Back to Normal

It was the independence referendum last week and now that it is over life has returned to normal.   After its relentless  coverage, the media has now reverted to the normal international and domestic crises.  The votes were counted by the 32 local authorities in Scotland; my area, Highland,voted 53% 'No' against 47% 'Yes. Counting posters one would have expected the result to have been 90:10 the other way, a clear indication that 'No' voters did not display their intentions to the wider world.

The campaign was extraordinary with half truths and untruths peddled liberally.   The 'Yes' campaign, much the more vocal and aggressive, took flight at and after the second televised debate when the anti-Tory rhetoric was wound up and the currency debate shouted down.  The 'No' campaign, bordering on the inept from the start, seemed to regain the initiative only late on when a number of major retailers confirmed what was blindingly obvious that shop prices in a small independent country with a scattered population, would rise over what they are now (higher distribution and transaction costs which are now averaged out).  

Whilst the vote has now gone I have a feeling that the issue has not died, to rise again like the undead over and over again.

The weather has also returned to normal.  At this time last year we suffered heavy rain for days.   This year we have had the complete opposite, with a very long dry spell and quite a lot of sunshine.   The change occurred this week with some rain.   I mowed the remaining areas of the croft now that the orchids have set seed and have mostly withered away.

Post mowing and strimming

Lesser butterfly orchid

Heath fragrant orchid

Also as a result of the good weather I have had the moth trap out 4 times in September.  I caught nothing very spectacular though one handsome moth was the Green-brindled Crescent with its flash of metallic green.  

Brindled Ochre

Green-brindled Crescent

There are lots of fungi in fruit.   So far I have found since the end of August around 20 or so on the croft and as ever at this time of year I get completely in a mess trying to identify these at the family level let alone to species.   Most of the books I have refer to Britain and Europe and the distribution information is imprecise, so unlike plants where the distribution information is comprehensive possible identifications cannot be ruled in or out based on the location.

Waxcaps, a favourite, because they are usually brightly coloured, should as a result  be easy because of the different colourations, rather than simply drab brown, but there are several that look very similar and the keys do not seem to be too reliable.   They rely on the cap and stipe (stalk) stickiness, the colours and shape of the cap, and the way the gills attach to the stipe.   So, viscid (slimy) or greasy, gills that are decurrent (curving down the stipe) or adnate (attached at 90 degrees), orange yellow or yellow and so on.   I picked up 5 this week, which brings the total number of waxcaps I have found over time to 7.   That puts the croft into the locally important grouping for mycologically rich, unimproved low-nutrient grasslands (see a Natural England paper  http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/131003)
 One more and we become regionally important but I don't think we get a certificate.  One waxcap, the pink waxcap, is a UK BAP species.

Probably Honey Waxcap (Hygrocybe reidii)

Pink Waxcap (H. calyptriformis)

Probably Butter Waxcap (H. ceracea)

Crimson Waxcap (H. punicea)

Heath Waxcap (H. laeta)

 I have had even less success with some of the other fungi I  found.  The spore print - the colour of the spores which drop off the fungus when left for a few hours over a glass slide - should be a good indicator, but working through the various keys I have is laborious and some of the dichotomies presented are often hard to pin down.    I put a few pictures on Ispot but there seem to be few fungi experts about and I did not have confirmations on most of my identifications.   I have made detailed notes so I might return to them in the winter months ahead.

A corner of the croft is left more or less to its own devices; it is covered by bracken and brambles and provides cover to the deer when they come on the croft.   Brambles (the name I have always known them as, but many call them blackberries) are now in fruit.   The only work I do on this bit is to cut out the long rooting canes put out each year because the fruit is on the established older canes.   When I was young my mother, who was brought up on a Cumbrian farm, dragged us off on autumn Sunday afternoons to collect brambles, armed with a shepherd's crook to bring the fruiting canes nearer to hand.  The reward was a bramble pie and enough bramble jam to last the winter (no freezers in those days).   I collected about 2kg this year most of which has gone in the freezer, but I will make a couple of jars of jam.   Sadly, collecting wild fruit for home use seems to have virtually died out.

Freezer ready

Bramble fruit

There is a carnivore about which has developed a taste for pigeons, feathers everywhere and a carcass under some bushes.  I suspect it is a stoat, but we hardly ever see them.    A buzzard has been seen regularly.

Days Out

I had a couple of days out last week.   

The first was an outing with the Skye branch of the Scottish Wildlife Trust  to look for water plants at Storr Lochs, a few miles north of Portree.  A botanical trip, so as ever Stephen Bungard was the leader and his comments on the walk are at  http://skyeraasayplants.wordpress.com/.    We found four pondweeds (bog, perfoliate, broad-leaved and red) and several horsetails.  

Field Horsetail showing branch and stalk nodes x10

 Broad-leaved Pondweed (Potamogeton natans)

In the damper grassland, there was lots of Grass of Parnassus, a very handsome plant which deserves an exotic name.   Despite being brought up in the Lake District I was not aware that Grass of Parnassus featured on the arms of the county of Cumbria.   It appears to have a preference for slightly basic soils and further south, such as Ainsdale on Merseyside, I have seen it in damp duneslacks.  

Grass of Parnassus (Parnassia palustris)

Although the walk had a botanical focus it was good to see some other wildlife including 2 short-tailed voles, and several  fungi in fruit (Egghead Mottlesgill, Dung Roundhead and Persistent Waxcap) before rain brought matters to an early end.

Egghead Mottlegill (Panaeolus semiovatus)

 Persistent Waxcap (Hygrocybe autoconica)

 Dung Roundhead (Stropharia semiglobata)

Then on Saturday in the sunshine, we went to a National Trust for Scotland event at Balmacara Square, across the bridge, a few miles beyond Kyle of Lochalsh.    There is a lovely village pond there and  I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trouser legs to go pond dipping along with the other children.  I found lots of water boatmen, and larvae of palmate newts, while damselflies danced around the edge of the pond.  

 Water Boatman (Notonecta obliqua)

Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans)

Creeping Lady's Tresses (Goodyera repens)

 We then went on to the nearby Lochalsh gardens to see an orchid, Creeping Lady's Tresses, (Goodyera repens) growing under Scots Pines.  Its distribution is primarily northern in Britain, in pine and birchwoods.   It is common for example at the RSPB reserve at Loch Garten, but not at all common on the west coast because these habitats are unusual.  









Meanwhile on the croft I put the mammal trap out over a single, well used vole run over a 36-hour period, inspecting regularly.    We caught 4 short-tailed vole, a common shrew and a wood mouse, all of which therefore seem to use the same track.   (Voles are eating brassicas, wood mice are eating peas). 

To add to voles and mice, further pests, cabbage white caterpillars, are now attacking cabbages with some ferocity.   

Wood Mouse

There have been lots of slow flying black flies around,  with legs dangling down as they fly, so that they look ungainly and rather fierce.  I caught a couple in a butterfly net and worked out that they are Bibionids - Heather Flies.  They are harmless and despite the name it appears that there is no connection with heather other than they emerge just as heather comes into flower.

 Heather Fly (Bibio pomonae)

Height of Summer

This is very much a catch up of observations over the last 3 or 4 weeks.

We had some remarkable weather at the end of July; hot and dry with temperatures up to 30°C. We had lots of windows open in the house for the first time in years.   I managed the annual haycut on half the croft during those days, a little earlier than last year.   I have let the grass lie to give some help to the spread of biluebells which seem to require some fertility in the soil.

The remaining part of the croft still has orchids setting seed and the cut there will  as usual be delayed until the middle of September.    Seed set amongst the lesser butterfly orchids looks to have been very limited.   I have yet to work out the pollination rate, the number of flowers that develop into seed pods, but of the 35 flowering spikes this year, 14 failed to produce any seed pods.  A few simply died off while some were chewed off by voles or slugs.  

The orchids flowered early this year because of the warm spring and maybe flowering did not synchronise with the appearance of pollinators.   I never managed to trap any moths with pollinia attached during the peak flowering period.   

During the hot dry spell I had the moth trap out on a 23 and 24 July.   The species count was 34 and 37 and the number of moths 72 and 83 respectively.   The total species count for the year to date is now 111.    There were a few interesting ones.   Whilst not very spectacular but a first record for Skye, was a Green Pug, whose larvae feed on plants of the Rosaceae family, and I am now fretting that I might have inadvertently introduced the moth when I brought up an apple tree from the south, where it is common.  However the moth is locally present throughout Scotland so a Skye occurrence is not out of the question.

Green Pug

One of the more attractive moths was a Coxcomb Prominent, and of course the Garden Tiger which usually turns up in small numbers at this time of year.

Coxcomb Prominent

Garden Tiger (and midges!)

Voles are everywhere, though not often seen.   Every mound has nest holes and there are vole runs every few yards.   I caught an adult near the vegetable garden yesterday in a Longworth mammal trap and a young vole this morning in the same place.

Vole Burrow

Another Vole Picture Because They Are Neat

The roe deer returned; it is the same individual from some weeks ago, recognisable because one of its antlers is damaged.   A couple of days ago it was feeding in the kale yard which can be seen from the house.   My wife "chased" it off (she tapped on the window!) because it damages blackcurrant bushes, but it came back again later in the evening.   However my attempt to get close enough for some more photographs proved too much and persuaded the deer to make a getaway, jumping  the fence though not without difficulty.

There are some otter signs about on the Loch Ainort side - fresh(ish) spraints and an otter run that looks recently used because the grass has been flattened.   I caught a very brief glimpse of one earlier this week, the first for several months.

Scotch Argus butterflies made their first appearance in the middle of July, and the first waxcap fungi, H miniata, with bright red caps sitting low in the grass began appearing at the end of July.    Another early event.

Scotch Argus Butterfly

Moths, Shrews and Trotternish Saxifrages

Designated by the charity, Butterfly Conservation, last week was National Moth Night, oddly over 3 days.   I don't think there were any events on Skye but in any case the theme this year was woodland, which is limited on the island.   The weather was not great so I did not have my trap out but the previous week and this week, we have had several long sunny days with temperatures in the low to mid twenties.   I had the trap out for the last two nights catching nothing remarkable; beautiful golden Y were commonplace, as were magpie moths.  I  had a poplar hawkmoth close to where there is a flowering greater butterfly orchid, a moth that is thought to be one of the pollinators, but there were no attached pollinia.   Indeed despite setting up the trap close to the orchids several times in the last month I have yet to see the phenomena, so I am no wiser on the pollinators locally yet they do set seed.   The moth counts over the last two nights have been modest, 31 and 39.   I have been reading The Natural History of Moths by Mark Young, which I never got round to reading until now, which is a pity because I missed out inter alia on a useful summary about the success or otherwise of moth trapping. The count is influenced by:

• night-time temperature - warm nights are good;
• wind speed and direction - light south westerly wind is good;
• humidity - high is good;
• moonlight - low is good;
• high contrast with background is good;
• best if there are no other lights nearby;
• best if the trap is above ground level.

This week the night-time temperatures have been quite cool and there has been a full moon - hence, it seems, the modest counts.  

Poplar Hawkmoth

Magpie Moth

Antler Moth

Beautiful Golden Y

The voles have relented a little.   I have put netting around the runner beans, broccoli, and to limit bird attack also, a nice showing of peas.   Intended for voles, I caught a water shrew in the mammal trap yesterday morning.  Unmistakeable, it is slightly larger than the common shrew (though not much help if they are not side by side for comparison), with a dark brown - slatey grey coat,  and near white on the underside.  There is no transition between the two colours.  Addition of the water shrew brings to 15 the number of mammals we have seen either on the croft or offshore.   Surprisingly we have not seen hedgehogs, nor, fortunately, rabbits.   There are no otters or deer around at the moment, and here are also very few seabirds about except for the occasional gannet.

Water Shrew

Earlier this week I went on a Skye Botany Group walk up to the cliffs under Sgurr a'Mhadaidh Ruadh on the Trotternish ridge.   SBG is an informal group led by the county recorder, Stephen Bungard, who blogs regularly and comprehensively about the plants of Skye (http://skyeraasayplants.wordpress.com/).  If the group were more formal then I doubt I would qualify because my botanical knowledge beyond a couple of plant families is very limited (to compensate I offered to drive!)  

Trotternish is one of my favourite places.   Geologically it is very interesting, an escarpment where gently sloping jurassic sedimentary rocks are overlain by more recent lavas and intruded by dolerite, the weight of which on the softer sedimentary rocks caused land slips over millions of years to leave steep east facing cliffs.  The views are dramatic.   It also has some uncommon and indeed rare alpine plants growing on the crumbly wet basalt-like ledges.   Stephen has commented that we saw 6 saxifrages within perhaps 100 yards of each other which is quite remarkable given that there are only 11 species native to Great Britain (excluding Ireland).  The rarest plant, Tufted Saxifrage was past flowering, and the other scarce plant, Alpine Saxifrage was a little past its best.   An end June walk next year is definitely on the list to see both fully flowering.

Trotternish

Yellow Saxifrage

Mossy Saxifrage

Tufted Saxifrage

Alpine Saxifrage

Basalt -like Ledges

On top of the ridge we saw Iceland Purslane which grows on Trotternish and Mull but nowhere else in Britain.  A truly arctic plant, a few years ago I saw it growing in profusion amongst gravels on Svalbard, 1,300 miles further north.  On Trotternish the plants are tiny, and I have yet to see one fully open.

Iceland Purslane

An excellent excursion!

Choices

I have two alternative titles for this update; either "Voles Ate My Broccoli" or "The Magnificent Seven".   Take your pick, but let me cover both  topics.

We have a vegetable garden which was created from a reasonably flat area, at one time covered mostly by a mix of soft rush and brambles.   The cultivated area is around 200 square metres including an area set aside for apple trees and soft fruit.   The soil is thin and stony and covers what is likely to have been a raised sea bed, which is very solid.   It has taken several years to tame, but low fertility and lots of rain mean that the yields I get are low.   Even then cutworms, slugs and snails and butterfly caterpillars do their worst, reducing crops to a pitiful level for the effort and cash expended.   It is worth it, we tell ourselves, for the taste of fresh vegetables.

I put up a 6-foot fence some years ago to keep out deer after they ravaged the plot, but now a new pest has arisen.   I noticed the leaves of two broccoli plants had been stripped off.   One leaf was at least a foot away, so probably not slugs, unless very muscular, and there were indistinct animal runs.   I put out a small mammal trap to see what was happening.   The first occasion I caught a shrew, probably not the culprit as they are insectivores / carnivores, but  the second revealed the true vandal - a short-tailed vole.   Oh, and they bite - probably best to wear gloves in future.    Both animals have been deported.   The shrew was a Common shrew - the tail was shorter than the body and was not covered in fur.

Common Shrew

Common Shrew

Short-tailed Vandal

Short-tailed Vandal

Small White Orchid

The orchid count has continued, with a complete surprise earlier this week.   Down amongst an area cleared of bracken over the last 3 years and now dominated by Creeping soft grass (Holcus mollis) I found the seventh orchid species to occur on the croft - Small white orchid (Pseudorchis albida).    Only a single plant despite some searching.    I used to think this was a rare plant, probably because when I lived down south it meant an early morning start to drive up to Keltneyburn, a Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve,  where there is a decent colony in the meadow there.  I have also seen it in Applecross, 10 miles away on the mainland, though it occurs in several locations on Skye, always as far as I can tell in small numbers.   It is a Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) species because of declining habitats, though other than some impressive plans I am not sure what that translates to in terms of action on the ground. There is certainly no feed-in to grants available under the Scottish government's interpretation of the EU common agricultural policy. Lesser butterfly orchid Platanthera bifolia) has the same status.

So "magnificent seven" orchid species it is together with 3 hybrids.  

Narrow-bordered Bee Hawkmoth

Another pleasant surprise was an uncommon day-flying moth, where there are very few records on Skye.   I found a Narrow-bordered bee hawkmoth, another BAP species, resting on the grass.  Similar to a clearwing moth, the wing scales are missing other than at the edges.

Costa!

Several lovely sunny days recently. On Saturday the temperature got up to 25 degrees briefly, according to our own weather station.   It was almost too hot even for the midges.

This year's orchid count is underway; so far  there are 80 early marsh (Dactylorhiza incarnata), a few northern marsh, lesser butterfly and heath spotted orchids. The first heath fragrant orchids are just coming into flower. The variability of heath spotted orchids is considerable, made even more tricky by hybridisation with other marsh orchids. There is an example below.  

Heath Spotted Orchid (but maybe Common Spotted as the central lobe of the labellum is very long)

Lesser Butterfly Orchid

I have looked closely at the early marsh orchids.  They only appear in the boggy area of the croft, in a permanently wet area in amongst common butterwort, bog asphodel and sedges.   The average height is 12.9 cm and there are between two and three keeled, unspotted leaves up the stem in a spiral.  There is sometimes a small basal leaf but it is often missing - probably chewed off.  In Britain four sub-species are recognised, based largely on the colour of the flower.  From the colour, pale pink, and the height, ours fit the description of incarnata but there are some characteristics of pulchella also.   The bracts between the flowers are purplish and the labellum, the middle petal, is not strongly recurved, though pulchella are usually more purplish pink.   Indeed there have in the past been one or two plants on the croft that look like the classic pulchella, but not this year.   Most if not all early marsh orchid plants on Skye are conventionally labelled as pulchella, so I probably have to follow that lead. 

Early Marsh Orchid (ssp. pulchella?)

Early Marsh Orchid (ssp pulchella ?)

My past encounters with deer have not been happy.  18 months ago a red deer ran into the side of my car, early in the morning on the A87, the route into Skye from Inverness and Fort William, causing over £1,000 of damage.   Now the roe deer (not red as per my previous lazy attribution, which Stephen Bungard our botanical recorder pointed out), have taken up near residence, and I have seen deer on several occasions.   They have damaged several small rowan trees by scraping off the bark,  and frustratingly inflicted the same treatment onto a blackcurrant bush which is not behind a deer fence.  Also they have dug several of what can best described as 'scrapes'.  

There is a little ritual developing with one of the deer; I come out with a camera at 7.30am, take a couple of pictures until it sees me, then it heads off at pace to find a part of the fence it can jump, its night-time grazing over.  The same on three days so far.

Damaged Rowan

Scrape

Trouble

Trying to learn a little more about orchid pollination I put the moth trap down in the bog near the early marsh orchids.   The widespread view is that many orchids are fertilised by night flying moths.  Indeed I have hardly ever seen bees or other insects in the daytime show any interest in orchids.   I had hoped to capture moths with orchid pollinia attached to their faces,  but nothing doing so far.  Pollinia are two stalked projections which carry pollen, and these break off when an insect searches for nectar in the orchid spur underneath.   The insect then flies off to another flower where it repeats the process but the pollinia then touch the female stigma of this second flower serving to fertilise it.  Neveretheless I caught 41 moths, totalling 16 species, some of which were rather attractive, such as this, which I think is a Small Angle Shades

Small Angle Shades

If the weather conditions are suitable I shall run the trap again at the weekend.

I looked at some of the early marsh orchids but could find very few with pollinia missing.  All I found were some flowers where slugs had damaged the flowers.  

Early Marsh Orchid one week after the first flower opened, probably damaged by slugs

An unexpected small treat was to find an uncommon plant on the road verge (the A87 gets another mention), 50 metres from my gate: moonwort, a strange looking fern last recorded in the tetrad square (i.e. 2 km by 2 km) 26 years ago.   In truth it is easily overlooked, and I was in any case looking for orchids.

Moonwort

Finally, nothing ottery at the moment.   No recent spraints and the various otter runs by the shore have been unused.  Oh well...