As you will have seen by now, sections of the BBC's Springwatch programme was beamed live from Strathspey with Simon King fronting this section of the nightly progr
amme. The BBC programme producers visited Abernethy way back in January to see what involvement the reserve should have, but from a long shopping list of needs just a few made it through to the programme. Crested tits featured regularly during the two weeks but when the nest close to Boat of Garten failed we were asked if we had anything that could act as a replacement. I had two nests which might have filled the gap but one was too far from the reserve track network and the other one was right by the road heading towards Loch Garten. The second nest was actually found by chalet guests Paul & Lesley as they walked back from the Osprey Centre and was just too public to film. Amazingly, the same Scots pine stump (right) was also used by cresties about fifteen years ago and featured on a 'live' taped interview that I did with a sound-recordist who wanted to incorporate information about the birds he was recording as well as sections of the birds calls and song. All those years ago the birds fledged young successfully but sadly this year, the nest suffered the same fate as the nest at Boat of Garten, predated by either great spotted woodpeckers, a pine marten or even a red squirrel. A day later I had another nest where the adults were feeding recently hatched young, and though the site was easily accessible, it was never filmed, the Grantown nestbox birds being the easier option to film activity inside the nest, something a little difficult to do with a natural nest site.One pinewood speciality that did find favour however, was the timberman beetle, involving Rab and his forest based sawmill. I checked out the site and sure enoug
h, there were several pairs of beetles visiting the uncut logs and the next day cameraman John Aitchieson and his assistant Sean Dugan were on site by early afternoon. Mating beetles were located and several single males and females were also on the logs. The timberman appeared in last year's diary (see "Rab and the timberman" 30 April 07). These spectacular beetles belong to the longhorn group of beetles with the timberman out-doing all the rest of the group by having enormously long antennae. In the male (right) the antennae can be up to six inches from tip to tip attached to a body that is only about an inch long, whilst in the female the antennae 
are about half that size. If you saw Springwatch then of course you will know all this! John filmed mating pairs, females laying their eggs under the pine logs bark and spectacular males wandering along the top of the logs. Simon appeared a few days later to do his bit to camera and of course, show a male beetle wandering across his hand - the only way to show just how big the beetles antennae actually are. Rab remains the star but sadly he didn't feature in the programme. He does though appear in my picture left. Thank you Rab.Another insect has been in my thoughts during the last few weeks as the warmer weather of June started to develop - the large pinewood hoverfly Blera fallax. Sadly few pictures of the hoverfly are available so go to http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/species/casestudies/pinehoverfly.asp to see what it looks like. One day I would love to get the chance to photograph this fly but first I have to confirm that it still resides in the Abernethy pinewoods and then the difficult bit would be actually seeing an adult on the wing and getting close enough to it to take its picture! In earlier diaries I have covered some
of the work I have been involved in by providing potential breeding 'pots' for the fly to use for egg-laying and larval rearing. To date none of the pots have been used so I moved on to the "Mark 3" breeding pot, well box actually. In the earlier 'pots' plastic containers have been used to hold the pinewood chips (being made left) and water that the hoverfly requires as a breeding site, the pot then being covered with a lid but with a hole for rainwater to enter to continue to maintain a pool of water over the chips. A few Scots pine stumps have also been hollowed out and filled with chips to try and create the same habitat. At the two sites in Strathspey where the hoverfly has been recorded in recent years, the latter artificial breeding hole has been used successfully (see http://www.mallochsociety.org.uk/blera-2003). So, my aim this time round, was to make a wooden 'pot', mimicking as closely as possible the pine stump site and
similar to what the fly would use in the wild. Sadly, I still need a small amount of plastic film in the make up of the box (right), to ensure water is retained, but hopefully the sheer amount of wood will overcome any problems the small amount of plastic might create. Time will tell. A bit of June sun wouldn't go amiss either! When the sun has shone patches of bird's-foot trefoil have been visited to see if the small solitary bee Osmia uncinata is still with us on the reserve. It is, and so far it has been seen at three sites.The 1st June was the time to start the second round of BTO Breedin
g Bird Atlas visits, the first ones having been completed during April and May. I didn't hang about and by 6th June all five tetrads had been re-visited for the required two hours and the data forwarded to BTO. I continue to record birds seen anywhere else via the roving records database. One such visit walking from Firwood, along the B970 and back through Mondhuie Wood (Speyside Way) produced a list of 57 bird species and all within about a mile of the house. Whooper swan and raven were the more unusual species but it 
was nice to see a few more swifts and house martins flying overhead and a couple of sedge warblers chattering away. The second visit was also made to the BTO breeding bird square close to Grantown on Spey. The lack of birds on the moorland site is more than made up for by the wonderful patches of pink coloured sphagnum moss dotted with the leaves of cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus) above. A meadow pipit erupting from your feet always indicates a nest and on this occasion the nest contained four eggs. The survey site is also a maintained grouse moor and evidence of predator control is
regularly encountered. Legal methods of predator control include Larsen traps for crows, fox snares and fen traps in rocks, boxes etc to trap small mammals. So it was encouraging to see the latter method correctly used when on my last visit, even though to many people the method still causes offence. On this occasion the fen trap was installed on a log across a ditch and covered with weld mesh to ensure that birds and non-target species couldn't land on the trap. You do have to hope though that the springing of the trap kills the animal outright otherwise it suffers a long and lingering death hanging upside down, in the trap, suspended from the pole.The last few weeks have seen all the puddles on the roads and the edges of the lochs turn an odd shade of yellow as the male pollen from the Scots pine tree
s has started to waft around the forest in search of flowers to fertilise. The general stillness of the weather has meant that this period has been a bit extended and on days when the wind did blow a little you would have thought parts of the forest were on fire as clouds of pollen was blown up above the trees looking a bit like smoke. As this has been happening the flowers from last year have been developing into new cones to provide the seed for regeneration, and for crossbill and squirrel food early next year. I couldn't resist a photo of one of the trees in all its energetic splendour.As the BBC Springwatch team arrived in the area Janet and myself welcomed two great friends,
Hugh and Sue Miles, back to the area where they had spent many happy but long hours working in the 1970s. When I joined the RSPB full-time in 1976, the RSPB ran a very successful films unit backed up by a great stills photo unit. Mike Richards was the stills camera man and Hugh was the film camera man. In the mid-1970s the Society embarked on a three year project to film the osprey in both its Scottish breeding sites and in the wintering area in north-west Africa and to ensure he was close to the action at all times Hugh, Sue and their family moved to Scotland for the duration of the filming period. There was great fun building high, no very high pylon hides to actually get close to the nesting ospreys and locating good fishing spots so that attempts could be made to film the birds actually catching fish. The latter efforts produced some of the most memorable footage ever of ospreys fishing and tested out the fairly new high-speed camera equipment to the limit, so that every movement was captured in superb "slow-mo". Everybody does it now, but
at the time this was cutting edge stuff and developed Hugh's reputation as a cool, professional cameraman, always looking for the best angle or technique to show the animal being filmed at its absolute best. Following the success of the osprey film Hugh went freelance and went on to film locally, "The Great Wood of Caledon" where finding cresties, crossbills, insects and plants tested skills to the limit, again producing a superb film about the ancient Caledonian pinewood, its ecology and natural history. The book which accompanied the film is well worth buying if you ever come across one. Filming otters in Shetland, polar bears in the arctic and snow leopards in the Himalayas followed, and who can ever forget the haunting Latin American folk music that accompanied "The Flight of the Condor". To see a list of some of Hugh's classics, visit http://www.wildfilmhistory.org/person/115/Hugh+Miles.html. The visit to Scotland on this occasion was to film salmon fishing on the River Spey for an eight part series to be titled, "Catching the Impossible", but as usual lots of other local wildlife was filmed as well, all with a part to play in the finished films. While Hugh is out filming and editing films in the studio Sue keeps the business side of the Miles film enterprise in order. For all Hugh and Sue's current projects see http://www.passionforangling.info/index.html.PS Guess who took Simon King out to introduce him to film making?
Mike Richards hasn't been taking it easy either since he left the RSPB, filming chimpanzees hunting other monkeys in the Tai jungle in Africa in 1992 to his most recent film on Tigers in Pench National Park in India, just a couple from a long series of award winning films that he has been involved in.
The work with the two mosses continues. The Dicranum bergeri (Waved fork-moss) work turned from just trying to re-find a couple of previous locations to carrying out a full survey of one of the bog sites that I had looked at. Why? Well, as is usual with me, when I go looking for these mosses, things don't always seem as they should be, and so it was at one of the sites. Within Abernethy reserve we already had the largest known UK population where, on one bog twenty four hummocks had been found by Gordon Rothero and Andy Amphlett in 2004. Having seen this site a hummock seemed to like growing on a damp sectio
ns of the bog. When I when to one site to re-find one of David Wood's records from 1991, the hummocks that he had found were in this sort of habitat. However, as I walked off the bog I found another hummock growing in what looked like less typical habitat, a bit drier, more heather and generally more vegetated. I took a GPS reading so that I could return the next day. One, two, three more hummocks...six, seven eight, hmm I thought, Taylor's going to be getting a reputation as the non-expert who finds rare mosses! Armed with a couple of bits of red and white tape, I systematically work my way back and forth across the bog, finding more and more hummocks. At each site a small sample of the moss had to be taken so that it could be checked under the microscope (above), so getting back from the bog late in the evening meant checking through the fresh material until about midnight. On 31 May the transects were complete, each sample had been initially checked by me and confirmed by Andy and out of the 68 collections made, only two were mis-identified by myself. The site had produced an amazing 66 hummocks, the best in Britain!The green shield-moss (Buxbaumia viridis) growing season is drawing to a close and all the logs and ant nests have been re-visited twice since the last diary. At all the sites, the capsules have
gone from being bright green and upright to brown and tipped over to an angle of forty-five degrees. From late-May the capsules started to 'peel' (left) and on a visit in early June my photographs showed the capsules and surrounding mosses covered in tiny white specks of dust which I assume to be gatherings of spores. I await confirmation of this. So capsules which first appeared in late October early November have had to survive until now to reproduce - a whole eight months. It isn't surprising then that just over forty-percent of them have been predated. Interestingly, a couple of capsules that have been knocked over recently, have also seemed to produce spores and the poor old capsule featured in the last diary has had yet more problems. On my last check the whole log on which the moss divot with capsule had been returned to following its last 'kicking' by sheep, had been completely destroyed by red deer, and once again the divot, complete with its capsule, was found upside down next to the devastated log. The capsule however, still seems to be producing spores so it was replaced, yet again, on a part of the log that hadn't been damaged! Watch this space. Whilst checking one of the o
ther logs there had been an emergence of flying queen wood ants during the day and the log was covered in them. Most of them still had their wings but one ant, as I watched it through my camera lense, started to remove its wings by bending sidewards and back and biting off the wings at their base. The picture shows the ant in the last stages of this operation and it still has one wing to bite off though this did seem to be posing a bit of a problem. There is a second queen ant in the picture which has already lost its wings. This is something I have never witnessed before.
It has been a good month for flowers. Whilst listening for a grasshopper warbler in Mondhuie I came across some of the tallest lesser twayblades I have seen on the reserve (left), at least six inches tall rather than the normal one to two inches. Just off the reserve I also came across an, as yet to open, spike of common twayblade, the relocation of a plant last recorded at this site by the late Mary McCallum-Webster in 1975. Amazing!A little further afield there were seven spikes of bird's nest or
chid (right) and even further afield (nr Keith) a show of hundreds of herb paris flowers (below) growing in a damp piece of woodland. The last time I saw this plant was when we were employed on the Hawsewater golden eagle project in 1973 and a few flowers were found in Naddle Wood. Well worth the miles and a very unusual flower when seen in such quantity.
Currently a little time is being spent looking for coralroot orchid at a site where it was last recorded in 1995, a green orchid in green grass growing in amongst green sphagnum moss. No problem then!
Whilst checking out the bird's-foot trefoil patches for Osmia bees I was lucky enough to come across a narrow bordered bee hawk moth which was hovering in fro
nt of the flowers and using its long proboscis to reach the nectar. A couple of days later we had one feeding on phlox flowers in the garden. This moth has fairly long antennae but it doesn't come into the league of the wee micro-moth that has been very abundant this year throughout the pinewoods. This is possibly Adela cuprella, one of the long-horn moths, appropriately named as with the timberman beetle.
That's it for another couple of weeks.
Best wishes
Stewart & Janet
nt of the flowers and using its long proboscis to reach the nectar. A couple of days later we had one feeding on phlox flowers in the garden. This moth has fairly long antennae but it doesn't come into the league of the wee micro-moth that has been very abundant this year throughout the pinewoods. This is possibly Adela cuprella, one of the long-horn moths, appropriately named as with the timberman beetle.That's it for another couple of weeks.
Best wishes
Stewart & Janet
A back-lit patch of "hare's tail" cotton grass just for Hugh & Sue!
and just for the record, a picture of the "other" cotton grass
All photos © Stewart Taylor
