Waxcaps & waxwings

As I start last months diary there are at least 10 blackbirds and 7 yellowhammers in the garden this morning and there are pine marten tracks – IN THE SNOW. It’s back, with just a six month break we are once again clearing snow. Two foot deep and counting! I digress.

In the last diary there wasn’t room for one item of great significance, a rare fly came back to Abernethy. It was not re-found but, as part of the pinewood hoverfly (Blera fallax) re-introduction programme, about 50 larvae were released, into prepared, man made “rot holes” close to where the last adult fly was seen over 20 years ago. This project has appeared several times in earlier diaries, the last time was in July 2009 when Ellen Rotheray was shown right at the start of the project, when the first captive larvae were just emerging as adult hoverflies in the hope that they would breed and create more captive larvae for release. Ellen was successful and later in 2009, several larvae were released into prepared rot holes in Scots pine stumps where woodland had been recently felled. This year it was the turn of captive bred larvae to be released at Abernethy and, having had a long involvement in all things Blera at Abernethy over the last decade, I was invited along to help. In preparation staff at Abernethy had been out with their chainsaws preparing artificial breeding holes in fresh Scots pine stumps and trial slots in felled logs. All the stump holes had been filled with Scots pine chips and all holes and slots were then filled with water. Everything was ready for Ellen’s arrival with her precious jar of hoverfly larvae (left). About 50 larvae were introduced to the breeding holes and all that we can do now is await their development and hope that Ellen manages to see adult flies or new larvae in the breeding holes next summer. Fingers crossed. To see a brief update on the project go to
http://www.snh.gov.uk/protecting-scotlands-nature/species-action-framework/species-action-list/hoverfly/update/tecting-scotlands-nature/species-action-framework/species-action-list/hoverfly/update/ and for Ellen’s recent presentation click on “see a video of the pine hoverfly talk”.

The whole of October was spent cat-sitting, after daughter Ruth’s cat had a major accident, probably with a car. The initial vet diagnosis was that all the toes on Monty’s left back leg were broken and that if the leg was placed in plaster the toes might start to mend. With limited room at Ruth’s home and with two young children and a dog to look after, we thought Firwood would be a better home until the “healing” period was over. After the first vets visit Monty returned with his leg in plaster (left) and, after a couple of days, was tapping his way around the house on three good legs and a fourth regularly held out behind but regularly clonking on the wood and tile floors. Despite the obvious pain and plaster-cast he seemed to be getting on fine, though being accurate with the litter tray took a couple of days to master! A week later the cast was removed and everything checked by the vet and a new cast applied. This time Monty didn’t seem too happy but a return to the vet the following day assured us that all was as it should be. Through the next week however, Monty seemed to be in pain and started to spend more time sleeping than tapping his way around the house and on the next vet visit at the end of the week Ruth and Janet were given the news they were prepared for but dreading, there was no circulation in his foot and that an amputation would be necessary. In situations like this vets don’t just remove the foot, they recommend the whole leg is amputated, and so, the following day, Monty returned for the operation. Apart from the shock of initially seeing a three legged cat with a large area of shaved hair and a set of stitches looking a bit like the back end of a Christmas chicken (right), Monty seemed reasonably happy helped no doubt by a daily dose of painkiller. Within a few days he had mastered the art of hopping around the house and by the time the stitches were removed after ten days, he was getting quite mobile and desperate to get outside. Another week and Janet found a great way of exercising Monty by trying to race him to the top of the stairs and a few days later the door was opened and he made his first outing into the garden. Just three weeks after the operation Monty had regained his freedom and was disappearing for a couple of hours at a time, though the two of us were regularly hovering by the door wondering just where he had got to, particularly one evening when he hadn’t returned by midnight! A week later and Monty made us a gift of a young rabbit and the following week returned to his home patch. With his past history Monty has just six lives left, take care young cat.

A late red admiral was in the garden on 9th October, just a few days ahead of one of the most amazing TV events of recent times – the emergence from the ground of the Chilean miners which progressed so well that it now seems like part of a dream. Well done to all those involved. Not so good news though was the behaviour of our local MP the “red-headed rat” sorry, “ginger rodent” who swanned into Parliament by conning us to vote for him only to break nearly all the promises he made. The most devastating locally was at RAF Kinloss where staff were preparing to receive the first replacement Nimrod only to be told sorry, we don’t need them any more and oh, by the way, we are closing down the base. RAF Lossiemouth might follow. “But I’m fighting hard for faster broadband speeds in the Highlands” he boasts, but let’s not mention promises to students, pensioners and the schools sport partnership! I wasn’t quite so kind as to call him a ginger rodent when I emailed him! Perhaps the swift rise from Press Officer for the Cairngorms National Park, Tourist & Housing Authority to Chief Secretary, HM Treasury has something to do with it.

Sorry, a second digression. Through all of these events my main focus has been on the autumn flush of fungi with the first pipe club fungus as reported last year again popping up all over the birch & hazel woods. Perhaps last year I didn’t look closely enough or perhaps there weren’t many fruiting but in several of the birch and hazel woods visited during October its smaller relative, Macrotyphula juncea the slender club (right with bigger relative) has been found in great numbers. Poking around in the fallen leaves looking for this fungus has brought home to me how quickly nature works. In amongst the fallen leaves the first fungal webs were well established (left) the first stage in the conversion of the newly fallen leaves to humus to enrich the woodland soil for the next growing season. I have also been looking at fallen leaves in local hazel stands to see if I could find fungi growing on the fallen nuts. In Norway, a small fungus in the Mycena family has been found growing on hazel nuts but not so far in this country (see http://home.online.no/~araronse/Mycenakey/nucicola.htm ) so, nothing ventured nothing gained and my first visit was to a tiny patch of hazel wood on the RSPB Abernethy NNR. Quite quickly I started to find fallen nuts and, just occasionally, there was a fungus growing on them. Heart beating faster, something new to UK? Sadly, the fungus I was finding didn’t really have a stem and when I checked under the tiny cap, there weren’t any gills as such, so time to calm down. The fungus turned out to be a Discomycete, (a large and taxonomically difficult group of Ascomycetes in which the fleshy fruiting body is disk-like or cup-shaped) called Hymenoscyphus fructigenus, sometimes called the hazel nut fungus (right), and during an afternoons search I found about half a dozen nuts with fungi. Also growing on the buried twigs were a few fruiting bodies of jelly babies (Leotia lubrica) a fungus which really does look like its name! A few flowerless spikes of woodruff were also new to the site and a squawking jay was heard.

The field at the end of the Firwood road, recently threatened with lots of houses, was visited to see if there were any waxcaps, a group of fungi which if present in numbers, indicates a field of high conservation value, probably an ancient type grassland, with little past agricultural management (ploughing etc) and little use of fertilizers over the years. My visit found quite a few waxcaps probably 8-10 species including the blackening Hygrocybe conica (left) and the largest but less common Hygrocybe punicea (right) and worthy of a visit by a mycologist if possible. My timing couldn’t have been better. The local conservation group (http://www.bscg.org.uk/ ) had just managed to get a small grant together to allow a few potentially good waxcap fields in the local Highland area to be surveyed and this field was to be one of them; the surveyor being local expert mycologist Liz Holden. So I was able to tag along and point out a few of my locations to save time. The magical number of different waxcaps in a field to make it “important” is 12 but the mini-survey just missed this target by 1. However, this information is adding to the importance of the field with its good population of field gentians, moonwort ferns, and now waxcaps and should hopefully help if the field is threatened with development in the future. The field’s owners though will need to be watched, another field they own in Grantown, where a planning application was turned down because of its biological importance, was heavily fertilized last spring in an attempt to reduce its floristic interest, a real underhand act of vandalism. Sadly, these fields don’t have quite enough importance to receive any legal protection and slowly, one by one, they are being lost.

Nethybridge was to the fore when the now well publicised invasion of waxwings started back in October with the first birds being seen on 23rd. Whilst walking to the local shop I flushed a group of birds from one of the gardens and initially identified them as starlings. I did think at the time it was an odd place to see a small flock of starlings and it wasn’t until my visit to the shop again the following day, that I realised my mistake. The group of birds were again flushed from a small rowan tree but this time they called and were instantly identified by their tinkly bell calls as waxwings. Within 20 minutes our near neighbours and chalet guests were watching the rowan tree when the seven birds returned to feed, followed a short while later by another five birds. The flock eventually grew to thirty birds, and as the last of the rowan berries were eaten, they moved on to a cotoneaster hedge nearby. I nipped down to the tree early the following morning and was lucky enough to get a photo of the birds perched in a neighbouring cherry tree, the photo eventually finding its way into the local paper. A few days later and there were reports of up to a thousand birds from residents and birders in Inverness. In addition a great spotted woodpecker was drumming by the house on 31st and more jays were seen, occasionally in oak woods but also in the Abernethy pinewoods. A bird obviously on the increase locally.

The month ended with another good find locally. Mid-month I met up with a lady from Edinburgh who was the original finder of Hydnellum cumulatum, a tooth fungus which was new to the UK when found. I was interested to know exactly where it had been found and Mary was quite keen to see where I had found it and to see it again for the first time since her find in 2002. The visit went well and there were a good number of fruiting bodies at the site we visited. On our way back from the site Mary mentioned that an unusual fungus had been found recently in another ancient pinewood, and it was what is known as a resupinate fungus (Resupination generally means being upside-down, supine, facing upward) and that it had been found, as the description suggests, on the underside of fallen pine branches. The fungus, salmon fungus (Erastia salmonicolor),doesn’t have a stem, but is stuck, limpet-like, to the underside of branches. On our way back to the car we checked a few branches but didn’t find the fungus which, Mary informed me, had only been found in three woods in the UK. Hmm! One of the tooth fungi that I had been looking for during this years survey that currently hasn’t been found in the UK also grows at sites in Norway under branches and fallen logs, so this was a habitat I had been checking – so now I had two things to look for when out and about. My first nice find under the edge of a fallen log was a bonny wee fungus called Mycena pterigena (left) growing on fallen bracken stems. With an afternoon spare late in the month I thought I would dedicate an outing to lifting fallen branches and realised that a similar purple coloured fungus to the salmon fungus was growing under some logs, but only where the log was actually touching the ground. The search narrowed to this type of log. The purple fungus also seemed to only be on logs that had been lying for a couple of years and were starting to loose their bark though the purple fungus was only growing on the bark that remained. Bingo! A few logs later there was a pinky coloured limpet-like fungus growing on the underside of a log (right) and when I applied a little amount of dilute, liquid potassium hydroxide (known as KOH or K in the lichen world) to the fungus, it turned a nice cherry red, a key identification feature. A small sample was taken and sent off to Mary for checking and a few days later the good news arrived to say that my fungus was the salmon fungus adding a new UK site and another new record for Abernethy. Brilliant.

Another great month, enjoy the read

Stewart & Janet

Archie's first birthday by Finlay

Autumn colours & old hay rake

All photos © Stewart Taylor