The early part of April was mixed with Janet off to see her mum for a week and grandson Finlay continuing his chest infection with short bouts in hospital. Thankfully all back to normal now and granddad is back to getting beat in the back garden version of football. Archie’s assistance in finding things continued when a visit
together to one of my “important” aspens at Insh to look for spiders produced a record of the rare moss
Orthotricum obtusifolium, a moss I had only seen once before. Early in the month we managed an overnight low of -11 degrees C followed a few days later with couple of inches of snow. A rise in temperature brought rain on the 14th and with the temperature in double figures for a few days, snow on the hills saw a rapid thaw. As waders and wildfowl began to settle in on RSPB Insh Marshes reserve, the whole marsh area disappeared under water (above), hopefully, for the last time during this breeding season.
I suppose the biggest national event of the month was topping of the record charts by the ‘Ding Dong’ song from the Wizard of Oz. There are some very devious thinkers out there. Slightly horrified by the cost of the ceremonial funeral for Britain’s longest serving prime minister of modern times, I decided to disappear out of the house to leave Janet to watch the proceedings in peace, despite light rain. Amazingly, the rain played a part in what would be found that day. Parking up by the quarry on the road to Loch Garten, I checked a lone aspen, without success, for the wee twig fungus covered in the last diary. A patch of bare gravel by the
road has the tell-tale ear-like apothecia of what I call the “diddy lichen” (being hopeless at remembering the correct Latin name) known in the books as
Peltigera didactyla. The rain was killing off the bird song with just the occasional chaffinch and coal tit declaring their territories. On a wee track leading away from the road the verge at one location had been quite badly disturbed by a visiting dog so I thought placing a nearby fallen pine branch on top of the hole might deter more digging. This track is quite important in the tooth fungi world, being the same track where
Hydnellum gracilipes was re-discovered in 2010. As I placed the small branch over the hole I noticed some small, black, fungal cups poking up through the bark of one of the thinner branches (above right), cups not too dissimilar to the ones I had been finding on the aspen twigs. Similar but not the same, so a few were sliced from the branch for checking at home. A little further along the track, amazingly, another set of cups were found on another fallen pine branch, not bad considering the
cups were no more than 2-3mm diameter, and had probably swollen a little due to the rain. It looked like this was going to be something fairly common, though not something I could remember seeing previously. Back home and Big Ben had been switched back on and was chiming once again, and a tiny drop of water was applied to the fungus in preparation for cutting tiny sections for checking under the microscope. A photo was taken of a cross-section of the fungus (above left) whilst even thinner slices were “squashed” prior to being checked at x1000 magnification to see if spores could be found. Plenty of spores were visible and these were measured (slightly banana shaped and 1 x 7ยต (microns ie 1/1000th of a millimetre) and photographed via the camera tube on the microscope. “Black cup fungus on
Pinus sylvestris branch” was typed into Google but despite lots of searching, nothing similar was found so photos were sent to expert Liz
to see if she could help. Liz’s suggestion was a fungus by the amazing name of
Ionomidotis fulvotingens, though it had never been found on Scot pine before. Its identity could be fully confirmed if one of the cups produced a red/brown pigment if wetted with the chemical, potassium hydroxide, something which happened instantly as I watched the reaction under the microscope. The fungal records database of Britain and Ireland showed just 19 records, all from broadleaved trees and with just 2 records from Scotland both made by Liz herself! So, yet another species to look for and by the end of April another half-dozen finds had been made – all from Scots pine. Interestingly, two recent finds of this fungus on the database were by Martyn Ainsworth and Alan Lucas, the two people who helped re-find
Hydnellum gracilipes on the track mentioned earlier. Amazing, and all thanks to Maggie!
The threats from huge housing developments locally started to raise their heads again and two emails received on 26th told of applications being made for 96 houses in Carrbridge and 58 houses in School Wood in Nethybridge, both being the subject of earlier applications. In addition I had been asked to look for any species of importance (that I could identify) at a planning application site in Kingussie, as mentioned
in the last diary. I’ll not mention the 1500 houses on Rothiemurchus Estate. Reading through the environmental survey information for the Kingussie site I found a reference for a tiny patch of a rare lichen locally –
Peltigera britannica – having been found by the surveyor, though in the report he wasn’t 100% certain that the ID was correct. An approximate grid reference was given along with a poor photo of the general area, and, because the record hadn’t found its way onto the local or national databases, I thought it was worth trying to re-locate it. As I made my way across the fields, the proposed housing site, I disturbed a group of oystercatchers and a couple of foraging mistle thrushes. As I made my way down towards Ardbroilach Road I entered the strip of woodland (now outside the footprint of the development site) where the lichen had been found. Eventually I found the leaning birch tree in the photo and after a bit of searching around found what looked like a suitable site, a bit of rock, jutting out of the wooded slope. Sure enough, a
tiny scrap of
Petligera was there, and looking at the wee black dots on the leaf of the lichen, it was indeed
P. britannica. The lichen was growing just a few metres from a wall running along the side of Ardbroilach Road, overhung by many of the trees I was standing in. To me, the rocky wall looked a more suitable site for the lichen and sure enough when I peeped over it I could see more of the leafy lichen. Clambering down onto the road there wasn’t just a small population, but huge patches of leafy growth over about 50 metres of the wall, potentially the largest known population in the area. A hugely important bit of wall and something local folk need to be made aware of. Next job. Even better news arrived today as I type. A letter has arrived informing me that the planning application for the houses has been withdrawn. Hopefully sense will now prevail and an application will be made for a smaller development aimed at servicing the needs of folk working and living locally. Sadly an email arrived today informing me that a fresh planning application would be made in June!
During April it was possible to undertake three of the possible five butterfly transects though all of them were walked in less than ideal conditions. The east to north wind direction all month has meant that even when the sun has been shining, temperatures have only just reached the bare minimum required for the walks to take place at 12 to 13 degrees C. Consequently each visit has meant that a pleasant walk has been made around the eleven sections but with little hope of seeing any butterflies. By the end of the month just few small tortoiseshells had been seen, mostly in sheltered sections of road and farm fields where the temperature was a couple of degrees higher. Flower growth has also been poor and for those butterflies on the wing, food
must have been hard to come by. Similarly, bumblebees have been scarce with a few along with a few honey bees visiting the catkins of local goat willows at the end of the month. The first swallows were seen over Tulloch Moor whilst looking for butterflies and the birch woods of Insh produced the first willow warbler, tree pipit and redstart. If the weather stays the same as currently I doubt we will see any swifts this year as there won’t be enough insects in the air for them to feed. The Loch Garten ospreys have again been having fun and games with the male bird breaking the first two eggs to be laid possibly thinking they weren’t his own. Amazingly the female produced four eggs so the pair of them are now sharing the incubation of the two surviving eggs. Starlings are nesting in two of the Firwood boxes and also in the chimney of the house being re-furbished across the road. We also have a blackbird nesting in the conifer hedge by the garage and blue tits in the usual box close to the chalet. Good luck to all of them. There are also changes taking place in the middle of the village with a new path and bridge connecting the road by Firwood with the Speyside Way path in the village. This arrangement still means a section of the Spey Way has to be negotiated on the road past Firwood, but eventually it is hoped to by-pass all the houses so the path joins with the Spey Way just up the road from our house. A pond is to be dug shortly, adjacent to the walk-way and the dense conifer wood close to the football pitch/highland games field is being thinned out. It will be good when everything is finished and the earth-works have settled down.
So, what about Professor George Dickie? It all starts with a visit to a part of Abernethy Forest to look for an aspen tree. During the 1980s whilst the Warden of the RSPB Loch Garten Reserve (the fledgling Abernethy Forest Reserve) an area known as Garten Wood was bought from the investment arm of a
pension fund and a start was made repairing some of the damage done to woodland and forest bog habitats. Bogs had been drained and most areas of woodland planted up mainly with Scots pine, thankfully without ploughing up the place, and also exotic conifers had been planted in the wetter sites. Over a few years the exotic conifers were removed and large areas of plantation Scots pine thinned, with several winters spent attached to the handles of a chainsaw. Novel management techniques were trialled, high stumps were left to decay for crested tits, the tops cut off some of the easier to climb trees (yes, off the ground and without a harness), and some areas left to thin themselves. In the bogs, once the exotic conifers had been removed, log and peat dams were built to stop the flow of water and to re-wet the previous areas of bog woodland. Today, some of these restored bogs look like they have never been interfered with, the sedges and sphagna
are back and on some sites the stunted Scots pines have slowed their growth to start to resemble true bog pines. Dragonflies abound and many bogs are home to the brilliant raft spider (above right)
Dolomedes fimbriatus. By thinning out the dense planted pines many birch and rowan trees survived creating the most diverse (though still young) area of mixed species woodland in Abernethy. As the woodland was changing a new method of monitoring birds was trialled, point counts, based on a grid one hundred metres square across the woodland area, where birds would be counted for five minute periods as you worked your way through the woodland from point to point. Early one morning (counts had to be completed before 8am) at
point count location 25, I noticed a very young patch of twinflower starting to spread, growing out over the heaps of brash from the woodland thinning work. As I made my way to where I thought the aspen tree was I thought I would re-visit this patch just to say hello for old-times sake, and was amazed by just how far the runners of the plant had spread. The leaves of the plant though looked a bit odd with most leaves covered in black dots. Being a member of the British Plant Gall Society I thought it worth taking a photo of the leaves along with just a couple of specimens to see if the dots could be identified. I began to wonder what I had found when there was nothing listed in the British Plant Galls book (Redfern and Shirley), and with twinflower being a rare plant, I wondered whether the black dots (fungal rust, smut whatever) could also be rare. A couple of the black dots were removed from the leaves and checked under the microscope to see if there were any spores but none could be found, so time to send off a few emails complete with leaf and microscope photos to the experts. Brilliant Liz was the first to respond and suggested the name of
Metacoleroa dickiei (big dots on leaves above), a species she had seen on twinflower leaves on Deeside.
The next email was from Martyn at Kew who suggested the same name but asked for a few leaves to be 100% sure. On receiving the leaves Martyn confirmed that the ascomycete fungus was indeed
M. dickiei but also let me know that he had found a second smaller fungus on the same leaves (small dots on leaf above)! A week later the name of
Sphaerulina leightonii was confirmed for the second fungus. There are, currently 7 records on the fungal database for
M. dickiei the first of which was made by Dickie in 1845, and just 3 for
S. leightonii, only one of which has a collectors name attached, W. A Leighton in the 1850s. For both records Dickie and Leighton where the first people in Britain, nay the world, to find and describe the two species. In the case of
S. leightonii my collection (identified though by Kew) is probably the first, in the field, since the fungus was first described. Slightly unreal! Interestingly, this isn’t my first encounter with Prof Dickie. A few years ago I was asked by work colleague Andy, to keep an eye open for a small fern found
growing occasionally, under old road bridges. A fern I found under a bridge at Glenlivet turned out to be the one –
Cystopteris dickieana – Dickie’s bladder fern (above left and underleaf sporangia above right)). A botanist AND mycologist of note. And so, a round of visits started to check other twinflower patches to see how regular both fungi occurred and with both species turning up at most sites. However, at one twinflower patch in Abernethy I spotted something that looked a little different and leaves from that location are now at Kew being checked to see if any spores can be found. No spores, no name, so fingers crossed the team at Kew (Martyn and Puni) manage to find something. And the aspen tree? I failed to find it and now begin to wonder whether I imagined my sighting or perhaps George Dickie lent a guiding hand? So far I’ve found
M. dickiei at 13 sites and
S. leightonii on the same leaves at 7 of the sites and on its own at 1 site. There is no doubt that these fungi are relatively common locally on twinflower leaves, and if I had the time to go round all the known sites in the area, we could accumulate a lot more records. Many thanks go to the team at Kew for all their help.
Late in the month a recce visit was made to the location I had been allocated for this years BTO woodcock survey, a repeat of one carried out ten years ago. Indications from the breeding bird atlas returns in the intervening period, had suggested there had been a decline in the breeding woodcock population, so a good time to do a repeat survey. The site allocated to me was one that had been surveyed previously and was one
of the locations generated at random where woodland was shown on the ordnance survey maps, allowing for an even spread of recording location across suitable habitat in the UK. My site was near Carr Bridge and not too far away from the amazing hump-backed Sluggan Bridge built on the route of one of General Wade’s roads in 1728. A recce was needed as the recording visit would start 15 minutes before sunset and the recording period was to be 75 minutes meaning exiting the site just after dark. The recording location turned out to be on a forestry track in semi-mature plantation woodland so finding my way back to the exit track, through plantation woodland, in the dark, could be fun.
One major recording outing in April was a trip over to Deeside to a couple of aspen stands to see if the wee aspen cup fungus could be found there. I knew of the small wood at Crathie but had never visited the one at the Muir of Dinnet NNR. The run over the tops was quite impressive being not too many weeks after the
snow and wind had caused so many roads in the Aberdeenshire area to be closed. The snow on one side of the road to the Lecht ski centre was five to ten feet deep, and all the way down to Crathie on the infamous A939 road, you could see where JCB’s and other heavy machinery had been used to cut through the snow drifts which at the time were just too deep for the normal snow-ploughs to tackle. Red grouse searching for food and winter-coated mountain hares were regularly seen on the roadside snowfields, and lots of skiers were making the most of pretty good conditions. The Dinnet aspens are very impressive, with many old trees but also a big effort by SNH to protect young trees from grazing animals. A little worrying though were
the number of mature aspens which had snapped off at their bases, something having weakened the trees at just above root level. This is something I have never seen in all the aspen woods I have visited where the trees seem to be amazingly strong, despite natural areas of decay being present on many trees. Trees occasionally blow over, but in those cases the root-plate ends up in the air but still attached to the tree. No root-plates were seen at Dinnet, indicating that this was probably a fungal infection and not a wind-blow event. Fallen trees though meant lots of decaying twigs and branches the ideal habitat for the wee black cups of the
Encoelia fascicularis fungus. My first find was on a small twig just lying on the ground and an age was spent photographing and taking notes just in case this was to be the only find. However, the twigs and branches of the next fallen aspen had a good population followed by the next and the next, developing into what has to be the biggest population currently known about in the UK. The fungus wasn’t just on the twigs as has
been the case with earlier finds, but there were large numbers of cups popping up through the bark of quite big branches (above left) making me annoyed with myself for not bringing the bigger camera and normal sized tripod. My tiny gorillapod tripod isn’t much use for anything more than a foot from the ground. The main thing though was that the fungus had been found at a new location, a first for Aberdeen-shire and adding another site to the few others currently in Scotland. Amazingly, I also found a tiny population in the aspen wood at Crathie. I also came across a private grave-yard on the edge of the Dinnet aspens, the enclosing wall providing me with a few unusual lichens and mosses, the most photogenic being the moss
Schistidium crassipilum with its red capsules (above right) and growing on the top of the wall. A puss moth larval case was also found on one of the aspens, another new record for the NNR.
That’s it for another month, enjoy the read.
Stewart and Janet
Web links from the diary above.
George Dickie (1812-82).
Born (and died) in Aberdeen, became lecturer in botany at King's College there, then professor of natural history at the new University of Belfast (1849), and finally professor of botany at Aberdeen University (1860). Best known as an algologist, in his The Botanist's Guide to the Counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine, 1860, the 200 species of fungi are arranged according to Berkeley's English Flora, 1836. Ramsbottom (1963): 171; SC 1:
For NBN Gateway see:
http://data.nbn.org.uk/
The Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland (twinflower fungi)
http://www.fieldmycology.net/FRDBI/FRDBIrecord.asp?intGBNum=9066
http://www.fieldmycology.net/FRDBI/FRDBIrecord.asp?intGBNum=12177
Sluggan Bridge
http://www.carrbridge.com/index.php/History/bridges.html
BTO Woodcock Survey
http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/woodcock-survey
Muir of Dinnet
http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/designatedareas/muir_dinnet_nnr.pdf
Blown soil in Moray
Robin and crocuses
Red grouse at the Lecht
Photos © Stewart Taylor
