for the very first time (!), it was discovered that Northern Rock-cress was the moth's foodplant. Skye is known to hold healthy populations of Northern Rock-cress so, during 2009 and 2010, various sites along the Trotternish Ridge (including the Old Man of Storr) were searched and the moth duly found at most of them! Since then, it's been found on Mull and one other mainland site. Although sometimes locally frequent, Plutella haasi remains an incredibly scarce find in Britain. This was my first attempt to locate it for myself.
 

Most plants were very small. The remainder were tiny.

After examining maybe 30 or 40 tiny Northern Rock-cress plants through my handlens, I suddenly found myself looking at one that had fine webbing strewn throughout the basal half. Oooh blimey, Plutella haasi caterpillars spin silken webbing in Northern Rock-cress plants... Being ever so careful, I began an intimate examination of the plant, following the webbing down to the base and then back up again until suddenly I saw a shape through the leaves. A caterpillar-shaped shape, in fact! Brace yourself for some appalling pics.

The image below is taken from the UKMoths page for Plutella haasi. I've included it so you have an idea what you're looking for in my rubbishy pics!

My rubbishy pics now follow. Best of luck!

It was 'just a tad' awkward to see, no matter how many angles I tried

Just for context, the thicket of leaves and stems that this Plutella haasi larva is hiding in measures approximately 1cm across. Here's a pic of the entire plant being held between my thumb and forefinger. The caterpillar is fully visible, helpfully highlighted by an arrow in the lower image. 

I was very careful not to accidentally uproot any Northern Rock-cress and especially careful with this particular plant. Happily my fat fingers were up to the task and no plants, caterpillars or anything else was hurt in the making of this blogpost. Apart from some moss that I knocked off a ledge, my bad. The trek back down to the carpark was an absolute joy compared to the sweaty slog up. Once back at the bottom, I found a staff member with a walkie talkie and asked if she could relay a message to Jordan for me (the warden I met earlier). She agreed and I said "let him know that the fella clambering on the rocks found the moth and it was lovely to meet him". Hopefully, if he finds me wandering off-piste again he'll not try to give me a hard time about it. 

I've let the new County Moth Recorder know the good news. I've also let Ghostie know because he's massively into moths and (far more importantly) he still needs it. If he ever gets his arse back to Skye I could potentially be talked into sweating my way back up the damn mountainside once more to show it to him. To be fair, I couldn't find any Rock Lady's-mantle today, it too being a very rare species, so a return trip could be in order anyway. Poa glauca and Poa alpina are up there too. And Iceland Purslane. And....