July was a month dominated by our pine martens: mum plus two
kits, and their regular visits to the garden.
Janet had been leaving a few peanuts out each evening on the deck by the
windowed garden doors and the ‘gang’ arrived to grab some food there before
heading over to the two squirrel feeders by the chalet. The young martens were obviously in the early
stages of learning how to forage and soon learnt that by lifting the squirrel
feeder lid there were lots of peanuts to be had. However, mum wasn’t too happy
when the youngsters sat on top of the lid whilst she tried to feed, and as with
previous years, the youngsters managed to tumble from the trellis but somehow
grabbed a-hold of the golden hop leaves and stems before hitting the
ground. We also became aware of one
young marten
making a constant ‘squeaking’ sound and seeming more interested in
playing and tumbling around rather than concentrating on feeding. This went on for the whole month and we began
to wonder if there was something wrong with it.
Via a series of photos, I could see one youngster seemed to have
something wrong with its eyes which, when closed, seemed slightly swollen. In addition to the family we also seemed to
be getting visits from at least one more adult which fed exclusively in the
squirrel feeders. As the days progressed
it was obvious that the family weren’t too bothered about us moving about in
the house when feeding on the garden deck and over time Janet quite happily
watched the group tucking in to the peanuts and raisins with the house door
open. Some nights one
or two hedgehogs
were also feeding on the lawn as the martens were feeding on the deck and on
one evening an inquisitive kit walked across the lawn to see the hedgehog which
promptly rolled itself into a ball. At
no time was there any attempt to attack or see off the hedgehogs. When our grandsons visited for an over- night
stay they were able to sit by the doors and watch the martens and when Laura’s
cat came to stay for a couple of weeks, cat and marten family seemed quite
happy to co-exist despite the inquisitive cat getting up close to see which
other animal was sharing its garden. By
late in the month the marten group had reduced to mum and the squeaking
youngster which made us more certain that there was something not quite right,
particularly when it still seemed more interested in play-fighting with mum
rather than tucking into the food. By
the end of July, the visits had just about ended so hopefully all the family is
now living independently of each other.
Completing the wider countryside butterfly surveys have been
a bit of a test this year with the lack of regular days of sunshine. A survey on the 8th had to be
called off half-way as the sun disappeared but not before a speckled wood had
been seen, confirming a new location becoming established following a sighting
in 2016. Slowly, this butterfly is
moving inland from the coast. A riband
wave
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| Riband wave - (Idaea aversatawas) |
 |
| Choke fungus (Epichloe baconii) |
moth (Idaea aversatawas) was also seen as was another location for the choke fungus on
Agrostis grass stems - Epichloë baconii, so not a bad set of records despite
the weather. The survey was completed on
the 13th but in less than ideal conditions with green-veined white
(2) and ringlet (10) being the butterflies seen. With sunny skies and warmer conditions
arriving on the 18th I just had to do the survey again and though
there were less g-v white’s (1), ringlets increased (29) and common blue (1)
and small heath (1) were additions. It
was the confirmation of speckled wood once again that was the most satisfying
with 1 in the first section but with 3 together in section 5 confirming the
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| Speckled wood |
butterfly really is becoming established.
The butterfly survey follows the same route as my BTO breeding bird
survey where a 1km OS map square is split into 10 recording sections, each 100
metres in length, the first 4 being in commercial forestry followed by a nice
100m section of bog, before crossing the 1 km square to completing the second 5
sections along a minor road with a mix of farmland and woodland habitats. With the thermometer showing a temperature of
around 270C, this was one of the better weather days for looking for
butterflies. However, the days recording
effort wasn’t complete and after a friend reporting good numbers of helleborine
orchids at a known site near Tomintoul, I hopped in the car for an additional
evening outing. The first photos I have
for this site
 |
| Dark-red helleborine, group and close up |
are from 1984 when the mix of broad-leaved and dark-red
helleborines were much higher, the reduction probably being linked to pollution
from an adjacent road combined with past verge cutting and an increase in the
local rabbit population going off the number of flower-spikes currently being
nibbled. However, it was nice to find
eight dark-red helleborines (x9 being the highest recent count) along with a good
number of broad-leaved. In an adjacent
woodland, the choke fungus Epichloë typhina on a stem of cock’s-foot grass (Dactylis
glomerate) was a first for me in this area.
It is a bit difficult to know whether this is new to the area or not
because over recent years this fungus has been ‘recorded’ but when checking the
records the grass species is not always correct. The most up to date guide is as follows:
Epichloë baconii on Agrostis capillaris and A. stolonifera
Epichloë bromicola on Bromus erectus
Epichloë clarkia on Holcus lanatus and H. mollis
Epichloë festucae on Festuca rubra
Epichloë sylvatica on Brachypodium sylvaticum
Epichloë typhina on Anthoxanthum odoratum, Dactylis glomerata, Deschampsia caespitosa, Phleum
bertolonii, P. pratense and Poa spp
All a bit complicated but the above list was created by B.
M. Spooner & S. L. Kemp after checking many of the species in the RBG Kew
collection.
The major pastime for July has been daily weekday visits to
Raigmore for my radiotherapy treatment, departing home at 7.45am, returning by
about 11 – 11.30am. Meeting the mix of
folk going through the same procedure has been an interesting experience with John
all the way from Stornaway, Christine and Sandra from almost across the road
from the hospital, Connor with his amazing tales
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| Raigmore Hospital from A9 |
and broad Irish accent and
Alison who had to delay her bike ride from Land’s End to John-O-Groats to
undergo the treatment to mention but a few.
Throughout the month the Radiotherapy staff have been brilliant, always
happy and encouraging but a little mystified by my “where are you off to today”
replies of orchid counting, butterfly survey and looking for fungi! When I asked Jane if it
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| Treatment underway and the impressive '£2m machine' |
would be okay to take
a photo of the ‘linear accelerator’ treatment machine, she offered to take the
photo of machine complete with yours truly in situ and with my modesty intact! However, the daily visits to the hospital
started to develop into a typical Taylor recording event. To ensure the body was in the right state
loo-wise, when going into the waiting room, I got to the hospital by 9am to
enable time for a walk round the hospital grounds for about 40-45 minutes. On the first walks, I saw plants that were
quite different to my home area so the notebook came out and wee lists started
to develop along with the occasional plant sample heading back down the road to
be properly identified. After a couple
of days of casual recording I changed to systematic recording complete with
rucksack and
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| Fumaria muralis top left and Fumaria officinalis top right confirmed by flower length F. muralis 12mm and F. officinalis 6-8mm. |
specimen bags and GPS for accurate location details for those more
unusual plants. With so much land linked
to roads and buildings lists of disturbed ground species grew but was I dealing
with common fumitory (Fumaria officinalis) or common ramping-fumitory (Fumaria
muralis), flower size turned out to be the key ID factor. Marsh woundwort (Stachys palustris) I
realised had leaves without stems whilst its commoner relative hedge woundwort
(Stachys sylvatica) had leaves with stems.
A very abundant plant by a small burn to the east of the main building
looked familiar, one of the umbellifers, but could this be the one that made me
feel ill after handling it whilst on holiday in South Uist – hemlock
water-dropwort (Oenanthe crocata)? It
sure was, so one to remain quiet about
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| Hemlock water-dropwort |
 |
| Round-leaved cranesbill |
when chatting to hospital staff! The same water body was also home to a row of
very healthy looking elm trees along with the best mix of plants from the
hospital grounds, tutsan, tansy, white campion, purple toadflax and wood avens,
to mention just a few. An ID query with
Vice County Recorder Ian alerted me to an old record for round-leaved
cranesbill (Geranium rotundifolium), a plant he had seen a few years earlier.
So, every cranesbill was checked carefully but all I found initially was
doves-foot cranesbill. Ian had a good
grid reference for the last find location and a careful search of the general
location confirmed that the plant was still there, in a very non-descript
location by a tarred path! This is its
only location in the north of Scotland. Day
by day the list grew and many days saw me arriving home with a few plants to
check. A couple of plants had fungi
growing on them and these were identified and a single lichen made it to my
notebook – Peltigera didactyla in gravel around a road sign. By the middle of the last week of visits I
was finding it difficult to find more plants that I was
 |
| All gone. Poppy flower and seed-head remains bottom photo. |
confident in
identifying and recording really did come to an end when, on the 28th,
the ground staff emerged with their strimmers and lawn mowers and cut down
everything growing on level ground leaving heaps of grass some of which was coloured
with the remains of purple fumitory and red poppies! Phew, wasn’t I lucky and my list of 93 plant
species wouldn’t have been possible if my treatment had been a few weeks later. By the 31st of July I was almost
at the end of my treatment,
with just a few more visits to make. My walk round the grounds that day found
swallows all around a muddy pool collecting nest material and in the
clover-rich grassland around the Heli-pad bees were busy visiting the
flowers. Hopefully, this area would be
spared the mowers. Once home I printed
off a card and photo to assemble as a thank you card for the staff for the last
visit.
Travelling the A9 road on a daily basis you start to realise
the heavy casualty rate caused by passing traffic. One stretch of road, just two lanes but with
a very wide verge on one side, was home to a breeding pair of oystercatchers
with recently hatched chicks seen during my first trips north. Slowly and inevitably most of the family
ended up dead with decaying bodies lying in the gutter for the duration of my
trips north. Roe deer were regular
casualties along with the odd hedgehog and, over the weeks three dead badgers
were seen. I was very surprised one day
to see a gang of about ten greylag geese feeding on a verge but all having
disappeared the next day apart from a dead one lying by the road. There were occasional rabbits and, near the
high-point of Slochd Summit, an occasional mountain hare. Small birds were occasionals as was a single red
squirrel. Common gulls made the most of
some of this free food but not without one or two not taking off quickly
enough. Verge cutting also took place
but at some horrendous cost; a single machine on or close to the verge with a
convoy of at least three wagons all warning of ‘verge cutting ahead’!
In early July, I used my visit to Inverness to see how the
only local population of small cow-wheat (Melampyrum sylvaticum) was getting
on. Since my last visit in June 2011 the
adjacent plantation of exotic conifers had been clear-felled but some of the
tree stumps were covered with climbing corydalis (Ceratocapnos claviculata) and
on the root-plate of a wind-blown tree was a clump of trailing St John's-wort (Ceratocapnos
claviculata) a plant I don’t see too often near to home. A deer fence had also been installed but once
over it I headed over boggy ground to a drier knoll where the
 |
| Small cow-wheat |
cow-wheat was
still growing. The small, egg-yolk
yellow flowers (free-range yellow of course!) identifies the plant from its widespread
cousin, common cow-wheat, and before lying down to take a few photos a quick
count arrived at just over one-hundred flower spikes. Little seemed to have changed, the number of
flower spikes were about the same, the tree cover was similar and the flowers
covered no more than a couple of square metres, a slightly vulnerable
population. Reading the SNH Species
Action Framework (SAF) paper (link at end of blog) I realised the plant relies
to a degree, on wood ants which help to spread the seeds about and that quite a
bit of work had been done on monitoring populations and seed had been collected
to try and establish new populations in new areas. Having wandered around the site I was aware
that there wasn’t an ant nest to be seen, so little
 |
| Trailing St John's-wort |
chance of the plant
expanding its population. In addition,
the plant is an annual, relying on good seed production each year to ensure the
following year’s population. Vulnerable
indeed! Andy Scobie, one of the authors
of the SAF paper, was also helping me with the Flowerfield orchid count for a few
years and when I asked him about the ants and seeds he confirmed that few of
the sites he had visited had good populations of wood ants. If I wanted to see the unusual seeds, I would
need to re-visit the plants in early to mid-August, just at the time the seed
are dropping from the plants.
Another outing saw me heading off to count the bog orchids
I’d found at a new site a few years ago, a good boggy area with usually a few
other things of interest. Large heath
butterflies were the first interesting finds and a Formica exsecta ant nest
turned out to be the same one recorded from exactly the same location many
years ago. As I stopped to record stuff
I noticed a small moth resting on my
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| The 'rucksack moth' |
 |
| Brown china-mark moth |
rucksack, irrespective of whether it was
on my back or not. It stayed with me for
most of the afternoon and turned out to be Lozotaenia forsterana one of the
largest of the Tortricid (micro) moths. Another
moth also made itself known in quite an obvious way by resting on the water
surface of peaty pools. This was the brown
china-mark (Elophila nymphaeata) a moth I had seen in this area
 |
| Bog orchids top and Cruet collar-moss bottom |
previously and
they are quite unusual in that their larvae are entirely aquatic, feeding on
water plants. The bog orchids didn’t
disappoint and between flower-less bulbils and flowering spikes a count of 76
was made. Whilst carefully moving around
the orchid site I also spotted an unusual moss growing within a patch of
sphagnum - cruet collar-moss (Splachnum ampullaceum) so called because of the
unusual swollen neck of the capsules. Although
I didn’t see any the moss grows on animal dung in boggy areas and as I wandered
around more of the bog I found a second cushion.
Just as everything was kicking off about the possibility of chlorinated
chicken from the USA making its way to the UK after Brexit, I read an
interesting article in The Times (22 July 2017) reinforcing why I don’t eat
farmed salmon. I made this decision
several years ago when on holiday in North Uist and saw an enormous boat, laden
with huge bags of food for feeding the salmon being reared in a farm just off
shore – fish being fed to fish, in huge amounts. I was also aware of the damage these farms
are having on the native wild salmon populations and to sea-life and loch-life in
the areas where they are located. The
article appeared at about the same time as one of the outdoor TV programmes
showed a fish farm in action and salmon being hovered up and spewed out of a
pipe into a waiting boat. Little did I
know what else takes place in the salmon rearing process. One of the fish farms mentioned in the
article had seen production fall for the first time in years due to the
combined effects of flesh-eating parasites, algae and amoebas. At this farm, a Norwegian well boat had just
hosed up 16,000 fish at the end of a two year long growing cycle from egg to
plate. The next bit of the article
though was the most worrying. “By the
time the adult fish were on board the Norwegian well boat they had been doused
in hydrogen peroxide and flushed through tanks of fresh water to
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| Lochmaddy in North Uist with fish farm just off shore |
treat amoebic
gill disease. Their food had been spiked
with a chemical known as Slice and they had been bathed in pesticide to rid
them of sea lice which can eat them alive.
At a farm in Loch Leven wrasse and lumpfish are put in the pens to eat
lice off the salmon.” At the same time
articles appeared in the press and on TV about the over exploitation of the
wild wrasse populations to be shipped off to fish farms to try and tackle the
sea lice problem. The scale of this
exploitation was made clear on a TV news item on 21 June 2017, “BBC Scotland
understands that about three million wrasse are needed to support the 60
million salmon produced in Scotland, but only about 600,000 come from [wrasse
rearing] farms. The rest are caught in creels
and transported to fish farms.” A few
additional bits from The Times also gave the following information. “Across Scotland last year the average weight
of fish fell from 5.6kg to 5.2kg because the longer they were left to grow at
sea the more lice levels increased and other diseases inhibited growth. Mortality rates also doubled from 7% in 2014
to 14% in 2016. According to Salmon and Trout Conservation UK about 20 million fish
died on farms in 2015 and last year.”
And the fish pumped into the well boat?
They made their way to the mainland in chilled tanks, were pumped off to
be taken to the slaughterhouse and then to a factory to be smoked, sliced and
packed ready for the shops. No thanks.
When doing the butterfly orchid count in Tulloch in late
June I noticed the keeled garlic plants were again growing well and when farm
owner James said the ‘other’ group of plants was doing even better this year, I
thought I had better have a look. My
count of 70 plants at the first site was a bit low and just on 100 were
counted. A new site by the cattle pen
produced another 70 and the site close to
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| Dasineura aperines gall in centre of a cleavers seed-head |
 |
| Dasineura aperines gall distribution map |
the sheds had an amazing 470 giving a
total of 645– quite a sight. Making my
way between locations a fungus on some willow leaves caught my eye but looking
down the rampant stems of cleavers/goose grass looked like they had been
attacked by something so time for a few photos and a small sample to take home
to check. The Plant Galls book led me to
a gall, caused by a wee midge, called Dasineura aperines, something I’d not
seen before and with few records in the UK.
In the same area, there is also hugely important progress to report – we
have a contractor lined up to modify the stock fence round one of the aspen stands to
deer height. Despite lots of toing and
froing Davie and son Danny are all set to undertake this work early next month
following a site visit at the end of July.
Late in the month there was a Highland Biological Recording
Group outing to the River Dulnain near Carrbridge. It was well attended and had a good
cross-section of expertise to record species of interest as we progressed along
the Sustrans Route 7 from the road to the river. Early on a gall on the leaves of several
young birches by the track was something I’d not seen before containing the larvae
 |
| Anisostephus betulinus galls on birch leaf |
 |
| The exquisite one-flowered wintergreen |
of the gall midge Anisostephus betulinus.
On the river shingle tiny plants of eyebright were covered in an orange
fungus which, when checked once home, turned out to be the same one that
infects colt’s-foot leaves as well as Scots pine needles - Coleosporium
tussilaginis. Golden ringed dragonfly
was also seen by the river. I also made a
return visit to the one-flowered wintergreen site near Grantown just to get my
head around just how many plants were popping up all around the ex-rhododendron
sites. There were certainly hundreds of
basal leaved rosettes and every so often small groups of flower stems with the
distinctive hanging single white flower, hence its Latin name Moneses uniflora. This will be an interesting site to watch
over the coming years.
So, despite the mornings being taken up for 20 days of this
month with drives up and down the A9 a few outings were also possible but
perhaps the inquisitive wee moth was wondering why there was an important loo
roll in my rucksack!
That's it for another month, enjoy the read
Stewart and Janet
Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey – Butterfly Conservation
Small cow-wheat species framework document
Salmon and Trout Conservation UK
Cruet Collar-moss (Splachnum ampullaceum)
Badenoch and Strathspey Conservation Group
Mapmate recording database
NBN Atlas
Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland (FRDBI)
BSBI – Botanical Society of the British Isles
Highland Biological Recording Group (HBRG)
 |
| Sawflies on willow tree possibly Nematus pavidus |
 |
| Gassy webcap (Cortinarius traganus) |
 |
| The large hoverfly bee-mimic Volucella bombylans |
