As I type we have probably seen the last few curlews depart,
the Loch Garten ospreys have headed south at the end of another successful
year, and everywhere we seem to be seeing swallows gathering on wires and
feeding over lochs and fields as they also prepare to head south. It’s also getting darker in the evenings, but
robins have started singing again at dawn around about 6am. The early part of August saw me visiting the
last two plant recording tetrads (2 x 2 km squares) down at Insh and
Newtonmore, the Insh site producing the only site for moonwort during the
summer survey of under-recorded plant areas within the Cairngorms National
Park. In all, 15 outings were made to
cover my commitment of 5 tetrads with the first outing in early June and my
last in the first week of August. A
total of 3500 plant records were made covering moorland species on the tops of
hills at 550 metres to the wide mix of habitats in woodland, fields,
stream-sides and lochs. I have yet to
work
out just how many plant species were found but heather featured a lot as
did several sedge species and some of the speedwells. One plant that caused a few problems when
found was prickly sow thistle (Sonchus asper), however its spiky leaves
clasping the stem quite tightly helped, and a check of the dandelion type seeds
under the microscope ensured I had the
right species. The smooth sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) can
be quite similar but under the microscope the seeds lacked the “transverse
wrinkling between the ribs” found in that species. I have recently visited a
site for this sow thistle and now having seen it in the flesh
can see there is
really no comparison. Thankfully, all
hawkweeds were recorded as just that, the plants being just too difficult to
identify to species apart from the obvious ones. Butterflies and dragonflies were recorded as
found and a road-side wall near Insh village produced a good population of
Peltigera britannica, the nearest recent record being my find in Inshriach
Forest in 2011. The Newtonmore outing
also produced something that wasn’t so welcome.
At the end of July I attended a botanical recording evening on Crown
Estate land near the Lecht ski area with the aim of trying to re-find hairy
stonecrop (Sedum villosum). This
involved following a small burn, the plant often being found in seepage lines
close to running water. As we walked
along we came across one of the heavily used management “tools” employed on
sporting estates, a fenn trap placed on a log across drains or small
burns. The land we were on is let by the
Crown Estate to sporting interests and
grouse shooting is one of the main
objectives, so the land would be under quite heavy predator control. Fenn traps placed on logs over burns, and
with a protective cage on top, is a legal way of controlling small predators
like stoats and weasles, provided they are checked regularly. Inside the cage and held in the jaws of the
trap was an adult dipper which was long dead showing the trap wasn’t regularly
checked. The trap was also set within a
hundred metres of a way-marked path which was a bit of a surprise. I’ve seen a mouse caught in one of these
traps but never a bird – until this year.
On my outing near Newtonmore I firstly came across the biggest number of
red-legged partridges I’ve ever
seen, birds presumably reared for sport
shooting later in the year. We can’t retain
our native grey partridge as a breeder in this area so these birds are reared
and released as a “substitute”. Having
completed the major part of my plant recording walk I was on my way back to the
car when I though a small burn might produce a few more plant records for the
day. Lemon-scented fern was found by the
burn along with lesser spearwort as was a log based trap. The trap wasn’t even operational with the
fenn trap lying on the ground by the log and again a wild bird was held in its
jaws. So much for regular checking
which, if it had been carried out, there wouldn’t have been any evidence of the
wrong species being caught.
Goodness
knows just how many of these legal traps are out there in the countryside,
along 800 metres of one of my butterfly transects I can count 4 of these, all
openly visible from a public road. So
far, no birds. If you want to follow a
good blog trying to make sporting estates operate a little better see Mark
Avery’s blog, Mark and his writing and petitioning is the reason why M&S
have decided not to stock red grouse in their stores, worried that they could
be found to be supporting the fact that in 20013 no hen harriers bred in
England on grouse moors.
 |
| Gland hairs on prickly sow thistle |
 |
| Seed - prickly sow thistle |
 |
| Seed - smooth sow thistle |
 |
| Peltigera britannica |
 |
| dead dipper |
 |
| unidentified bird in trap |
The early part of August saw Janet preparing for her
Tweedcraft stall at the Abernethy Highland Games and with the tent installed on
the 8th all was ready for the Games the following day. Daughter Laura came over to help and with
over 3000 visitors to see the running, dancing and pipe bands, her help was
essential – I’m not too good at selling tweed
bags and ear-warmers! A bit of torrential rain during the night
before the Games had us all worried but the weather for Saturday turned out
just right for the event helping to ensure a good turn-out. Events take place from about 10.30 on the
morning of the Games with the official opening, by the special guest for the
day at 1pm. A minutes silence was
observed in memory of those lost in the First World War a hundred years ago and
this was followed by a “thank you” to Bill Templeton, our near neighbour, who
had died that week and who had been a volunteer helper at the Games over many
years. With all the crafts delivered and
installed in the tent I headed off home to spend some time checking sites for
tooth fungi (more about that later) but also to re-visit the wood ant nest
“destroyed” by fire a year earlier. A
visit to the nest a week after the fire let me see that many of the ants had
survived
(see October 2013 blog) and that they had already started to re-build
the totally destroyed nest, so what would it be like 12 months after the
fire? I had seen some good progress via
a visit in about May, but what I found on this visit was absolutely
amazing. Despite the surrounding
woodland still showing all the evidence of the fire, the ants had been working
their socks off, and a huge nest was there for all to see. If I hadn’t seen and photographed the
destroyed nest I would have been struggling to know that anything had happened
as there in front of me was a nest whose base was almost as before and with its
domed top probably two-thirds the height that it was before the fire. This was a big nest before the fire and all I
can assume is that many of the ants went deep underground during the fire and
all
were available to help with its re-construction once the fire was out and
the damping down work had been completed.
A new nest starts off with just a few ants and over many years the domed
structure starts to grow as the ant population grows. However, this was a very large, well
established nest and though no count can be easily made of the numbers in a
nest, colonies can number up to half a million ants, though many of the big UK
nests probably contain no more than 100,000 individuals. If only half of that number survived the fire
that
is still a large number of very determined individuals tasked with
re-building their nest. Whatever, it was
still an amazing sight to see such a large structure produce in just one
year. Well done ants! My surprises though didn’t end there. As I wandered around the fire site
particularly in the area where the fire had started and smouldering probably
for several days before “taking off”, burning so deep into the ground that two
mature Scots pines had fallen over.
Around the edges of the root-hole craters I started to notice lots of quite
shiny, dark
shiny brown crust-like growths many with a bright yellow margin. This had to be a fungus whose growth was
directly linked to the fire and the more I looked around the more of them could
be seen, some coalescing impressively together.
Hopefully this colourful fungus would be easy to identify in the books
so a single sample was removed just in case spores needed to be checked. The Collins Guide to British Mushrooms and
Toadstools lead me to what else
but the pine fire fungus (Rhizina undulata), a
fungus whose spores lie dormant in the forest soil until activated by the heat
of the fire and as they grow, the underground mycelium attacks the roots of
adjacent pines possibly leading to their deaths. Watch this space though the reaction won’t be
in the same time-scale as the wood ants re-building their nest!
 |
| Massed pipe bands Abernethy Highland Games |
 |
| Wood ant nest after fire September 2013 |
 |
| Same wood ant nest August 2014 |
 |
| September 2013 |
 |
| August 2014 |
 |
| Pine fire fungus (Rhizina undulata) |
 |
| Rhizina undulata spores x1000 (oil) |
What happened a few days later would have been very welcomed
if there was a forest fire. At about
10pm it started to rain, something we had had little of during the previous few
weeks and throughout the night the rain was heard battering down on the Firwood
metal roof. By 10am the following day it
had stopped but during the twelve hours about 50mm of
rain had fallen with
possibly more in the surrounding hills.
I wandered down to see how high the River Nethy was and as I approached
the roar of the water let me know that the river was incredibly high. None of the usual rocks were visible and
quite a bit of woodland debris was rushing by.
Despite taking lots of photos few gave a good interpretation of the height
and speed of the flow so once home I thought it would be worth visiting the old
pack-horse bridge in Carrbridge, the one, which a couple of weeks earlier had
seen lots of the locals doing a bit of pool jumping during a nice warm spell. Jumping off the bridge on the day after the
rain would have seen a quick journey down the rivers to the coast with no
survivors. As I approached the road
bridge adjacent to the pack-horse bridge one of the Carrbridge residents said I
should have seen it a few hours earlier because by the time I arrive the water
level had fallen by 6-7 feet! Pictures
of the bridge at the height of the spate
appeared on national BBC news and
quite a few folk made the trip to see something that has rarely been seen
before, the River Dulnain gaining so much height that the parapets either side
of the main arch of the bridge were also under water. There were similar tales from Deeside and
Glenlivet and in Kingussie the normally tiny Allt Mor over-topped its banks and
washed away the road under the railway line where it crosses the B970. Within a few days all rivers were back to normal
and, apart from finding debris several feet up on the river banks, it was hard
to see there had ever been a problem.
The local weather station, Straythspey Weather, found that August 2014
was the wettest month yet recorded since its records started in 2000, the
189.7mm beating the 155.9mm from April 2012.
 |
| Carrbridge pack-horse bridge with typical river flow |
 |
| Carrbridge pack-horse bridge 11 August 2014 Photo © Andrew McMullen |
Next year I should remember not to offer to take a group out
to see the normally abundant tooth fungi.
I had to work hard to find many species in September 2013 after offering
to take the local U3A out to see some, and, with something similar on offer to
members of the Highland Biological Recording Group for the end of this month, I
was once again struggling. The need for
a bit more rain probably during June and July was probably the
reason and I knew
I was in trouble when the normally abundant Hydnellum peckii (devil’s tooth or
bleeding tooth fungus) was nowhere to be found.
A little odd because at the end of June a single fruiting body of this
species along with several of the normally rarer Hydnellum caeruleum (blue
tooth) had already appeared by one of the tracks. Added to this was a request from Maramedia
(the timberman beetle film folk) to see if they could film some of the
Abernethy tooth fungi for their forthcoming film for the BBC (Highlands:
Scotland’s Wild Heart). With this double
request I started doing the rounds of the known
fruiting spots, a little like
the 5 year survey but on a smaller scale, and with time a few locations were
being found though the devils tooth was being just that…a devil!. It’s okay finding the fungi but when a
two-day filming slot is entered into the diary there is then pressure on trying
to find species that will be looking their best at that time. Quite interestingly as I wandered I started
to accumulate species so that as the filming days approached I had found all
but one of the 14 species known to grow in Abernethy. I did though have worries that the brown and
blue/black species wouldn’t be “sexy” enough to make it onto your TV screens
plus the fact that I had said the film team would need to involve expert Liz so
that if they had queries about fungus ecology, the right person would be to
hand (I just look for things!). Despite
searching and with only a few days to go before filming there was also the
possibility that the cameras would head for Deeside where Liz had also found a
few tooth fungi. Five days to go and I
came across a brilliant display of blue tooth, probably the most colourful for
the cameras, but with temperatures into the twenties Celsius they soon dried,
grew and lost their colour. One fruiting
body though, slightly
hidden under heather was still in good order and could
meet the filming requirements. Abernethy
ended up as the place to do the filming and Liz drove over to meet up with
Simon (Producer) and Raymond his cameraman.
Over the next three hours the blue tooth was filmed, then Liz was filmed
undertaking typical recording activity along the track, followed by some
beautiful Boletus edulis (Cep) and B. pinophilus (pine bolete). There are huge populations of these edible
Boletes this year probably thanks to the deluge. Highlight of the mornings filming session was
seeing over 60 swifts regularly feeding high overhead. Mid-pm and it started to rain so we moved to
check out the second area of good tooth fungi species in the hope that it would
stop. The rain stopped, the warmth
returned and the
midges came out in there thousands just in time for Liz to do
her bit to camera. How they all stood
still to film I don’t know and at one stage Raymond had to remove the lens
filter because of the number of midges on it.
The midges might play a part in the final film there were so many clouds
of them. Day two and I returned to point
out four tooth fungi species that might make good footage and left Simon and
Raymond to do the filming. As we parted
Simon asked me to keep an eye open for any good fly agarics, probably our most
colourful fungus, and I said cheerio. As
I drove back down the track a field with birch trees pinged a light on in my
head so I parked up. I looked for any
colourful waxcaps in the field without success and eventually ended up in the
birches where I couldn’t believe my eyes.
On a slight bank (100% perfect for filming, gills, stems and caps all
visible) there were about 20 fruiting bodies of fly agarics, from newly emerged
ones through to fully opened caps in red and white
splendour and within half an
hour I was saying cheerio again with a very happy film team in Agaric heaven. With all the searching around, the afternoon
visit by the HBRG members went very well, the leader knowing where all the
species were, having visited the tooth fungi sites several times during the
previous week. We passed the occasional
fly agaric but the visit ended with the visitors peering into a small hole,
behind moss and heather, in an old quarry to see the tiny fruiting bodies of
Hydnellum gracilipes, and despite this fungus being re-found in 2010 after
being identified as new to Britain, the group were seeing a fungus that
probably less than 50 people in the whole of the UK have set eyes on! A total of 12 species were seen on the day
with one other species to be checked.
 |
| Hydnellum caeruleum |
 |
| filming tooth fungi |
 |
| Pine bolete left with paler Cep on right |
 |
| Liz & film crew brave the midges! |
 |
| Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) |
The species seen on the day (total 12) are detailed below for the two sites visited:
|
Species
|
Speyside Way
|
Dell track
|
Species
|
|
Bankera fuligineoalba
|
*
|
*
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum aurantiacum
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum caeruleum
|
*
|
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum concrescens
|
to be checked
|
|
to be checked
|
|
Hydnellum ferrugineum
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum gracilipes
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum peckii
|
*
|
*
|
*
|
|
Hydnellum cf.
scrobiculatum
|
*
|
|
*
|
|
Phellodon melaleucus
|
*
|
|
*
|
|
Phellodon niger
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
Phellodon tomentosus
|
*
|
*
|
*
|
|
Sarcodon glaucopus
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
Sarcodon squamosus
|
|
*
|
*
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Grand
Totals
|
6
|
9
|
12
|
Once again, the annual gathering of the Harley Davidson
motorbike enthusiasts took place in Aviemore with their Thunder in the Glens
“ride-out” taking place on the Saturday.
There was one big difference though this year – Janet had her craft
stall in the heart of the
gathering in the Aviemore Centre! The tent and crafts were set up on the Friday
morning and ran through to the end of Sunday afternoon. Despite the event having taken place over the
last 18 years (with the ride-out probably a little more recent) we had never
ventured into the heart of the gathering and it was quite an eye opener to see
the scale of the set up in the Centre.
Trade stands, an avenue of tents selling everything from leather goods
to kiddies windmills, and many outlets selling motorbike gear, with the thump
of all-day music somewhere nearby. We
were never aware either of just how many participants camped on
the Centre’s
spacious lawns, all within a temporary security fence. Packing the sales good up at the end of each
day made for an early start next day to lay out all the tweed items again, but
everything went off without a hitch. An
unusual experience but not too sure whether we will be regulars at future
gatherings. Having set up the stall on
the Saturday I dashed home to prepare the chalet before grabbing camera gear to
see the bikes pass by on the nearby A95, a place I had visited once before with
grandson Finlay to see the bikes heading back to Aviemore at the end of the
ride out. The location was quite nice in
that the Kincardine Hills
 |
| Harley Davidson camp |
 |
| £30,000 - each! |
 |
| Hygrocybe conica |
With the tooth fungi filming team due I wondered whether the
rare Bankera violascens had re-appeared in the Sitka spruce plantation near
Forres and visiting the wood I could see several fruiting bodies, some newly
emerged. The floor of the spruce wood
was covered in fungi most beyond my ID capability, but in the sides of some of
the plough-lines there were lots of Phellodon melaleucus (the grey tooth)
fruiting bodies, many cascading down the sides
of the plough-lines and looking
very photogenic. A possible species for
the film crew. Fly agarics were starting
to appear as was another fungus belonging to the “hare’s ear” group of fungi
(Otidea). Somewhere in the back of my
brain I seemed to remember a request from Brian at Kew for samples of any of
this group of fungi so I popped a couple into a box for checking and drying at
home. If you check any field guide on
fungi you will usually see about three or four species described and often what
you have collected will “match” one of these.
However, my MapMate database lists 8 species and if you go to the
“bible” the FRDBI, you will find 12 species listed. Hence the request for specimens to find out
how many species Britain supports and to add a little more to our knowledge of
their distribution. A visit to the Dell
Wood NNR spruce wood just up the road from Firwood again found lots of fungi
fruiting with a similar looking Otidea species growing in good numbers in some
areas. The specimen I took home to
check, dry and forward had spores which looked the same as my first collection,
but we will see what Brian says (Otidea leporine confirmed). A similar, but larger specimen was found a
few days later near Cawdor and just up the road from the house the first “dark”
Otidea was found on the roadside verge, the latter belonging to the “toad’s
ear” group and could possibly be Otidea bufonia. Watch this space. This Dell Wood Norway spruce plantation has
also started to give up new
locations for the green shield moss with at least
10 locations found so far. Hopefully I
can persuade owners SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage) to keep this interesting
bit of woodland rather than pursue the removal of all exotic tree species
policy (within designated sites) which has seen most of the same trees felled
in Abernethy despite the fact that they also supported this rare moss. Before the rains, the numbers of butterflies
on the weekly transect
were quite high, particularly for green-veined whites
and scotch argus, the latter producing over 100 contacts again on just one
count section, as a couple of years ago.
Down came the rains along with the first two frosts and the numbers
dropped. It was a real shame to see the
state of the scotch argus butterflies encountered on the same count section a couple
of weeks later. Small heaths have been
having a good year and it was nice to have a few contacts with
dark green
fritillaries though these were all related to a patch of flowering spear
thistles which appeared after that section of the moor was burnt a couple of
years ago. So far, only two weekly walks
have been missed due to poor weather conditions and these were the first two of
the year which isn’t that unusual. It
would be good if I could manage to walk the last four of the year to complete
an almost “full house”, something that might not have been achieved before.
 |
| Phellodon melaleucus |
 |
| Otedia leporine one of the "Toad's ear" fungi |
 |
| Scotch argus before the rains |
 |
| Scotch argus after the rains |
That’s it for another month. We vote tomorrow and have to hope that the ‘jam
tomorrow’ folk fail in their bid to break up our UK. Scotland has not been a nice place to be
recently with all the uncertainty of the last few months. Jam tomorrow – No Thanks.
Stewart and Janet
Prickly sow thistle
Mark Avery
Pine fire fungus (Rhizina
undulate) a scientific paper
Strathspey Weather
FRDBI
BSBI
Highland Biological Recording
Group
and how to join HBRG
 |
| Mouse on peanut feeder - a first! |
 |
| Frost & misty mornings return |
 |
| Green lestes damselfly with prey |
Photos © Stewart Taylor unless shown otherwise
