recently four miles away in Tulloch, feeding on juniper berries and a few insects that have been emerging on some of the warmer days. Yes, the temperature reached a balmy 12 degrees C on a couple of days and overall February was quite a good month with more days of sunshine than appears to have been the case further south. The longer days and the rise in temperature saw a mini dawn chorus developing by the end of the month, robins to the fore but also “singing” crested tits, coat tits and chaffinches spreading out into the forest. Mistle thrushes were also clearing their throats and the first song thrush was heard in the village on the 23rd where my first local wren of the year was heard singing on 19th. As the first snowdrops pushed up through the soil Janet was busy catching up on garden tidying jobs so abruptly stopped by the heavy snows way back in November. Best of all, warm feet in the wellies, but only when the sun shone! Will we get the “lambing snow
s” – watch this space.Quite a bit of the month was spent getting Ruth and family moved to their new accommodation near Kingussie, despite having promised everyone that my days of house removals was over! Re-wiring TV aerials, shelf fixing and sorting the wood burning stove was all good fun, but lending a hand to clean Ruth’s VW crew-bus every time a potential buyer turned up was something new and t
he smell of Turtle wax polish will live long with me. A real bonus though was driving to the cottage for the first time and saying to Ruth that her surrounding woodland looked like it might be good for leafy lichens just in time to see the first leafy growth of lungwort waving to us from one of the trees. Running through the trees was a nice wee burn and immediately I could see the potential for a good day out. Good move!Finding big willows in the Ryvoan Pass in Glenmore led to an invite from the Forestry Commission to attend a training day for land managers, similar to something that had been organised in Abernethy a few years ago. The aim of the day was to highlight the importance of their estates for lower plants and attending the day were three experts, Liz Holden for fungi, John Douglass for lichens and Gordon Rothero for bryophytes. I had been invited along to lead the way to the “big willows” if time allowed towards the end of the outing. The problems and expense of micro-managing for the lower plants was raised but just generally being a little “untidy” when thinning woodland was agreed as a possible way forward. The suggestion of leaving all dead trees standing if possible, the odd pile of logs left on the ground and a bit of small-scale ground disturbance by management machinery (there are few
manual chainsaw operators these days) would all be beneficial. Both Gordon and Liz have appeared in earlier Firwood diaries and it was great that on this day out, both would have a wee role to play. The first was Gordon (the original green shield-moss expert) when the group stopped in an area where large-scale removal of exotic conifers had taken place some ten years earlier. As the work on the site was being explained by Richard from the Forestry Commission, Gordon was beckoning me over to see something he had found right at his feet. On one of the rotting logs left after the felling were two bright green capsules of the green shield moss (right) – brilliant, and a perfect example of being a little “untidy”. The day had been organised by Plantlife Scotland, and in the delegates pack was a copy of their booklet on management aimed at helping this very moss! See http://www.plantlife.org.uk/uploads/documents/Green_Shield-moss_and_other_deadwood_mosses_mgt_guide_FINAL_PDF_lr.pdf . There was time to visit th
e willows on the way back to Glenmore Lodge and there was just time to show Liz a huge fungus that I had found on my earlier visit, growing out of a section of a large dead willow. The large, crumbly fungus which was way passed its best, did pose a problem for instant identification, so Liz took a small piece away with her. An email the following day gave the name of the fungus as – “chicken of the wood” or Laetiporus sulphurous, something new to the site. Not the best photo (left) but the log on which the fungus is growing is about two foot in diameter.I am afraid that the rest of the month has seen me wandering up
wee burns and rivers, checking out sites where folk thought they might have seen examples of these mighty willows. A wee burn near Dulnain Bridge produced a few rarer pinhead lichens but no big leafy species. A pair of buzzards were also busy nest building. The burn by Ruth’s cottage was better and produced lots of trees with lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria), a tree with Degelia plumbea (right) and an aspen with Pannaria conoplea with “fruits” or apothecia, something quite rare. The best outing was to 
try and re-find a big willow near the Allt Mor burn, running down from the Cairngorm ski-grounds. In perfect weather on the drive to the site, the snow capped Cairngorms (left), from the B970 road near Coylumbridge, were crying out for everyone to stop and photograph them, which many were doing. I parked by the ski-road and made my way along the Allt Mor trail looking for old willows along the way. Twice I crossed the Allt Mor burn running fast with melt water from the C
airngorms to check out biggish willows the second occasion proving too much for my wellies and one of them took a fill of icy water. I needn’t have bothered, the willow I was looking for was right by the path and what a beauty it was (right). The basal part of the tree trunk was angled at about 45 degrees allowing a less than vertical section to develop a great covering of mosses and lichens with masses of lungort, a minimum of 3 species of Peltigera and, in a slightly hollow section near the base, a group of greenish pinhead lichens – Chaenotheca furfuracea. The roaring burn was also quite impressive and the camera was pointed at it and with a slow shutter speed a classic photo of blurred water and rocks was achieved. The more I look 
for these ancient trees with their important populations of lichens and bryophytes the more worried I become about where the next generation is coming from. When ancient trees are found they are usually approaching death and, with the heavy snows of the last two winters huge limbs have been broken off and in some cases the trees themselves have been toppled. Birches, aspens, willows and rowans all reaching senility but with little evidence of the next generation of young trees becoming established. If these self-contained wee nature reserves are lost there is currently a gap of 2-300 years before anything similar will be available nearby. I think this has to be the next crusade to try and safeguard this important resource. Perhaps a start will be to try and measure all my important trees and get them added to the Woodland Trust ancient tree map though not sure this will provide any protection or regeneration action. Perhaps time to contact the amazing campaigner Ted Green – Ancient Tree Man http://frontpage.woodland-trust.org.uk/ancient-tree-forum/atfnews/news03/030103.htm , perhaps he can set me along the right road.
In between times, we managed to purchase a red deer carcass from RSPB so a day was spent skinning and preparing the venison for storage in the freezer. The best meat and organically grown to boot. Two outings in Abernethy proved interesting. The first was into a section of the Abernethy Reserve known as Rymore where a wander through a couple of bogs and along a wee burn lead me towards the
top of the “hill”. Along the boundary fence was one of the best areas of dense juniper scrub I have seen in a while the area looking ideal for pine martens and wild cats. Pine marten scats were seen but there wasn’t a sign of any cats. To aid my return to the road and car I got out my compass and headed straight back down the hill. Strange leaves were found which belonged to a whitebeam which must have been established via tree seed in a birds dropping. My straight line then took me towards a very large rock (an erratic?) and on the forest floor close by was a tiny plant of twinflower, possibly a recent seedling. The 50-odth site for Abernethy. A pose by the rock was needed to give an idea of size.The second outing was again a “cross country” outing wandering
through the pinewood towards Loch a’ Chnuic. In the distance a large mound caught my eye which, as I got closer, turned out to be a fallen Scots pine tree, as big as anything I have seen. A search of the sections of trunk which weren’t covered in snow couldn’t find anything unusual but some tiny leaves hanging from the underside of the trunk turned out to be
not liverworts but a tiny moss called Tetraphis pellucida and a sphagnum moss on the upturned root had the wonderful name of Sphagnum quinquefarium (left). Again, a pose by the leviathan was needed to show just how big it was. The tree looked like it had been lying there for a couple of decades and would continue to decay, in situ, over the next hundred years or so.Find of the month has to be another lichen, Peltigera malacea (see the December diary). A BTO bird recording outing to Kinchurdy, near Boat of Garten lead me through a mixture of brilliant bog, birch woodland and ancient aspens. Dropping down through the trees to check out one of the thawing lo
chs I came across a shallow, sandy depression and there on the sandy ground was a bright green lichen Peltigera leucophlebia, a lichen I had only seen once before. But what was that even brighter green lichen looking up at me?– Peltigera malacea, a species with only one other current inland site, in an ex-quarry near Nethybridge. The birds were forgotten about for the next hour or so as I searched the sandy hollow a little more thoroughly along with the surrounding heathery hillside. About 6 clumps of the lichen were found in the sandy hollow along with 3 more on the heathery hillside. Brilliant. A return visit was made with the “good” camera a few days
later and a copy of one of the photos emailed to the experts for full confirmation. “Do you realise that Peltigera mebranacea and didactyla (left) are also in the photo?” came back the reply – 4 in 1 (above right), not bad, particularly as the latter is also quite a rare lichen locally, meaning another trip to see how much was present and to take another photo! The last photo was forwarded to Mike at British Lichens to add to his amazing lichen gallery (see http://www.uklichens.co.uk/species/Peltigera%20didactyla%20small.jpg ). A nice end to a day’s bird-watching. On the same outing the first fresh shoots of cotton grass were seen on one of the bogs the reason why, a few days later when on another bird recording outing, I flushed 4 females and a male black grouse from an extensive area of boggy ground in Abernethy Forest. Black grouse, deer and sheep all head for the bogs at this time of year to feed on this first flush of new plant growth. Spring is a-comin’.Congratulations go to sister-in law Paula who was successful in her application for a place in this years London Marathon. Well done, and we all look forward to trying to spot you on the telly on the big day.
That’s it, enjoy the read.
Stewart & Janet
A frozen Loch a' Chnuic & Cairngorm
Sunset Crofts of Tulloch
All photos © Stewart Taylor
All photos © Stewart Taylor
