Hey, you missed a few!

October is that time of the year when we wave bye bye to the last of the summery things and start to get major hints that winter is on its way. The odd capercaillie on the road or track as I pedal in to work is typical in October, the last of the blaeberries, plant seeds and plant shoots to feed on on the ground before the birds transition to pine needles and bits of vegetation. Red admirals hung on for the whole month, enjoying a bit of an Indian summer mid-month. The lights were dusted off, charged and attached to the bike again preparing for the misery of pedalling up the road in the dark and descending again at the end of the day in even blacker dark. To assist with lighting the way down the track after work the bike has a set of twin headlamps, a massive 10 watt one for lighting everything up and a 5 watt one for finding the edge of the track and the major potholes. Two lamps also confuses the rare motorist approaching me on my descent – wondering why such a thin car is heading his or her way. I suppose the orange reflectors on the pedals give it away, a thin car, twin headlights and funny orange yo-yos going up and down on either side. It works though, and all the motorists slow down a bit and thankfully dip their headlights. The lighting set was new last winter after my trusty Vistalite set, which had served me well for ten years, final packed up. £70 the new set cost, half the price of the Vistalites of ten years ago, and not quite as good. The clocks went back and the lights were needed for the descent but one was off as much as it was on, thankfully there was the second one. Back to the shop went the faulty one along with the original box which had all the information and receipts inside as proof of purchase. Jenny, at Cyclelife in Aviemore looked at the box and said “You got a bargain there, those lights retail at £110!” Taylor had managed to get two for the price of one. “That’s alright then” I said “cos only one of them is working!” Water during last winter had got into the lamp and caused its failure, so it’s back off to the makers to see why something that sits on a bikes handlebars, out in the open, had packed up so quickly because of damp.

Something quite unusual also happened last month, I had a three week break from work, possibly the longest time I have been away from work since we took the children to France before the eldest started school about 20 years ago. Time off had been planned to be available to help out Ruth following the birth of Archie, and well, it was kind of hard to get back into the work mode! Anyway, looking after Finlay for a few days was great fun and I have to blame Finlay for a major bit of recording work that developed during October. On the day when Finlay was practising his camera skills (see earlier diary and photo left) on an outing to the Craigellachie NNR at Aviemore we found a strange ochre coloured, thin pencil shaped fungus growing in the grass by the path. I remembered seeing one about 15 years ago when the late Peter Orton was at Abernethy recording fungi. A photo emailed to Liz (see http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/planning/inquiry/env_FungiReportPt2BlairtonLinks.pdf for a sample of her excellent work) confirmed that it was indeed Macrotyphula fistulousus var. fistulosus, the pipe club fungus (right) and that though Roger Philips Fungi guide says it is rare, Liz suggested that it was probably overlooked and under-recorded. This appeared to be possibly the case when returning from a search of one of the bogs by the osprey nest site for Dicranum mosses, I found 3 groups of the fungus growing under birches on the Osprey Centre car park. The next day I popped into four birch woods along the A9 and it was in all of them, and a visit to similar woodland on Tulloch Moor produced the same results. Aviemore, Kingussie, Loch an Eilean visits produced more records and a hop over the boundary into Moray produced what appear to be the first records from that county. Amazing, Liz was right. A brilliant bit of mixed hazel, birch aspen wood in Tulloch produced so many records that I re-visited the site in the hope that a much rare relative M. fistulosus var. contorta might be there, and after half an hour of searching there it was, growing, just as the books say, from a one inch diameter hazel twig half buried in the ground (left). Its commoner relative grows in the same way but usually from small twigs of broadleaved trees that are fully buried in the ground, though a few can be found growing from twigs on the surface. Thanks Finlay. A bonus of this search was an amazing meeting with a none too worried roe deer which, for a few camera grabbing seconds, didn't seem to think I was so close. With fieldfares cacking over head I took off my rucksac, got out my camera and managed to take a quick photo of our brief encounter.

The warmer weather mid-October saw many of the late summer dragonflies still on the wing. At the dragonfly viewing deck by the Speyside Way Sympetrum danae the black darter and Aeshna juncea the common hawker were still on the wing on the 17 October and a few days earlier a single Sympetrum nigrescens the Highland darter was regularly resting on the decking hand-rail. The latter has been a rare beast on the reserve and something I have searched for in some of its previously recorded haunts. It would appear though, that the Highlands and Islands has lost one of its local species because the Highland darter has been subsumed into the family of Sympetrum striolatum, the common darter. It has been deemed therefore that the Highland darter is not a separate species as decreed by A. E. Gardner way back in 1955, but was, as some Odonata experts had suggested for a while, just a variety of its commoner relative. Whatever, it still remains a rare beast within Abernethy, the red males adding colour to our dragonfly fauna.

It’s October so time for an 800m high outing, not Bynack Mor this year but the Shepherds Hill above Glen More. Major engineering works a couple of years ago by the Forestry Commission created a new path from the Ryvoan Bothy almost to the summit and then from just over the summit back to Glen More. The sheer numbers of people ascending the hill on the old path was causing so much erosion that something had to be done. The old path had never been a maintained / managed path, and followed a few lines that added to the erosion problem, too steep, boggy ground etc, and whilst the new path looks new and a bit of an intrusion on the landscape, with time is should vegetate over and blend more into the hillside. I digress. This trip was to enjoy one of the best views over Abernethy and the surrounding lands from the summit hence the name Shepherds Hill or Meall a’ Bhuachaille and also to have a look for quite a rare lichen for which the hill is one of the main sites. It was a glorious day and on the way up the hill I passed about a dozen people who were making their way down. Messing about taking photos near the top it was amazing how the wind had increased and the temperature had dropped markedly so on went the light-weight gloves, woolly hat and waterproofs. But there it was, Alectoria ochroleuca (Alpine sulphur-tresses) growing out of the wind-clipped vegetation in amongst other commoner Cladonia type lichens (below). This is a lichen that is only found above 750m asl. and is mostly found in the Cairngorms. If you check the distribution map at http://data.nbn.org.uk/gridMap/gridMap.jsp?allDs=1&srchSpKey=NBNSYS0000018168 you will see it is a lichen we share with a site on St. Kilda.

The 18th October was quite a good day, Jensen Button became F1 World Champion and Beth Tweddle became a world champion gymnast and guess who the Prime Minister didn’t ring to say well done?. In the local home Derby in Lancashire it was Blackburn 3 – Burnley 2, 17 years since the two teams last met in the league. Thankfully there were no riots! The following day I fancied a wee wander on one of Abernethy’s smaller but very interesting bogs in the hope of finding a new location for the rare Dircranum bergeri moss. There were a few hummocks of Sphagnum austinii and the straggling runners of berryless cranberry, but no bergeri. It was starting to get a little dark as I left the bog and I have often thought I should devote a bit of time to checking the stumps of felled Norway and sitka spruce along the edge of the bog for the green shield-moss. I had to pass a couple of sitka stumps as I made my way back to the track and I couldn’t help myself and I bent down to have a quick look. Nothing on the first one but another nearby looked a more likely site, and sure enough there were a couple of capsules from the last growing season. I wouldn’t have mentioned this find but felt I had to due to its significance. In the last diary I mentioned a find by Oliver on a wood ant nest, which, a couple of weeks later, turned out to be the brown shield-moss and not the 100th new site for its close relative for last season. So here, at my feet, was the 100th new site for Abernethy (right) to conclude a year of searching, and on the stump next door was the 101st! Stop! Despite missing out on the 100th site Oliver’s find was however significant and a visit to the site last week showed that there were 18 brown shield-moss capsules on the ant nest, the biggest single group that has been found in the last few decades.

Way back in May I took a photo of a group of rowan trees so heavy in flower that they looked like trees covered in snow. The weather was quite kind at the time and it looked like the bees were getting on well with the job of pollination. By August I had to trim a couple of branches on the rowan in front of the chalet because the weight of the berries was bending the branches so much that you couldn’t see the bird feeders. Amazingly, none of the branches snapped under the weight and I started to look forward to the invasion of thrushes to devour the crop. The first few redwings arrived on 9 October followed on 12th by a few fieldfares but little happened in the rowans. As Julie and Neil were leaving the chalet on 30 October they reported a few of both species had been eating the berries along with a couple of bullfinches (left), but it wasn’t until a few days later that main invasion occurred. There had been a lot of fieldfares in nearby Tulloch from about the 20th but suddenly on 4 November tens of thousands of fieldfares arrived in the area and within a day the rowan tree in front of Firwood had been stripped bare and a lot of birds were starting to feed in the tree in front of the chalet. Getting my bike from the shed at 7.30am on 5th, 200-300 fieldfares (right), a few redwings and blackbirds erupted from the garden and the cack-cack-cack of fieldfares was everywhere. Getting my bike from the shed at 7.30am on 6th, nothing and the chalet rowan was still quite heavily laden with berries! Even in the wider area few birds were to be found. Why the sudden mass departure, particularly with so much food still available? Even as I type, the chalet rowan has still lots of withering berries.

So not a bad month, a new grandson, a 40th wedding anniversary, fungus guidance from Finlay and the longest holiday for ages! Brilliant.

Happy reading
Stewart & Janet

All photos © Stewart Taylor