Ravens, sheep and Rogie Falls

Too many photographs, too many personal projects and too little time to keep up to date with everything. It is just going dark outside and I sit here typing whilst sipping from a bottle of Harviestoun 'Bitter & Twisted' beer, the time has come to catch up with another diary covering a list of items a page of A4 long and a selection of photos that have been fun to sort through to get ready for insertion into the blog. As Janet was preparing dinner a neat bit of recycling was taking place. The chalet settee was replaced a few weeks ago and today it was time for it to depart from the house, where it had taken up temporary residence while we took delivery of a new sofa from M&S - which arrived yesterday. We put the two-seater out for the council to collect but, reluctant to see a still useful bit of furniture end up at the dump, we stuck a "Free to good home" notice on it, hoping someone would make use of it before the council workmen turned up. Within half an hour Will and Becky were tapping on the window offering to take the sofa and after wedging it neatly in place on their canoe carrying roof-rack, it disappeared up the road to its new home in Tulloch. The tomatoes and mushrooms had gone cold but it was great to see the sofa going to a new home. The green bits of chives on the egg are about the only thing edible in the garden currently, but with onion sets and a risky early sowing of carrots in the ground, it won't be long before the garden starts to produce food again. The last 'crop' from the veg patch was eaten just a week ago when the last of the parsnips from summer 2007 were dug up, having survived weeks of being frozen in the ground during January. More amazing was that one of them measured 22" long!

The new settee wasn't the only bit of furniture to arrive at Firwood recently. Janet's mum and brother visited over Easter and we just had to go for lunch at the wee hut cafe on the seafront at Nairn. Now Nairn isn't that far from Giles Pearson's antique / country furniture workshop http://www.giles-pearson-antiques.co.uk/contact.php at Logie Steading Visitor Centre (type Logie Steading into your search engine) and visits tend to have severe financial implications! As you can see Giles was very happy to see us and as Alan chatted to him the rest of us wandered round the wonderful furniture that he always has in stock. I first met Giles in 1978 when he was living near Aviemore. As if I didn't have enough on my plate that year looking after the Loch Garten ospreys, volunteers, visitors and the reserve, we also decided to try and protect another local osprey site, the very one that the current Garten female - EJ, moved from 4 years ago. During the 1970s the Scottish/UK osprey population was less than twenty pairs and one or two of the well known sites were regularly robbed by egg thieves. And so it was that in 1978 we decided to try and watch over this second site, just during the hours of darkness. An appeal for help went out to several of the local birders and via one of these, Giles offered to help and was put on the rota of volunteer night-time watchers. With this extra help the thirty odd nights of nest watching paid off and the ospreys reared two chicks. I digress. " Have you seen that bench in the corner?" Janet whispered. I had and was very interested, so we got the gang to try it out. Perfect!

Church pew or pub seating? Giles suggested it dated from the late 1800s and that it had started life as pub seating. Janet was worried that the holes at the left hand end of the bench were the result of woodworm, but that didn't look quite right to me. Think of its location in a pub suggested Giles. Dart holes! The left hand end of the bench must have been nearest to the dartboard because the further you went from the dartboard, you reached the maximum distance for bouncing darts and the fewer holes could be seen. How much are you asking and can you deliver? Deal done, and the bench is now part of the furniture scene at Firwood.

Snow has been a feature of the last few weeks and there must be so much up on Cairngorm that skiing will probably go on throughout May. It really all started on 5 April and only stopped being a daily feature after the 15th. The poor visibility and prolonged snow showers on 5th April caused a pilot fatality when a light aircraft, en route from Carlisle to Wick, crashed on Cairngorm, very close to the Ptarmigan restaurant. On this occasion the plane crashed outside the mountain part of the RSPB reserve, but only just. On Friday, 25 March 2001 a similar situation saw two USA F15 fighter jets crash into the summit ridge on Ben Macdui just off the reserve, but the jets, whose impact speed was about four-hundred miles an hour, bounced from the ridge eventually embedding themselves in deep snow on a rock outcrop about half a mile away in one of the remotest parts of the reserve. Recovery of debris continued until August and even now thousands of tiny paint fragments remain on the mountain (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1250057.stm Only the deep snow of 2001 stopped this incident from being a major environmental disaster.






The snow has played havoc with the flowers trying to grow in the garden with early primroses and crocuses being constantly flattened by snow. It's amazing though how resilient the flowers are and most have bounced back now the snow has melted. Despite the weather the female osprey EJ arrived at the nest on 26 March but little else in the migrant line has arrived since, although wheatear and sand martin have been reported. Just before the snow arrived the Highland Biological Recording Group held their spring meeting in Strathpeffer, and dodging the snow showers I headed north. The indoor session ran to form but it was the outdoor meeting at Rogie Falls in the afternoon that was the highlight of the day. Over the Christmas period Dave Genney the SNH Lower Plants Officer had found a big birch log with eleven capsules of the green shield-moss, and, with a good audience from the morning meeting, it was decided to show them the moss, see the sort of log on which it grows and the type of woodland where it is found. This site was also good for a whole range of other mosses, lichens and liverworts and the second aim was to get folk enthusing about these too. As we made our way we came across a work party from 'Trees for Life' (http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/) on their way to plant trees in Glen Affric, so a few more folk were added to the green shield-moss viewing party! The old birch log was very impressive, two foot in diameter and a worthy home for this rare moss. Dave explained all about the moss and its requirements and asked everyone to go and search a suitable bit of woodland near to where they lived. Hopefully this will be successful. I have yet to hear of any new finds from north of Inverness but there is plenty of time yet. The other aim of the visit was to see a very localised lichen called Pelitgera britannica (left) (http://www.hbrg.org.uk/Plants/Peltigera/Peltigera.html) in a precipitous location close to Rogie Falls (above right). The lichen, which is one of the big, leafy dog-lichens, didn't disappoint and though there was only a small patch it was a species that would stick in my mind to look out for when visiting similar humid gorge areas. As we made our way back across the foot-bridge someone mentioned that they thought they had seen something similar by the path on the way back to the car park, and sure enough they were right, not one small patch, but several bright leafy clumps along the side of a wet rock face. My highlight of this location was seeing several fruiting clumps of common apple moss Bartramia pomiformis. Apples on sticks (right)! Rogie Falls are well worth a visit if you are on your way north from Inverness to Ullapool, the car park is right by the road, there are loos and some spectacular walks - and keep your eyes open for the species mentioned.


The main pastime since the last blog can be summed up as sheep, lambs and ravens. Just when the last blog was posted I received a phone call from a local farmer who was having trouble with ravens from a local roost having attacking his new born lambs, and, if a sheep happened to be ill and off its feet, the ravens were pecking out its eyes. Ravens, a protected species, are opportunistic feeders and will have a go at anything that provides a ready meal. Normally, they would be scouring the local hills looking for carrion but on this occasion they were having a go at John's sheep and lambs. Over the last few years a raven roost has developed somewhere nearby during the winter months numbering more than 100 birds. This year the roost developed close to Broomhill Bridge, where the Strathspey Railway terminates at the famous Glen Bogle station. At its height about 190 ravens were coming into roost after spending their day wandering the local countryside looking for carrion. The problems started when the local farmer started lambing, a month earlier than all the other local farmers and during a period of cold, snowy weather. Over Easter John arrived at the house with a sheep that had just lost an eye and during the previous few days John said that about nine lambs had also been taken, so I spent the rest of the day sitting at the edge of the fields where the sheep were lambing. Two ravens were perched on a fence and a buzzard was flying across the field carrying what looked like after-birth. Over the next four hours I didn't see any ravens in the fields but I did see five carrion crows which can cause problems for sheep and lambs and which can be legally controlled. However, I also didn't see anyone tending the sheep, many of which had tiny, new born lambs, and one sheep was lambing. A colleague also visited to see what the ravens were up to and was a little worried to see several dead lambs in the lambing field, one or two of which had ravens in attendance. Had the lambs been born dead, had they died shortly after birth, had some of them been killed by the birds? Could they have been saved if they had been taken inside, should someone have been tending the sheep more regularly to help any weak lambs and by having a presence in the fields, keeping the ravens away? There is no doubt that the numbers of ravens locally is increasing even though very few breed in the local area, and there seem to be more incidents of lambs being killed. Is it all the ravens' fault or could the crows also be playing a part, and how much could be ascribed to busy farmers having less time to tend their stock? A licence was issued to shoot up to ten of the problem ravens, and this might be one way of addressing the issue in the future. As the raven population is on the increase perhaps now is the time to review lambing practices and look at practicable ways of disrupting some of the bigger roosts well ahead of the lambing season. A difficult one and there are no easy answers. I photographed the sheep that had lost an eye but the picture would be just too upsetting to include here.


The early breeding season is now starting to progress: the first bumblebee was seen on 4th April, woodcock roding 31 March, first tick in the arm 4 April, lots of toads on the move 4 April and good old EJ the female osprey arriving back on 26 March - very early! A wander along one of the forest tracks on 10 April showed that somewhere nearby a mallard had a nest with eggs, and, with the evidence lying on the track in front of me, a local carrion crow had found the nest and had pinched at least one of the eggs (right). On the 1 April 'Caper Watch' kicked off for another season and the early visitors were rewarded with views of individual caper males. Then the snow arrived and everything went quiet for several days. Down on Tulloch Moor, Loch Garten staff in conjuction with the local common graziers had gone to great lengths to try and let visitors view the black grouse lek without disturbing the birds. Last year's efforts of asking visitors to stay just out of site behind the wee hill didn't work and most folk walked forward to get better views - in full view of the birds. This year, the same viewing area was to be used but a whicker, willow screen had been installed allowing visitors an elevated view whilst keeping them out of the birds' view. So far, most visitors have used the screen and visitors and birds now have a win, win situation - the visitors see the birds and, because the birds aren't regularly disturbed, they are staying generally on the lek area. Hopefully, with less disturbance bird numbers might creep up.

The roving bird Atlas work is ongoing, as well as keeping an eye open for the green shield-moss. When the snow eased off a couple of week ago I revisited the highly productive log mentioned in the last blog, just to see how the capsules had coped with the cold and the regular snow. They were all fine but whilst at the log I spotted a few more along with more stalks indicative of where capsules had been predated earlier in the year. I returned with the camera to photo the new capsule locations and to re-photograph the stalks, an easier way to count them when there appears to be lots. What I found amazed me. The capsule count rose from seven to twelve but the stalk count rose from 62 to 94! This log, in a very unusual location had just become the most productive log found to date, well it would have been if all the capsules had survived. It will be interesting to see what pops up in the next growing season. In addition I made a trip to Sandy and Claire's site near Beauly where, after a bit of searching, twenty-five capsules were found on the upturned root of a birch tree and, with a brief bit of sunshine, I was able to photograph five of the capsules as they glowed, back-lit by the sun (left).

However, a new moss challenge has been undertaken, and this moss is not so easy to identify. It does however take me back to my beloved bogs (left). Over the years a few records have accumulated in the reserve files that only have rough location details and, where the record/species is important it is worth putting in a bit of effort to see if the species and location can be re-discovered. And so it was that I took on the challenge to try and tidy up past locations for another Red Data Book moss - Waved Fork-moss, Dicranum bergeri, the name alone makes you want to go and find it (http://www.snh.org.uk/publications/on-line/naturallyscottish/mossesliverworts/mires.asp). The locations I was trying to find came from a botanical survey carried out by a brilliant botanist and no mean bryologist, David Wood in the early 1990s. The survey was carried out just ahead of the arrival of global positioning system gadgets so David had to try and give as accurate a map reference as was possible using large scale maps and aerial photographs. He was not too far out on the first site I visited and after a bit of hunting the distinctive moss was found. With care, a small sample of the moss was extracted from the well established cushions, so that the record could be checked by Andy, our reserve Ecologist and moss expert. I wandered further onto the bog and thought my luck was in when I came across another bright green moss cushion, so another small sample was taken. At the end of my evening wander I had three samples to be checked, and it was at the checking stage that I realised I would have to learn a lot more about the Dicranum group of mosses if was going to be competent at identifying the target species and to ease Andy's work-load by knowing what was common bright and green compared to what was rare bright and green! So out came the microscope and a crash course in Dicranum identification was undertaken. I'm getting better and two of the three past locations have been found along with a few new locations. The picture of the moss, in close up left, is quite rare in that the moss very rarely produces capsules in Britain.

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to capture a decent picture of the steam train on the Strathspey Railway chugging along, steam everywhere and with the snow covered Cairngorms in the background and I've decided that the weather knows what I am up to and everytime I get myself in place the sun goes out and the clouds build or, as happend on two occasions, the clouds build up and it snows. Undeterred I took the photo anyway, but I will have to go back when the sun is shining but before the snow melts. Quite atmospheric even if you can't really see the train!

That's it for another week or two, and there is already quite a lot to report.

Happy reading

Stewart & Janet

Four generations of The Clan on a visit to Laura's

All photos © Stewart Taylor

Happy Christmas - sorry Easter!

It's been a good couple of weeks with progress on the BTO Bird Atlas front and with a couple of searches for "lost" plants. Roving recording for birds has seen visits to Loch Garten, Grantown on Spey, Loch an Eilean and a walk home from Boat of Garten. The general picture is that the breeding season is getting underway, although a bit delayed over the last few days due to adverse weather! Curlews, lapwings and oystercatchers are now back in numbers and it was nice to see a flock of 120 golden plover in the fields below Tomachrochar last weekend. These are newly arriving birds, feeding on the low-lying fields before heading off to the hills to breed. Black-headed gulls are also everywhere and the numbers of song thrushes continues to grow with one in the garden just a couple of days ago, a first for 2008. I also had my first meadow pipit locally on 16 March and Brian, our chalet guest had a red-throated diver on Loch Morlich yesterday whilst looking for the recently sighted ring-necked duck.

A few weeks ago Andy, a work colleague, just happened to mention that he had a few old records of plants growing fairly locally, that hadn't been seen for quite a few years - a challenge I couldn't refuse. Andy is the plant recorder for the old county of Banff for the BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles) as well as a BSBI Council Member, and part of his role is to maintain an up to date plant list for that county as well as check through thousands of old plant records to ensure all are listed on the county database. Any doubtful records are listed as such until someone has checked them out, not easy when some records go back to the late 1800s. BSBI maintains a very good website and it is well worth a visit if you want to know anything about our current knowledge of plant distribution within Britain (http://www.bsbi.org.uk/index.html). The challenge? To check out a few sites for Dutch rush (Equisetum hyemale) and a single site for interrupted clubmoss (Lycopodium annotinum). The former has a scatter of sites throughout Britain but you will need to visit Scotland if you want to see the latter - check out the BSBI tetrad maps. Dutch rush (left) is a plant I have searched for locally but have failed to find though I did re-locate a site near Inverness which hadn't been recorded since the mid-1970s. The site near Inverness is a little odd in that the plants are growing on a wall rather than in a damp wood and there are just a few stems compared to the thousands that been recorded at other sites. Oddly named the plant is not confined to Holland nor is it a rush, but its other names explain it better - rough horsetail and scouring rush and its Latin name is even more helpful Equus = horse and setum = bristle and hyemale = winter. The non-flowering stems do look like rushes and as the Latin name indicates, they remain evergreen, so the plant that is easy to look for in the winter. The family Equisetum is the single surviving genus of a class of primitive vascular plants that date back to the mid-Devonian period (350 + million years ago), giant versions of which produce the coal deposits of today! The Dutch link comes from the fact that the plant stems have a high silica content and the Dutch folk used to gather the stems, tie them into bundles, and use them as pan scourers. The plant is listed alongside the ferns in plant books, though they aren't ferns and like the ferns, reproduces itself by means of spores. I digress. Armed with a series of known last locations I set off towards Forres and then on to Keith. At the first site, right by the River Findhorn, I was greeted by thousands of plants, at last I had seen it, in quantity, in its typical haunt. The second site was also on the River Findhorn but lower down the river and at this site there were even more plants but with evidence of tree planting near by. A few trees are fine but too many and the plant will struggle to survive. The third site near Keith hadn't been checked since the 1970s, well not by anyone who forwarded their records, so I didn't know what to expect. The site was by a small burn by a farm track and glory be it was still there, again, with thousands of plants on display (above right). I pushed my luck a bit by going to a fourth site where the last record dated from 1890 and apart from a pleasant wander round a damp wood I didn't see the horsetail. To see a little more about the Equisetum's go to http://www.bsbi.org.uk/Equisetum.pdf.

The interrupted clubmoss check on the other hand was a much more straight forward outing, a site from the 1990s complete with GPS location. Locally, this plant is found most easily on the open slopes of Cairngorm but, following finding a site in the woods close to Loch Mallachie, a few more low-level, woodland sites have been found. Within Abernethy several members of the Clubmoss family occur: Fir, Stagshorn, Alpine, Issler's (Diphasiastrum complanatum) and Lesser (Selaginella selaginoides). As its name implies the stems of the interrupted clubmoss are "interrupted" with usually a slight 'waist' halfway up the stem, hopefully visible in the picture right. The trip was successful and the patch, about one metre by two metres, continues to thrive. During the summer a 'cone' appears on the tip of each stem carrying the reproductive spore-capsules.

During March we are starting to get onto familiar ground. Whilst out marking a couple of logs where the green shield-moss (Buxbaumia viridis) has been found previously and in the potential line of a new electric deer fence, I visited a couple of pools which I found last year, home to loads of frogs. I wasn't disappointed and the croaking warned me that the frogs were in residence well before I reached the pools. The pools are in an area of woodland where a large stand of exotic conifers was felled a couple of years ago, the pools being created by the wheels of heavy timber extraction machinery. Having removed the conifers the site is now being prepared for small scale tree planting operations, aspen trees initially, the electrified fence keeping the resident deer out of the site. Deer don't like crossing electrified fences, so, rather than a six-foot deer fence, with all the problems this creates for capercaillie and black grouse (flying into fence), a three wire electric fence is being installed to no more than stock fence height, to do the job. Watch this space. My aim of visiting the pools was to try and photograph the mating frogs but, to get close enough, I first had to disturb them meaning that all of them disappeared under the water. So I got myself, camera and tripod into place and waited. It then started to rain quite heavily so out came my umbrella to keep me and my camera dry. At this stage I was hoping that no one was watching me, man in wellies with camera under umbrella sitting on edge of puddle in freezing rain - not moving! After about twenty minutes the first frogs head appeared and the rain stopped but I dared not move to take the umbrella down. A few more minutes and a few more heads appeared. Ten more minutes and the sun was trying to shine and a few more heads appeared and the frogs started to croak again. The pool was alive with frogs some as singles, some as pairs. I counted sixty, so there had to be several more than that. The end of the pool where I was seated was where all the frog spawn was and it was around the spawn that the bulk of the frogs congregated, probably adding to mass of spawn. It was brilliant, after an hour I had my pictures but my feet were frozen and I had to move. Sorry frogs!

I've been in the forest bogs again, that little appreciated wet habitat within the bigger forest and full of diddy trees, small, but also very old. I visited this particular bog as I walked back from Boat of Garten, I seemed to remember having seen fir clubmoss there in the past, a plant that isn't that common on the reserve. This bog was much better than I remembered it, stunted trees but lots of small pools with open water. It was along the edge of this bog that myself and John Miles, Osprey Warden in 1980, installed the first log and peat dams to block up the drains carrying masses of water out of the bog. The dams are still there! I couldn't find the clubmoss but I did see lots of new flowering shoots of cotton grass (left & right) but with their less obvious white/yellow flowering heads rather than the white cotton seed heads that will appear in May. It is the sphagnum moss that is the real boiler-room of these bogs, the moss acting like a sponge holding and raising water-levels above the surface of the peat, and the growing and decaying of moss along with plants adding to the development of new peat.

Bog pine and pool system, a return visit will be needed later in the year to see which dragonflies are on site and to see if there are any of the special bog flowers growing. Perhaps sphagna also.

The ants are getting active again and, before the weather made its dramatic change, many of the big wood ant nests were covered with a mass of ants as the first spring sun warmed their nests and the ants mingled together on the nest cap.

The snow during the last few days will have had them scurrying back into the warmer depths. I hope we see them again soon.

Yes, as with much of the rest of the UK we have had snow, snow and more snow. An inch or two a day since 20 March, overcast skies, and windy at times which saw a few drifts developing on the roads. Six or seven yellowhammers, thirty to forty chaffinches, robins, dunnocks, blackbirds, woodpigeons, rooks, jackdaws have piled into the garden during the last few days and the wonderful show of snowdrops and crocuses have disappeared below a white blanket. I dug the vegetable patch in the hope of planting the onion setts early - no chance. Minus 6 degrees C forecast tonight, and the Holden clan due tomorrow for a week, I hope things warm up a bit so that Great Gran Holden can get round to see everyone. A few visits have been made to the outer reaches of the forest since the snow arrived in the hope that the sun might bless me with its rays and help to brighten the scene. It didn't quite happen so the colour photo has reverted to a sort of monochrome but under these conditions you realise how scattered the Scots pines are once you get out towards Ryvoan bothy and Ryvoan Pass. The snow out here is knee high so a few days yet before we see the meadow pipits arrive on site. Despite the snow black grouse have been lekking and dippers could already be on eggs. Brrr...



That's it, enjoy the read.

Stewart & Janet

Crocuses before the snow arrived

Happy Easter

All photos © Stewart Taylor

Lots to tell you about at the start of a new season

Hello to the regulars and welcome to any new readers - sorry for the delay in getting this blog written.

It's been a busy couple of months and a pretty chilly period also. Regular frosts and long-lying snow meant that getting to work during January was hard work - Janet driving me to the end of the Forest Lodge track, a trek into work from there and then the reverse in the evening - both ways in the dark. Okay, we could drive all the way to Forest Lodge, but then I wouldn't get a wee bit of exercise each day and the chance to look for new tracks in the snow. In fact, it wasn't until the 23 January that I managed to cycle all the way to work, dodging the icy bits and holding my breath as I cycled across some of the frozen bits of track. It only lasted for a day and the snow came back and I was back to car and walking. Twice I had fresh badger tracks in the snow and once a pine marten, but the most regular were roe deer and the very distinctive tracks of red squirrel (left & right). I searched hard for a set of capercaillie tracks but failed miserably. The ski operators on Cairngorm have had a good season so far with plenty of snow and lots of visitors. At the end of January a couple of days of heavy rain and a rise in the temperature saw a huge snow melt take place and late on the Saturday afternoon I could see the River Spey was coming over its bank, pouring into the fields along the B970 between Nethybridge and Boat of Garten. A check first thing on the Sunday saw signs up in Nethybridge saying the road to Broomhill Bridge was closed as was the B970 towards Boat of Garten, so a detour via Grantown on Spey was needed to get across the river! An amazing sight and a much bigger flood that the one we had around the same time in 2007. Just as amazing was the sight of a man and wife launching a Canadian canoe into the torrent and heading off down river towards Grantown.!


Whilst I have been neglecting my Diary I have been busy writing a couple of articles for local newsletters. The first was a short piece for the North East Biological Recording Centre (NESBReC) trying to tempt folk to go looking for the green shield-moss. The area covered by this Centre stretches from Aberdeenshire into Moray taking in the area near Dufftown where I found the moss growing on a dead rowan tree in December. Hopefully one or two folk might be tempted to go and have a look. You can find the newsletter at http://www.nesbrec.org.uk/articles/Newsletter%206.pdf and it is a very good read. The second article took a lot more thinking about and quite a bit of data sorting and covered the tooth fungi survey carried out during August and September 2007. This article along with a re-vamp of the green shield-moss article was written for the Highland Biological Recording Group newsletter - Highland Naturalist. Sadly, this newsletter isn't published electronically and is still in the process of being produced, but you can see what the group gets up to at http://www.hbrg.org.uk/ . You can even support the group AND receive the newsletter if you join!

During January / February the second round of the BTO Winter Bird Atlas tetrads were walked - I have taken on five tetrads locally. One covers the village and produced quite a good number of birds whilst another covers the bog and old woodland close to the osprey site and produce just eight birds, the highlight being a jack snipe. A frog, on a cold frosty day was also unusual. A warm day on 22 January tempted the first great spotted woodpecker to start pronouncing its territory by drumming on a lump of deadwood on a live Scots pine right by Forest Lodge. A second was heard close to the house on 26 January. About the same time the first song thrush arrived back in the village along with a couple of pied wagtails - spring is on its way! Don and Tracy spent a week in the chalet in January and once they had headed off south it was time for a few repairs to the chalet porch. The logs that were originally installed had started to rot quite badly at ground level, so the frame-work was propped up, the old pillars cut out, and new oak pillars installed, finished off with a nice bit of Lindab galvanised guttering. Another wee job involved stocking up the freezer with the best organic meat going. A couple of weeks ago Bob rang me from Abernethy to say that he had a red deer hind in the larder for me. Most of the animals that are culled make their way to the local game dealer but a few staff along with a few locals put in their orders and the sale goes directly to them, bypassing the game dealer and the butcher. Venison that has gone down that route is just too expensive to buy. So, we pay the same as the game dealer but also receive the deer in the same state as they do, complete with skin! So the first job to do was to get the skin off (left) so that the carcass could air dry and hang for about a ten days before boning out the meat and getting it home to the freezer.

Other interesting things that have been happening over the last couple of months has seen a team of dedicated researchers wandering all of the conifer forests in the north of Scotland to try and record crossbills. Which crossbill - well that is the purpose of the survey. Within each of the forests the researchers, using GPS technology, go to the centre of all the OS map one kilometre squares comprising the wood and once there, play a tape of a crossbill 'chipping', the aim being to draw out any resident birds and hopefully, get them to start chipping too. Each researcher is armed with a good quality sound recordist's parabolic reflector and if they do get a crossbill to respond then the call is recorded onto tape so that back in the office the taped call can be put through a sonogram "machine" and the resultant printout be compared with sonograms from known species of crossbills. Amazing. The crossbill species involved are common, Scottish and parrot and the main objective of the work is to try and find out which species is where. Watch this space. Johanna, left, is seen playing a tape and listening out via the parabolic reflector.

A novel bit of management that has been taking place within Abernethy is aimed at addressing the lack of deadwood within the planted areas of forest. In the 1980s, when we embarked on a programme of heavy thinning of some of the plantation woodland within the reserve, we would regularly ring-bark a tree to kill it off or just put the chainsaw through the trunk of the tree at a safe working height from the ground, leaving a nice lump of wood for the key deadwood flora and fauna to invade. We know from some of the few natural forests that exist in the northern hemisphere, that left to nature, huge amounts of deadwood start to accumulate, amounting to several tonnes of deadwood in every hectare of forest. Abernethy, with its past history of management, has relatively little deadwood and one way to address this imbalance is to physically go into the forest and kill of several trees in each hectare of woodland. Let a decade go by, and then return and do the same again. In some planted woodland areas a tractor and timber winch has been used to pull over a few trees every sixty metres throughout the wood. This method produces lying deadwood and, as the branches die and decay, some cover for capercaillie. The light thinning that is taking place will also encourage more blaeberry on the forest floor, again to benefit capercaillie and many of the other woodland birds via berries and insects. In other parts of the forest a few trees are being killed off by lopping off the top of the tree with a polesaw creating a tall piece of deadwood, or by ring-barking or by 'high' stumping. This happens about every hundred metres through the selected woodland. But perhaps the most dramatic technique has involved the use of a timber harvester (above), a machine which is normally used for felling and snedding trees and cutting the logs to various lengths as required by the sawmill. By asking the operator to reach up towards the top of the tree, the machine is able to produce a tall stem of deadwood once the top section has been felled (left). Using this technique, several thousand trees were treated in thirty hectares of woodland over just five days, something that would be impossible to do by hand. All we can do now is sit back and see what invades this deadwood heaven. Drastic? Considering that in this particular piece of wood we have about 1500 trees per hectare, killing off a few every fifty metres comprises a very small percentage of the whole, particularly when considering the benefits to anything and everything that lives on deadwood.

In the meantime there has been a change of camera, the old faithful Nikon D200 (right) has gone and a D300 has taken its place. There are many new features on the new camera so it's now up to me to see if I can get the camera to live up to its reputation. Apart from 12 and a bit million pixels it has a self-cleaning sensor which, considering the number of lens changes I can get through in a day, will be sorely tested. The old camera spent a month of the new year at Nikon having its sensor cleaned, and that was only by mid-February, two trips at £25 a time! This is the last purchase, if things go wrong this time perhaps I will go back to film!

Finlay, our grandson is now walking, even without the aid of a chair. Well done the wee fella. It could be fun keeping up with him at Ruth & Sean's wedding in October.

Laura also popped over for lunch in between the snow showers and came forth bearing a box of Cadbury's Cream Eggs for her dads birthday in early February. Amazingly they lasted a week and the last one accompanied me on one of my outings looking for the green shield-moss. By mid-afternoon I was getting quite knackered having spent the last couple of hours working my way up a stream filled gully. In the midst of this wonderful scene can you believe it, I came across a 45 gallon oil drum, stuck in the stream bed, and to prove it I took a picture. Me, my last cream egg and a 45 gallon oil drum! It is quite appalling the mess man can make of his planet. Following the same theme, remember the dead buzzard from the last diary? I was really out of order giving the local gamekeeper the benefit of the doubt and I knew deep down that the bird had probably been poisoned. I have the report from the Chemistry Section of the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency by me as I type and I quote "Buzzard - female, died in very good condition weighing 1385g and showing no evidence of trauma. There were good fat deposits over the breast and body cavity. The stomach contained some fresh food. The gullet was full of (animal) muscle tissue with deposits of white powder evident. The post mortem examination findings indicate that pesticide poisoning was likely to be the cause of death in this incident. The analytical investigation has confirmed that suspicion by revealing gross residues of chloralose in liver tissue and gullet. The source of the chemical is unknown at present but abuse is suspected". A search if the area where the bird was found couldn't locate the poisoned bait so all the police could do was warn the estate staff that the bird had been found, and, naughty boys, not to do it again in the future! So, the killing goes on and my buzzard just becomes another statistic.

To close, just a quick up date on the ongoing green shield-moss search. Since the last diary a few more people have been out looking and finding logs and capsules - brilliant. A day on Deeside with Sandy, Claire, Richard & Caroline at a known site we found one capsule on the original willow log and then a few more on four other logs, comprising willow, birch and Scots pine. Sandy carried on the good work and found several new logs and capsules in a wood near Beauly which used to be the only known site in Britain for the moss and where it hadn't been seen for several years. On one of my Bird Atlas outings in early February I came upon a likely log in a very odd place right by a vehicle track and saw lots of stalks where the capsules had been predated along with seven remaining capsules (above left). In total there were 62 stalks along with the remaining capsules, the largest single population that has ever been found and what a sight it must have been before the capsules were eaten off. So we are now past the forty log mark and the capsule count has topped 160. At the end of last week I was honoured to have a visit from Gordon Rothero, one of Britain's top bryologists, who spend a day looking at the moss growing on some of my alder log sites, a habitat where he hadn't seen the moss growing before.

That's it, enjoy the read.

Stewart & Janet

The Cairngorms from Rynettin - Abernethy Forest

All photos © Stewart Taylor

Highlights of 2007 a year that will be difficult to beat

A Happy New Year to you all. To round off the year I thought it would be nice to run through a few of the highlights of 2007 and bring you up to date with a few items from the Christmas and New Year break.

January.

2007 started with a wee personal project within the forest in trying to sort out how many sites or 'patches' of twinflower there are within the reserve. Over the years people had visited areas where the plant was known to grow, some just to see this brilliant pinewood plant and others to work on the plant ecology, habitat, patch size etc. Over time various grid references came into being, two or three sometimes referring to the same patch, so did we have 20 or 60 patches? The aim of the project was to visit each site and, using modern technology (a global positioning system unit), decide once and for all what constituted a patch and to give that patch its own accurate location. Plant recording in January I hear you cry! Well yes, the creeping stems of the twinflower retain their leaves all through the year so provided there isn't lots of snow it is possible to find it. A short article on twinflower appeared back in June when I showed Andy carrying out research on pollination of the flowers. However, what I failed to mention was that 2007 was the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus the father of modern plant and animal classification, and twinflower, Linnaea borealis, is the only plant or animal he gave his name to. To read more about Linnaeus go to http://www.linnean.org/index.php?id=51 . The first person to fully describe a plant or animal, has their name added to the full Latin name hence Linnaea borealis L. (or Linn.) means that Linnaeus was the man who first described twinflower. Similarly, Cortinarius pinicola Orton shows that my friend the late Peter Orton was the first to describe this fungus. Sorry, I digress. The survey found that the reserve holds more than 40 patches of twinflower (difficulty in separating a couple of patches and two more added recently) and to date I have not seen the results of Andy's pollination work.

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February & November.

At one twinflower site I was blown away by the naturalness of the forest, big mature Scots pines, big fallen decaying Scots pines with the creeping stems of twinflower covering some of them, and a very active section of the River Nethy threatening, at some point in the future, to wash quite a bit of it away. I live in awe of areas of 'naturalness' like this, and even though man has had his grubby hands on this bit of the forest in the past, it is one of the hidden gems within the bigger Abernethy Forest that has remained fairly undisturbed for about the last hundred years. I doubt I could take you anywhere in Britain and show you a piece of pristine, natural forest, woodland that hasn't been altered by man, so these small, but relatively "natural" pieces of ancient woodland, growing and dying over hundreds of years need to be left to carry on doing just that. As I looked at these logs my thoughts turned to the possibility of some of the fallen logs providing a home to the rare green shield moss Buxbaumia viridis, and as you know from recent diaries, following my first encounter with a few popping out of the snow on a big dead alder log almost a year ago, I've managed to write a new chapter on the status and distribution of this moss in that time. Seven logs with about 20 capsules in January has now grown to 31 logs with 125 capsules by the end of 2007. The search goes on and as the snow melts and the days get longer a mini expedition to the riparian woodlands north of Inverness beckons.

My 60th birthday present from Janet and the family was a day out with Neil McIntyre learning all about the art of taking good photographs like the Achlean waterfalls left. http://www.neilmcintyre.com/

March.

The first Firwood diary was written!

This was the month when we felt winter was letting go, oystercatchers and lapwings were back in the fields, song thrushes and meadow pipits sang in Nethybridge and on nearby moorland, the first butterfly appeared, but the best sound was the calls of frogs and toads as they moved back to their breeding pools to start the breeding process all over again.
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April - May.

Osprey arrival time with 2007 following similar soap-opera theatre as in previous years. Henry, if you are reading this could you please try and arrive by the first week of April this year! Also Caperwatch time with lots of early mornings and many fingers crossed down at the Osprey Centre. All the migrants had arrived by first week of May and, following a very dry and sunny April, lots of flowers were blooming early. In the forest, blaeberry was flowering three weeks early, the forest buzzing with bumblebees as they visited the flowers. Bombus monticola the bilberry bumblebee is one of the less common bees to be seen easily at this time. See Jennifer's website at http://www.sbes.stir.ac.uk/people/postgrads/harrison.html . Some of her work is being carried out in Abernethy. Wood ant nests were also teeming with ants as they re-thatched their nests and foraged in the forest for food.

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June.

Lots of birds had young on the wing which was just as well this year as June and July deteriorated into one of the wettest summers on record. Just my luck to get a short paid contract to go looking for a little mason bee (left) Osmia uncinata! Even on days when the sun shone the temperature was too low for the bee to fly. Despite the poor weather six new sites were found for the bee. In addition, searching nearby forest tracks for the bee also turned up a first location east of the Great Glen for a conopid fly Physocephala nigra ( see http://hbrg.org.uk/Conopids/ConopidMain.html ) and a new sites for the small blue and dingy skipper butterflies. On Loch Garten a few families of goldeneye were still around and alarming common sandpipers let me know I was getting too close to their mobile family.

ST is honoured by being named as one of thirty Highland Naturalists as part of the celebrations for the Highland Year of Culture. Wow!

July.

More bees whilst on holiday in the Uists, finding 12 sites for the northern colletes bee Colletes floralis, but the main highlight really was just walking along miles and miles of deserted beaches, blown by the wind and seeing what had been washed in by the tide. The other highlight is the light and colour, big skies and colourful machair with accompanying giant orchids!

July was full of highlights really, with bog orchids re-found, rare moths found in the aspen woods, the masses of creeping lady's tresses in the pinewoods and the appearance of the first of the forest fungi. Now there is a story.....

August & September.

Taylor becomes a single species mycologist - a fungi recorder. Along side the work done on the green shield moss, the recording of tooth fungi that took place during these months has to be up there as one of the main highlights of the year. 87 kilometres of tracks were walked and all the little quarries along them were visited. Tooth fungi seem to like the edges of tracks and areas of small scale disturbance as places to grow - so this is where the searches were carried out. At the end of the survey tooth fungi had been found at 507 locations comprising 12 species with 22 needing further work to be identified.

Hydnellum caeruleum - blue tooth is shown right.

.Species ............................................ Number of sites
1. Hydnellum peckii ....................................... 132
2. Hydnellum scrobiculatum .......................... 85
3. Bankera fuligineoalba ................................. 60
4. Phellodon tomentosus ................................ 48
5. Phellodon niger ............................................ 41
6. Phellodon melaleucus ................................. 29
7. Hydnellum caeruleum ................................ 22
8. Hydnellum aurantiacum ............................. 21
9. Hydnum repandum ..................................... 20
10. Sarcodon squamosus ................................. 20
11. Hydnellum ferrugineum .............................. 6
12. Sarcodon glaucopus...................................... 1

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To find out more about the distribution of these relatively rare fungi go to http://www.searchnbn.net/ type the name in the search section and click on 1 or 3 for the simplest maps.

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October.

Bury Market - brilliant, and also covered by the Two Hairy Bikers recently on TV. Janet was tempted and we tucked into fresh black pudding as we stood by the stall, finger-licking good and if you would like to try some try typing Bury black puddings into Google and be amazed!

November.

Our grandson Finlay's first birthday and Janet's hope for a shorter working week realised.

December.

Happy birthday Janet. The bus pass has just arrived!

A two day working week agreed at school so Janet has time to develop her eBay business putting her expert sewing skills to good use by developing a range of hand-made products. Amazingly lots of men visited her eBay site at janet-gardencottage in the run up to Christmas as they searched desperately for that gift that was different and a little bit special, see Egg cosy right.

Ruth won a local "Dragons Den" competition organised by Highlands & Island Enterprise.

Laura & Douglas bought an old farmhouse in the Aberdeenshire countryside with tree sparrows and yellowhammers in the garden, and barn owls waiting on the fences to greet them as they returned from work.

Recent events.

BTO Atlas work continues with outings to less visited areas to undertake roving recording. An outing just before Christmas saw me visiting woodland to the west of the Speyside Way combining a green shield moss search with a bird recording visit. Leaving the woodland to cross the moor I came across yet another dead buzzard lying by a fence. There is just a possibility that the bird had flown into the fence but I wasn't taking any chances so I turned my poly-bag inside out so that I could use it like a glove to pick up the bird in case poison was the cause of death. The bird is currently being analysed to determine how it died. This is the third dead buzzard I have found this year, the first possibly naturally injured or shot in the wing and not killed, the second has a possible court case pending, and I will let you know about the third once I have the results back. The tip of a very large, and not shrinking iceberg, I would suggest.

For Christmas we visited Laura and Douglas and were looked after like royalty - thank you. On Christmas eve Laura commented on the size of the moon rising outside so I just had to go out and have a shot at photographing it. Not sure what the neighbours thought about the odd guy in the field, in the dark, with a camera, but it was a bit of fun and a few nice photos were captured. However, it was when I was viewing the pictures that I realised there was something wrong and the lump of muck on the camera's internal digital filter has meant that I am now camera-less and my faithful companion is currently with Nikon to have the muck removed and the camera serviced.

To walk off the excesses we visited the coast on Boxing Day. The first stop was at Pennan, famous for the film starring Burt Lancaster - Local Hero and, more recently, for some huge land-slips. The second stop was at Crovie just a few miles further along the coast. Both of these tiny hamlets almost defy logic perching as they do right on the very edge of the sea. At Pennan you can at least drive to some of the houses but at Crovie you have to abandon the car at one end of the village, at the bottom of a very steep road, and carry or cart your shopping or goods along the narrow sea-front path to your house. Visitors are asked to leave their cars at the top of the hill and walk down!

To see more pictures and read more about Crovie go to:- http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/gardenstown/crovie/index.html. Well worth a visit with the RSPB Troup Head nature reserve just next door (about 85 miles from Firwood).

And so we move into 2008, if it turns out to be half as good as 2007 that would be great. A bit more sun and a bit less rain would be a good start, along with a settled pair of ospreys! Thank you all for your Christmas cards, letters etc, and thank you Christopher for a brilliant calender. Christopher and mum and dad are regular visitors to Firwood and you can see what Chris is getting up to at http://www.chriswebdiary.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ .

With our best wishes for 2008

Stewart & Janet

Stewart's longest shadow on the shortest day!

Everybody getting in on the act on Christmas Day!

All photos © Stewart Taylor