Butterflies continued to do us proud into the beginning of
September with a report of a comma in Nethy Bridge but an email from a friend nearby
suggested I get to his garden asap because there was an amazing gathering of
butterflies on the flowers by their house, mainly on the purple heads of purple
elegance or Verbena bonariensis. The
rarest for this part of the UK was another comma but also 8 peacocks, a painted
lady, a red admiral and 2 small tortoiseshells, an amazing sight. The
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| Comma butterfly |
comma stayed around until the 9th.
The last butterfly walk of the year on
the 1st didn’t fare quite so well with just 2 speckled woods. On the way back from the butterfly transect I
called in to add numbered tags to the hazel protection rings mentioned in
the last blog and to install the last rylock
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| Hazel rings finished with birch shieldbug middle and hawthorn shieldbug |
circle after the extra stakes
arrived from the Boat of Garten BSW sawmill.
Interestingly, on several stakes installed around different hazels there
were quite a few birch shieldbugs (Elasmostethus interstinctus) a species that
can easily be confused with the hawthorn shieldbug (Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale)
a single specimen of which was also seen.
It would be interesting to know why these fairly freshly cut wooden
stakes proved so attractive to the bugs.
The larger ‘spikes’ sticking out from the pronotum identify the hawthorn
from the birch shieldbug as can be seen in the photos of
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| The main group of giant funnel fungi |
the two species. My notebook from 2017 also informed me that
it was early in September that I saw an amazing display of grassland fungi at a
site in Tulloch. My return visit didn’t
disappoint. As I approached the grassland
surrounded by birches and aspens, I could see the enormous giant funnel fungus
were back again and in greater numbers than last year. In all, there were three distinct groups,
still in a partial circle – 176, 116 and 80 fruiting bodies – 375 in total and
quite an amazing sight and an indication that this is an area of fairly
natural, long-term grazed but unimproved grassland.
September is the month when tooth fungi come to the fore
and, despite the dry summer, some species did very well. However, one of our rarest species, Bankera
violascens, the spruce tooth, had a very strange season at the two sites I
visit. On the 3rd I visited
the Sitka spruce plantation near Forres and found that the plantation had been
rack-thinned, that is every 5th or 6th row of trees had
been felled.
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| The spruce tooth |
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| The rack-thinned spruces |
Having been thinned
mechanically, most of the brash (branches and crowns) from the trees removed
lay along the line of the trees being felled, ensuring little of the ‘debris’
ended up along the lines of the other planted trees. Because of the numbers of fruiting bodies
usually found I take along a hand-tally counter, one press of the lever for
each fungus found. As I wandered the
lines of planted spruces something was becoming obvious, there were very few
spruce tooth fungi, in fact at the end of the ten walks back and forth across
the plantation my tally counter registered zero! The first time ever none had been recorded. The lack of
fungi at this site was probably due to the lack of rain
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| River Dee, mealy tooth middle and the Boletopsis with a small sample on top of the cap to check the pores |
throughout the summer and not because of the
partial opening of the canopy. Two other
species of tooth fungi are usually recorded at this site and neither of them
had fruited either (Phellodon melaleucus and Sarcodon squamosus) suggesting
that the weather could have been the main factor for non-appearance. A few days later and I was over the tops to
Deeside to check the other spruce tooth site, which, in recent years, had
produced very few fruiting bodies. First
though I stopped off to visit a Scots pine plantation by the River Dee to check
on an even rarer fungus, Boletopsis perplexa (current name but awaiting DNA
checks) which I’d recorded there three times since 2012. Here, as at many other sites this year there
were good numbers of fly agarics (Amanita muscaria) along with the usual Hydnellum
ferrugineum (mealy tooth) and Hydnellum peckii (devils tooth). Very close to one of the Hydnellum
ferrugineum sites a careful search found just a single fruiting body of the
Boletopsis (black falsebolete owing to its close resemblance to the Boletus
fungi) probably in exactly the same spot as in previous years. Perhaps because I was in a bit of a hurry to
head off to the spruce tooth site, I’m not sure, but I took just a single, poor
photo, of the fruiting body despite it being a bright and sunny day! At least I had the record which was the main
thing. On the way to the spruce tooth
site I stopped off briefly to check an aspen wood for one of the rare aspen
mosses, blunt-leaved bristle-moss (Orthotrichum obtusifolium). I re-found this moss at this site in early
2017 on an aspen tree that had fallen over since it was first found in 2003 and
despite still being on the bark of the
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| Blunt-leaved bristle-moss |
fallen tree in abundance, much of the
bark was now very loose and would no doubt detach from the aspen in the next year
or so taking the moss with it. Sadly,
this wood is just used as a site to graze cattle and, with several trees having
fallen over, the wood is in serious need of help to ensure the next generation
of trees is given a chance to grow. From
there it was a short drive up the hill, a climb over a deer fence followed by a
walk up the forestry tracks to where the spruce tooth grew. On reaching the track I started to find the
first few fungi as I walked out checking one side of the track before returning
on the other side, clicking the hand-tally counter as I walked. As I completed one side of the track, I realised that something very strange had happened – there were
quite a few fruiting bodies compared to all the previous visits, and this
became more apparent as I began my
walk back along the other side of the
track. There were three groups
comprising over a hundred fruiting bodies each along with tens of more in
between. The last entry in my notebook
at the end of the count was “Phew” and the total had reached an incredible 832
fruiting bodies, the biggest count to date for this site. Was Deeside cooler, wetter during the summer? Whatever, this was an amazing turn around in
fortunes between the two sites and emphasised the value in undertaking counts
over several seasons and not as the requirements for planning applications, a
single survey at the time of the application.
The table above shows the annual counts for the two sites, suggesting
that the near Forres count might just be a one off.
A walk along the Speyside Way just up the road from Firwood,
revealed quite a few tooth fungi species that had been recorded in
previous years as in the table below. In
addition, a check of a small ex-trackside quarry revealed a tiny population of
another rarely recorded tooth fungus
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| Hydnellum gracilipes |
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| Tooth fungi numbers from part of the Speyside Way |
Hydnellum gracilipes, as graceful as its
name implies. This tooth fungus was new to the UK when first found in Abernethy in 2001 and with few
locations outside Abernethy since then.
As I parted the heather and moss on the face of the old quarry, I could
see a few tiny fruiting bodies and, having had a bit of rain, several of the
fruiting bodies had tiny red droplets of moisture on them. Another area of interest to me was a section
of Abernethy Forest where a track was closed off to vehicles in
2006. This track formed a section of a
major survey that I undertook between 2007 and 2011 when all the tracks in the
woodland area of Abernethy Forest were walked annually between
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| Scaly tooth top and blue tooth |
mid-August and
late September, and good numbers of tooth fungi were recorded. Having last surveyed this track fully in 2011
I was beginning to wonder how the tooth fungi were faring as the track-side
trees continued to grow and shade the track and the track itself is starting to
vegetate over. The re-survey took a
couple of days as both sides of the track had to be carefully walked and
species searched for and the dry summer might have had an impact. However, it looked like the weather hadn’t
had too much of an impact and, despite the tree and vegetation growth, the
regular species seemed to have continued to fare quite well. Two species that would react badly to the
track
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| Numbers of tooth fungi on the track closed to vehicles over the years |
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| The narrow cruet-moss |
vegetating over, Hydnellum scrobiculatum (ridged tooth) and Phellodon
melaleucus (grey tooth) did show major declines. One of the most impressive sights was a
population of just over 100 fruiting bodies of Hydnellum peckii along just a
few tens of metre of track and with good numbers of Sarcodon squamosus (scaly
tooth) and Hydnellum caeruleum (blue tooth) in many of the known locations.
This is probably a survey that would be useful to undertake again
fifteen years after the track was closed (2021). As I walked the track, I wasn’t really
looking for a couple of rarer mosses that I had surveyed previously, but at one
location I did spot something that looked like one of them, the narrow
cruet-moss (Tetraplodon angustatus).
Photo and grid reference taken along with a small sample to check once
home, I carried on with the tooth fungi search.
My hunch was correct and, more amazingly, the grid reference tied in
with a location for the moss from April 2014 so had to assume the moss had
survived all that time living on the same decaying mammal dropping!
Our delayed Christmas present from daughter Ruth (2017!) was
completed this month, a trip to Edinburgh.
Originally, we had planned to make the trip in April/May but with family
commitments we put this back until the schools had started again after the
summer holidays. As in 2017 we took the
early train to Edinburgh arriving early enough to have most of the late morning
and afternoon in the capital. Not sure
why, but we ended up visiting the Scottish Parliament again after booking into
‘The Hub’, to listen to the plans for the next year by the Scottish Government
along with replies from the opposition parties. Once we had heard enough, we wandered up the
Royal Mile, almost
linking the Parliament building with Edinburgh Castle, Janet checking out various shops as we walked.
A diversion took us to Edinburgh Old Town, last visited when in
Edinburgh to collect an MBE, before heading for St. Giles Cathedral. It looked interesting but required a bank
loan to visit the inside, so we walked back to ‘The Hub’ base before heading
out for a bit of posh nosh at Browns also courtesy of a birthday present from
Ruth! Next day we debated whether
to catch a bus or walk as we headed off to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Being mostly downhill to the Gardens we
decided to walk but making a big mistake with the Gardens in sight. Instead of walking just a few hundred yards further
along Inverleith Row (the B901) we turned left along Inverleith Terrace, a
route which took us all around the outside of the gardens to the main entrance
whereas the other way would have given us access to the gardens so we could
have enjoyed the trees and plants as we
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| Janet approaching St. Bernard's Well and Dean Village |
walked to our lunch destination, the Dawyck
Café. Lunch finished we set off for our
main destination of the day via the Water of Leith, Dean Village. This amazing village, built to house the
workers linked to a once very busy group of grain mills, is now a mix
of colourful houses either side of the Water of Leith. As we approached the houses, we passed St
Bernard's Well, a very impressive building adjacent to a natural spring which was
rumored by the locals at the time to have healing powers. Dean Village turned out to be a very popular
visitor location, there was a steady stream of mainly foreign visitors
wandering around with a local guide available to answer
questions. From the village we made our
way back towards Princes Street via the private gardens of the New Town area
of Edinburgh. After the day's walk, we
once again dined at Browns Restaurant on George Street (posh fish and chips for
me) before returning to The Hub for free cheese and
biscuits! With the train back to Aviemore not until
5.30pm on our last day in Edinburgh we packed and left our bags at The Hub and
headed off to the National Museum of Scotland.
What a place and a location where it would be easy to spend a whole
day. As I wandered the area with transport,
industry, engineering and energy exhibitions Janet visited the decorative art,
design, fashion and style displays before joining up to see the Lewis Chess Men
display. These chess pieces, made of Walrus
ivory, were found in 1831 on a beach at Uig, on the Isle of Lewis, a place we
had visited several times during our holidays on Lewis, but this was the first
time we could see the chess men for real.
Amazing carving, really unusual poses and facial expressions on the
carved kings and queens, bishops, knights on their mounts and standing warders
and quite brilliant to see them for real after they were carved way back in the
12th or 13th century.
No butties and flask today and once again we
dined out at the museum
before heading off just around the corner to see another of Edinburgh’s famous
visitor locations Greyfriars Kirk, Greyfriars Bobby and the famous dog with its
polished nose! We managed to find the
grave of John Gray, the bobby, in the graveyard before we found the statue of
the dog which was outside the church grounds on George IV Bridge road. We probably missed it on the way into the
churchyard because it was hidden by the sheer number of people surrounding
it. Time was creeping on and it was time
to pick up our bags from The Hub before making our way to Waverly Station for
the train back north after another memorable visit to the capital. Next day it was straight back to normal and
an outing with Hayley from the Cairngorms National Park to see the hazels with
their rylock fence rings.
An email arrived late in September from Gus and Tessa Jones
(BSCG) asking if the black covering on an interrupted clubmoss (Lycopodium annotinum)
they had found on the slopes of Cairngorm was a fungus. Checking my book on Microfungi on Land Plants
by Martin and Pamela Ellis (a husband and wife team) led me to Leptosphaeria lycopodina,
the only fungus listed under Clubmosses, but also linked to growing on two other
clubmosses (alpine and stag’s-horn). Checking
this name on the Fungal Record Database of Britain and Ireland lead me to its
current name Phaeosphaeria lycopodina and with only four
known records listed. All of these
records were from long ago, with no locations given and little detail
date-wise (19XX), but all had been checked and confirmed by Martin B. Ellis
from unidentified material collected by keen mycologists and probably stored in
the mycological collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. This probably occurred during his 30
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| Interrupted clubmoss with bright green un-infected plants and the black ones infected by the Phaeosphaeria lycopodina fungus |
years of
employment at Kew (1946 -1976) where, latterly he was the Principle
Mycologist. This remarkable husband and
wife team must have been amazing finders, identifiers and recorders because this
book alone comprises 868 pages and was just one of three books they published
on the lesser known and less obvious fungi growing in the UK. I digress.
Once I had the basic facts about which fungus might have been found I
asked Gus and Tessa if they had a specimen, and this arrived at Firwood early
the next day. Under the microscope the
black dots (Ascocarps) on the bracts of the ‘cone’ or spore producing spike of
the plant sample were highly productive comprising a mass of Asci full of
spores. Ellis and Ellis’s book’s written
description of the spores accurately described
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| Close up of infected bracts top and Asci and spores bottom. Spores 3-septate and 20 x 10 microns (oil x1000) |
what I was seeing and, checking
on the internet I was able to see pictures also confirming the species named in
their book. So, a couple of days later I
drove to the ski carpark on Cairngorm and made my way up the track that leads
to the Ptarmigan restaurant. Along the
way I found alien monkey flowers at 750m (asl) above sea level (2450’), alpine
clubmoss, moor club fungus (Clavaria argillacea) and trailing azalea but just
once in flower. The first populations of
interrupted clubmoss didn’t display the blackened ‘tops’ I was looking for but
the nearer I got to Gus and Tessa’s location, there it was. Not just the occasional plant affected but
quite a few in the first group of plants.
As I got higher, I was finding very good populations of the clubmoss and
regular plants affected by the fungus – perhaps, once again, I’m finding a
species that is hugely under-recorded?
As I looked down towards Loch Morlich I could see heavy rain showers
passing by so time to head down with a few fresh samples of plant and fungus
ready to be dried before sending them off to – yes, Kew! At home my Mapmate database has all the
interrupted clubmoss records for the RSPB Abernethy Reserve along with my
additional records for the surrounding area a perfect dataset to see if the
clubmoss and fungus grew together on non-alpine slopes. On the last day of September, I decided to
head for a
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| Cairngorm slopes and Loch Morlich in the distance |
population at a few hundred metres asl in the Craigmore section of
the reserve where I knew a good population covering several square metres had
been recorded. Walking along the track
heading up the hill I was aware that the annoying deer keds were on the wing,
an insect that seems quite difficult to just get hold of. These insects fly initially until they find
their deer host where their wings are shed and a drink of blood is needed to
aid mating and reproduction. I’ve never
been bitten by one. Once the larvae in
the female reach pupal stage the female ‘lays’ them on the deer from where they
fall to the ground ready to start the whole process again next year! A pouched false morel fungus was next
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| Pouched false morel |
in the
notebook (Gyromitra infula) before the best find of the day was made as I left
the track and headed up through the Scots pines – a patch of twinflower – a new
location for the reserve. As I
approached the clubmoss location at 400m asl, I could see my GPS was working
well and all around the forest floor were lots of stems of the clubmoss and it
didn’t take long to see the fungus was also present. Perhaps it would prove to be just
under-recorded and as more of my known sites were visited this started to be
the case. To jump the gun a little the
last site I checked was close to Loch Garten in December and here, at just 200m
asl, the fungus was also present.
Returning from one of the tooth fungi outings along one of
the minor roads running through the reserve I remembered having seen a couple of small populations of
serrated wintergreen (Orthilia secunda) in the past so kept an eye open to see
if they still survived. Despite regular applications of salt during the winter months they had but as I bent
down to see if there were any flower spikes (no) I noticed a few leaves had
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| Serrated wintergreen leaves top and orange grisette |
orange dots on them so I just had to collect one to see if they were fungus
related. They sure were and once again
my Ellis and Ellis fungus book led me to something called Pucciniastrum pyrolae,
a fungus with just 31 UK records on the fungal database, 9 of which were from the
1800s! My location was new and providing
another new species for the RSPB’s Abernethy Reserve. The Firwood garden/woodland also provided a
nice surprise which, thankfully, survived my outing with the lawnmower. This was an amazingly orange coloured fungus
which, on closer inspection, had a distinctive white sack-like ‘volva’ just
popping up out of the ground. This
feature led me towards the family with the deadly poisonous death cap and
destroying angel and my ID book told me it was either the tawny or orange
grisette. The zig-zag markings on the
stem of the fungus helped hugely to arrive at the right name the orange grisette
(Amanita crocea), something I’d not knowingly seen previously.
That’s it for another month, enjoy the read.
Stewart and Janet
Dean Village, Edinburgh
The Hub Premier Inn Rose Street Edinburgh
National Museums of Scotland Edinburgh
Lewis Chess Men
Phaeosphaeria lycopodina details FRDBI
Deer ked life-cycle
NBN Atlas
Strathspey Weather
Parkswatch
Badenoch and Strathspey Conservation Group
Mapmate recording database
Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland (FRDBI)
BSBI – Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland
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| Daughter Laura's BBC Weatherwatcher photo |
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| First pinkfeet passing over |
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| Cream-coloured ladybird |
Photos © Stewart Taylor
