Whoa! Too good to last? Those heady days of 20+ degrees centigrade disappeared just as
quickly as the month of March, and as April appeared over the horizon so did the clouds. The weather-folk did say we were in for a shock after the warmth of March and the real shock came in the form of a white covering from mountain tops to Nethybridge and surrounds – snow! Thankfully Janet got the craft fair at Badaguish out of the way before the snows and chalet visitors David, Anne and Marie had a successful visit to Caper-watch, but by mid-week the arctic blast had arrived turning everything “bright and crisp and even”. Perfect timing to progress my tooth fungi write up for Field Mycology, but with cabin fever setting in after a day I headed out, along the B970, down to the River Spey via
Tomachrochar and then along the river to Broomhill Bridge. The pink-feet were still present in one snowy field with an estimate of about 300, with 3 whooper swans by the river. Farmland waders were gathered on one particular field, possibly ploughed, harrowed and sown, so lots of bare ground but mostly covered with snow. The same field had a group of about 50 golden plovers, brought down from the hills by the wintery weather and on the river there were still displaying male goldeneye. The whole circuit
produced 48 species of birds, and a new site for the wee pink lichenicolous fungus, Marchandiomyces aurantiacus mentioned in the last diary. On returning home a beautiful snow sculpture had appeared in the garden courtesy of Marie, a winter plumaged ptarmigan. The birch tree buds bursting into leaf at the time of writing the last diary were brought to a shuddering halt and even now in late May few are fully emerged.
It is always interesting visiting the Highland Biological Recording Group website (http://www.hbrg.org.uk/Frameset.html ) as there are often links to other web-pages, and a link in late March to the Scottish Fungi website which, like HBRG also has a species of the month in the hope that folk will go looking and add new records/locations for their database. This request was for the Ebony Cup fungus (http://sites.google.com/site/scottishfungi/species-profiles/pseudoplectania-nigrella ) possibly a rare species with few Scottish records and, always
prepared for a new challenge, I started looking! Liz, who writes the request, told me that her ebony cup site had produced a new crop of fruiting bodies this year and that the site was a moss covered detached branch of a Scots pine, so I visited possible sites. A paragraph in the diary doesn’t really convey the time spent looking for something new and with several hour-long visits to various bits of Abernethy pinewood and nothing found, there’s no nice ‘fists in the air photo’ to show success. However, what isn’t quite
so obvious is what else is found whilst looking – something I have mentioned many times before. An outing near the dragonfly pool on the Loch Garten road produced a new site for the green shield-moss, and another on the other side of the road a record of a strange wee beastie called a common ground-hopper - Tetrix undulata (above right), a rarer variety with longer wings found in the Highland pinewoods. Close to the track to Forest Lodge, searches found more good lichens on juniper bushes and for about 12
hours I thought that I had found the elusive Ebony Cup, it was a fungus, it was brown and it was cup-shaped, but it was growing on a buried bit of juniper stem. Photos were taken and sent to Liz who informed me that it wasn’t the ebony cup because it had reddish hairs on the outside of the cup but it looked like another cup fungus (left & right) by the name of Plectania melastoma. The interesting news though was that the only other record for Scotland
certain she would need to see a specimen to check under the microscope. So I had failed to find the ebony cup but by looking for it found something equally as rare and by continuing to search for it another good find was made but this time, of the jelly kind. In earlier diaries I have detailed the finding of jelly fungus on willows Exidia recisa or willow brain, on birch Exidia repanda or birch jelly but for the hat-trick I still needed to find Exidia saccharina or brown witches butter on Scots pine. The English names are
enough to put anyone off from looking for them but they are pretty good all the same. The last species was likely to be found in similar habitats to the ebony cup and on one evening outing I found what to me, looked like the hat-trick species (above left). To be certain Liz advised me to put a specimen on a glass slide, keep it moist and let the drop spores. It still amazes me that in the Kingdom of fungi something moist and with a consistency of jelly would have the ability to drop spores (dust sized particles), surely they just wouldn’t drop or if they did they would just stick to the fungus? The specimen was set up as advised and two days later a patch of greyness had appeared under the fungus, it looked like I had my spores. If the spores were circular with a little lump at one end they would be a fairly common species found on lots of decaying wood Tremella foliacea but if they were banana shaped I would have my hat-trick. With the slide under my high-powered microscope and the magnification set to x400 the spores (above right) came into focus – bananas – I had my third jelly fungus and a new species for Abernethy Forest
As the Easter weekend approached Firwood prepared itself for a two and a half day visit from grandchildren Finlay and Archie giving their playgroup leader mum a break from children during the Easter holidays. A visit to the coast via Inverness airport allowed for lunch as the planes arrived and departed, a new experience for Archie, and then a short run along the coast
to Nairn allowed us all to whack a few balls on the putting green and crazy golf course. We had really just got going when the sky rapidly darkened and within minutes it was pouring down, time for a rapid exit. We all piled back into the car and headed round to the harbour, just in time to see a brilliant rainbow over the boats in the marina. With the sun back out it was time for an ice cream and a walk to the river to see if the mute swans were nesting again on the island this year, and sure enough, both birds
were there, one on the nest and its mate curled up asleep by the nest. So regular is this event the council have erected notices asking visitors not to disturb the swans together with a little information about the birds themselves. On the way back to the car a strange plant growing out of the cracks in the pavement caught my eye, a circular leaf growing round the stem and topped by a group of white flowers, my initial guess was spring beauty Claytonia perfoliata, which was confirmed when we returned home. We were in a bit of a sticky mess after ensuring the ice creams were
eaten rather than ending up on the floor, so I didn’t manage a photo but you can see one at http://www.naturespot.org.uk/species/springbeauty along with the plants distribution. On day 2 we found toys that we had forgotten we still had before a walk to the shop for the paper and a small sweet treat and then with wellies donned we headed for Loch Garten just in time to see a canoe being
launched for the statutory paddle round the shore line. Why our open access legislation means that you can do anything anywhere whether a heavily designated nature reserve or not beats me, particularly when so many lochs locally are already geared up for water based activities. I digress. Amazingly, as we walked along, wee groups of chocolate mini-eggs kept appearing on rocks and tree stumps much to the delight of Archie and Finlay, and after a paddle in the ex-boatshed bay and an attempt by all of us to link hands around a monster Scots pine it was off home for dinner, bath and bed.
Over another two days, comments from a couple of experts were incorporated into the tooth fungi paper and finally the fourth draft was completed and sent of to the Field Mycology editor, with fingers crossed that it makes it into print. Photos were put in the post today to accompany the article. Locally, a farm wader survey briefing was attended at Insh Marshes ahead of four visits to the fields of the same farms I covered for the 5 year survey a couple of years ago. The
objective will be to record all breeding waders but to concentrate specifically on lapwings, identify breeding locations and around the beginning of June, see how successful the lapwings have been in getting offspring through to fledging. With the wader population continuing to decline dramatically year on year it won’t be long before we have our very own wader version of a silent spring. On the odd sunny day butterfly transects have been walked but with few butterflies being found, no doubt those that have emerged have frozen to death before getting the chance to mate, so far small tortoiseshell,
green-veined white and green hairstreak (bove right) have been seen, but to give them a chance we really do need a run of a few days of warmer weather. After a particularly wet day towards the end of the month – half an inch of rain by 9am – it stopped raining and by early evening it looked like we were going to get a bit of sun with the potential for a watery sunset. The cameras were loaded into the car and I headed off over Dava Moor to see the sun set behind the castle on the island at Lochindorb. As I approached the “Jesus Saves” rock by the A939 on the moor I was suddenly aware of a short-eared owl hunting over to my
right, just in time to allow me to swing round into the layby on the opposite side of the road. The camera was already set up with the 400mm telephoto lens and as I stopped the car, grabbed the camera, wound out the lens to 400mm and pointed it out of the window, the owl was flying straight towards me. I let fly with a series of continuous shots whilst at the same time trying to workout what camera settings I was operating with in the gathering dusk. As the owl swung round to fly round me again I realised I was badly under-exposed and that all the first shots were likely to be a series of blurred owl but as the owl passed the car, crossed the road and perched on a fence post, I had time to match the camera setting to the gathering darkness and take a few photos before it set off hunting again. Whilst the pictures of the owl on the post came out quite well just one of the first series of shots was worthy of reproduction, the picture of the owls head and blurred wings worthy of being classed as modern art! My attempt to get to Lochindorb for the sunset fell foul of the days of heavy rains, the road bridge crossing a normally tiny burn was completely under water.
On the way back I realised that I had never been to Huntly’s Cave, a climbing crag on the edge of a deep gully below the road just by the Cairngorms National Park
of the gully so I edged back from the crag and began to make my way down the steep wooded slope to the side of the crag. Being a steep-sided gully, the snows of recent winters had knocked over many ancient birches and willows and in other places trees had grown horizontally rather than vertically. When I see a big old willow growing horizontally (left) I know there will usually be something good in the world of lichens growing on it. The first willow I came across took about an hour to search and many of the rarer lichens I had been finding on similar willows elsewhere were all present. However, the rain was back and taking photographs under an umbrella is not to be recommended. The rocks higher up looked interesting and though there was little of note in the lichen world there was a clump of fir clubmoss, beech fern, oak fern, brittle bladder fern. Also moschatel, sanicle and woodruff all flowers of richer ground. April is not really the best time to go botanising (leaves but usually no flowers) and when I found a set of strangely shaped cranesbill leaves, I had to take a photo to check once I got home – shining cranesbill, another goodie. And so the day progressed, up the slope, down the slope checking rocks and trees as encountered, Peltigera britannica, Lobaria 
scrobiculata, Degelia plumbea all very local lichens in Strathspey and then several large plants of climbing corydalis (Corydalis solida) a plant with only 25 known locations within the National Park. The best finds though were saved until last. On a small, leaning aspen which hardly looked worthy of checking was a small patch of a green lichen with a series of volcano like pimples on its thallus (leaf), Lobaria virens (above left), miles from it nearest known neighbour. The last find
was a lichen that I have been searching for for months, it’s grey, it looks like a very common lichen which grows in the same sorts of locations (called frilly lettuce (rght) or Platismatia glauca) and there are fewer records in Scotland
good picture in my mind of what to look for, the main one being the network of sharp ridges on the thallus. It’s tricky enough to identify positively and even when I sent a photo to expert Brian to check he said that despite being 99% certain I was correct he would need a small sample to be 100%. Confirmation arrived a few days later that my identification had been correct. Phew.
That’s it for another month; sorry this edition is a bit late.
Enjoy the read.
Stewart & Janet
Lapwing in snow Carr Road
Snow on tops and sowing seeds
Sunset Rutven Barracks Insh Marshes
All photos © Stewart Taylor
