Things with long antennae

It has been an interesting but busy few weeks since the last diary entry, as the last one was penned the bird breeding season was in full swing and as I type away just now, there are young birds everywhere and for some birds the breeding season is over. Blink and you've missed it! At the Loch Garten osprey site all three eggs hatched successfully and the chicks have progressed reasonably well, though the youngest one is getting a bit of 'aggro' from it's bigger nest mates. Provided the male osprey brings in plenty of fish all should survive, though it's not unusual for some or all of a brood to be lost if insufficient food is brought in. Watch this space. By the end of the month the young ospreys will be ringed and, for the first time for the Garten chicks, fitted with satellite tracking devices. It will be very interesting to see for the first time, where the young birds get to as they start to find food for themselves in the local area, but, more interestingly, where they get to as they migrate south for the winter months.

As you will have seen by now, sections of the BBC's Springwatch programme was beamed live from Strathspey with Simon King fronting this section of the nightly programme. The BBC programme producers visited Abernethy way back in January to see what involvement the reserve should have, but from a long shopping list of needs just a few made it through to the programme. Crested tits featured regularly during the two weeks but when the nest close to Boat of Garten failed we were asked if we had anything that could act as a replacement. I had two nests which might have filled the gap but one was too far from the reserve track network and the other one was right by the road heading towards Loch Garten. The second nest was actually found by chalet guests Paul & Lesley as they walked back from the Osprey Centre and was just too public to film. Amazingly, the same Scots pine stump (right) was also used by cresties about fifteen years ago and featured on a 'live' taped interview that I did with a sound-recordist who wanted to incorporate information about the birds he was recording as well as sections of the birds calls and song. All those years ago the birds fledged young successfully but sadly this year, the nest suffered the same fate as the nest at Boat of Garten, predated by either great spotted woodpeckers, a pine marten or even a red squirrel. A day later I had another nest where the adults were feeding recently hatched young, and though the site was easily accessible, it was never filmed, the Grantown nestbox birds being the easier option to film activity inside the nest, something a little difficult to do with a natural nest site.

One pinewood speciality that did find favour however, was the timberman beetle, involving Rab and his forest based sawmill. I checked out the site and sure enough, there were several pairs of beetles visiting the uncut logs and the next day cameraman John Aitchieson and his assistant Sean Dugan were on site by early afternoon. Mating beetles were located and several single males and females were also on the logs. The timberman appeared in last year's diary (see "Rab and the timberman" 30 April 07). These spectacular beetles belong to the longhorn group of beetles with the timberman out-doing all the rest of the group by having enormously long antennae. In the male (right) the antennae can be up to six inches from tip to tip attached to a body that is only about an inch long, whilst in the female the antennae are about half that size. If you saw Springwatch then of course you will know all this! John filmed mating pairs, females laying their eggs under the pine logs bark and spectacular males wandering along the top of the logs. Simon appeared a few days later to do his bit to camera and of course, show a male beetle wandering across his hand - the only way to show just how big the beetles antennae actually are. Rab remains the star but sadly he didn't feature in the programme. He does though appear in my picture left. Thank you Rab.

Another insect has been in my thoughts during the last few weeks as the warmer weather of June started to develop - the large pinewood hoverfly Blera fallax. Sadly few pictures of the hoverfly are available so go to http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/species/casestudies/pinehoverfly.asp to see what it looks like. One day I would love to get the chance to photograph this fly but first I have to confirm that it still resides in the Abernethy pinewoods and then the difficult bit would be actually seeing an adult on the wing and getting close enough to it to take its picture! In earlier diaries I have covered some of the work I have been involved in by providing potential breeding 'pots' for the fly to use for egg-laying and larval rearing. To date none of the pots have been used so I moved on to the "Mark 3" breeding pot, well box actually. In the earlier 'pots' plastic containers have been used to hold the pinewood chips (being made left) and water that the hoverfly requires as a breeding site, the pot then being covered with a lid but with a hole for rainwater to enter to continue to maintain a pool of water over the chips. A few Scots pine stumps have also been hollowed out and filled with chips to try and create the same habitat. At the two sites in Strathspey where the hoverfly has been recorded in recent years, the latter artificial breeding hole has been used successfully (see http://www.mallochsociety.org.uk/blera-2003). So, my aim this time round, was to make a wooden 'pot', mimicking as closely as possible the pine stump site and similar to what the fly would use in the wild. Sadly, I still need a small amount of plastic film in the make up of the box (right), to ensure water is retained, but hopefully the sheer amount of wood will overcome any problems the small amount of plastic might create. Time will tell. A bit of June sun wouldn't go amiss either! When the sun has shone patches of bird's-foot trefoil have been visited to see if the small solitary bee Osmia uncinata is still with us on the reserve. It is, and so far it has been seen at three sites.

The 1st June was the time to start the second round of BTO Breeding Bird Atlas visits, the first ones having been completed during April and May. I didn't hang about and by 6th June all five tetrads had been re-visited for the required two hours and the data forwarded to BTO. I continue to record birds seen anywhere else via the roving records database. One such visit walking from Firwood, along the B970 and back through Mondhuie Wood (Speyside Way) produced a list of 57 bird species and all within about a mile of the house. Whooper swan and raven were the more unusual species but it was nice to see a few more swifts and house martins flying overhead and a couple of sedge warblers chattering away. The second visit was also made to the BTO breeding bird square close to Grantown on Spey. The lack of birds on the moorland site is more than made up for by the wonderful patches of pink coloured sphagnum moss dotted with the leaves of cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus) above. A meadow pipit erupting from your feet always indicates a nest and on this occasion the nest contained four eggs. The survey site is also a maintained grouse moor and evidence of predator control is regularly encountered. Legal methods of predator control include Larsen traps for crows, fox snares and fen traps in rocks, boxes etc to trap small mammals. So it was encouraging to see the latter method correctly used when on my last visit, even though to many people the method still causes offence. On this occasion the fen trap was installed on a log across a ditch and covered with weld mesh to ensure that birds and non-target species couldn't land on the trap. You do have to hope though that the springing of the trap kills the animal outright otherwise it suffers a long and lingering death hanging upside down, in the trap, suspended from the pole.

The last few weeks have seen all the puddles on the roads and the edges of the lochs turn an odd shade of yellow as the male pollen from the Scots pine trees has started to waft around the forest in search of flowers to fertilise. The general stillness of the weather has meant that this period has been a bit extended and on days when the wind did blow a little you would have thought parts of the forest were on fire as clouds of pollen was blown up above the trees looking a bit like smoke. As this has been happening the flowers from last year have been developing into new cones to provide the seed for regeneration, and for crossbill and squirrel food early next year. I couldn't resist a photo of one of the trees in all its energetic splendour.

As the BBC Springwatch team arrived in the area Janet and myself welcomed two great friends, Hugh and Sue Miles, back to the area where they had spent many happy but long hours working in the 1970s. When I joined the RSPB full-time in 1976, the RSPB ran a very successful films unit backed up by a great stills photo unit. Mike Richards was the stills camera man and Hugh was the film camera man. In the mid-1970s the Society embarked on a three year project to film the osprey in both its Scottish breeding sites and in the wintering area in north-west Africa and to ensure he was close to the action at all times Hugh, Sue and their family moved to Scotland for the duration of the filming period. There was great fun building high, no very high pylon hides to actually get close to the nesting ospreys and locating good fishing spots so that attempts could be made to film the birds actually catching fish. The latter efforts produced some of the most memorable footage ever of ospreys fishing and tested out the fairly new high-speed camera equipment to the limit, so that every movement was captured in superb "slow-mo". Everybody does it now, but at the time this was cutting edge stuff and developed Hugh's reputation as a cool, professional cameraman, always looking for the best angle or technique to show the animal being filmed at its absolute best. Following the success of the osprey film Hugh went freelance and went on to film locally, "The Great Wood of Caledon" where finding cresties, crossbills, insects and plants tested skills to the limit, again producing a superb film about the ancient Caledonian pinewood, its ecology and natural history. The book which accompanied the film is well worth buying if you ever come across one. Filming otters in Shetland, polar bears in the arctic and snow leopards in the Himalayas followed, and who can ever forget the haunting Latin American folk music that accompanied "The Flight of the Condor". To see a list of some of Hugh's classics, visit http://www.wildfilmhistory.org/person/115/Hugh+Miles.html. The visit to Scotland on this occasion was to film salmon fishing on the River Spey for an eight part series to be titled, "Catching the Impossible", but as usual lots of other local wildlife was filmed as well, all with a part to play in the finished films. While Hugh is out filming and editing films in the studio Sue keeps the business side of the Miles film enterprise in order. For all Hugh and Sue's current projects see http://www.passionforangling.info/index.html.
PS Guess who took Simon King out to introduce him to film making?

Mike Richards hasn't been taking it easy either since he left the RSPB, filming chimpanzees hunting other monkeys in the Tai jungle in Africa in 1992 to his most recent film on Tigers in Pench National Park in India, just a couple from a long series of award winning films that he has been involved in.

The work with the two mosses continues. The Dicranum bergeri (Waved fork-moss) work turned from just trying to re-find a couple of previous locations to carrying out a full survey of one of the bog sites that I had looked at. Why? Well, as is usual with me, when I go looking for these mosses, things don't always seem as they should be, and so it was at one of the sites. Within Abernethy reserve we already had the largest known UK population where, on one bog twenty four hummocks had been found by Gordon Rothero and Andy Amphlett in 2004. Having seen this site a hummock seemed to like growing on a damp sections of the bog. When I when to one site to re-find one of David Wood's records from 1991, the hummocks that he had found were in this sort of habitat. However, as I walked off the bog I found another hummock growing in what looked like less typical habitat, a bit drier, more heather and generally more vegetated. I took a GPS reading so that I could return the next day. One, two, three more hummocks...six, seven eight, hmm I thought, Taylor's going to be getting a reputation as the non-expert who finds rare mosses! Armed with a couple of bits of red and white tape, I systematically work my way back and forth across the bog, finding more and more hummocks. At each site a small sample of the moss had to be taken so that it could be checked under the microscope (above), so getting back from the bog late in the evening meant checking through the fresh material until about midnight. On 31 May the transects were complete, each sample had been initially checked by me and confirmed by Andy and out of the 68 collections made, only two were mis-identified by myself. The site had produced an amazing 66 hummocks, the best in Britain!

The green shield-moss (Buxbaumia viridis) growing season is drawing to a close and all the logs and ant nests have been re-visited twice since the last diary. At all the sites, the capsules have gone from being bright green and upright to brown and tipped over to an angle of forty-five degrees. From late-May the capsules started to 'peel' (left) and on a visit in early June my photographs showed the capsules and surrounding mosses covered in tiny white specks of dust which I assume to be gatherings of spores. I await confirmation of this. So capsules which first appeared in late October early November have had to survive until now to reproduce - a whole eight months. It isn't surprising then that just over forty-percent of them have been predated. Interestingly, a couple of capsules that have been knocked over recently, have also seemed to produce spores and the poor old capsule featured in the last diary has had yet more problems. On my last check the whole log on which the moss divot with capsule had been returned to following its last 'kicking' by sheep, had been completely destroyed by red deer, and once again the divot, complete with its capsule, was found upside down next to the devastated log. The capsule however, still seems to be producing spores so it was replaced, yet again, on a part of the log that hadn't been damaged! Watch this space. Whilst checking one of the other logs there had been an emergence of flying queen wood ants during the day and the log was covered in them. Most of them still had their wings but one ant, as I watched it through my camera lense, started to remove its wings by bending sidewards and back and biting off the wings at their base. The picture shows the ant in the last stages of this operation and it still has one wing to bite off though this did seem to be posing a bit of a problem. There is a second queen ant in the picture which has already lost its wings. This is something I have never witnessed before.

It has been a good month for flowers. Whilst listening for a grasshopper warbler in Mondhuie I came across some of the tallest lesser twayblades I have seen on the reserve (left), at least six inches tall rather than the normal one to two inches. Just off the reserve I also came across an, as yet to open, spike of common twayblade, the relocation of a plant last recorded at this site by the late Mary McCallum-Webster in 1975. Amazing!

A little further afield there were seven spikes of bird's nest orchid (right) and even further afield (nr Keith) a show of hundreds of herb paris flowers (below) growing in a damp piece of woodland. The last time I saw this plant was when we were employed on the Hawsewater golden eagle project in 1973 and a few flowers were found in Naddle Wood. Well worth the miles and a very unusual flower when seen in such quantity.

Currently a little time is being spent looking for coralroot orchid at a site where it was last recorded in 1995, a green orchid in green grass growing in amongst green sphagnum moss. No problem then!

Whilst checking out the bird's-foot trefoil patches for Osmia bees I was lucky enough to come across a narrow bordered bee hawk moth which was hovering in front of the flowers and using its long proboscis to reach the nectar. A couple of days later we had one feeding on phlox flowers in the garden. This moth has fairly long antennae but it doesn't come into the league of the wee micro-moth that has been very abundant this year throughout the pinewoods. This is possibly Adela cuprella, one of the long-horn moths, appropriately named as with the timberman beetle.

That's it for another couple of weeks.

Best wishes

Stewart & Janet

A back-lit patch of "hare's tail" cotton grass just for Hugh & Sue!

and just for the record, a picture of the "other" cotton grass

All photos © Stewart Taylor

'Allo, Allo, allo, what's all this then

The breeding season is well underway since the last diary, young blackbirds in the garden, starlings in the nestbox feeding young, birch trees a brilliant green with their new leaves and the road verge into the village a mass of yellow as the dandelion flowers open en mass forcing their petals upwards towards an ever warming sun. All the migrant birds have arrived but there is a noticeable lack of house martins and swifts around the place, the few of the former that were visiting possible house nest sites in Nethybridge a week ago seem to have disappeared and so far only one swift has been heard - very strange. One willow warbler one day and a wood full the next. The first redstart was followed ten days later by the first spotted flycatcher and now their zip-zip-zip calls can be heard in many places in the forest. A grasshopper warbler in Mondhuie Wood was unusual and a single whooper swan on the Spey on 1 May looked like it might be staying here for the summer. A single whooper summered on Lochindorb last year so, possibly, this is the same one. A walk round the tetrad (4 one kilometre squares) roughly covering Firwood and Mondhuie Wood on 1 May produced 49 bird species, not bad within a mile of the house! Sadly, 'Have I got news for you', on Radio 4 will never quite be the same with the passing of Humph Lyttleton on 25 April. Many a time I wondered what passing motorists thought as they passed a single person in a car laughing his head off as Humph flew close to the wind with one of his Samantha jokes or the team as they suggested names for the folk attending the undertakers ball! Brilliant and a great loss. For a period of time Humph was also President of the RSPB in recognition of his love of birds. Not a bad musician either.

Following the sad news, a bit of good news: The Isle of Lewis windfarm planning application has been refused, safeguarding an amazing part of the island for the internationally important wildlife it supports. Lets hope the Scottish Executive is brave enough to do the same with Donald Trump's plan to convert an equally important section of the Aberdeenshire coast into a golf course, or is it the 100s of houses and the big hotel that is the real motive? It's a little sad that folk see these large tracts of unspoilt countryside as 'waste-lands' ripe for development. Perhaps the credit crunch will help here.

It's that time of year when huge amounts of effort go into recording and monitoring wildlife as we progress rapidly into the growing and breeding season. The five bird Atlas tetrads I have taken on have just had their first breeding season visits completed, just a second visit to complete during June, though we are allowed to record as late as July. The visit to each tetrad takes two hours, which is timed so that all participants are collecting data in the same way, allowing BTO staff at a later date to analyse the data to extract the maximum amount of information possible from the huge effort that is going on nationally to collect it. However, you will have to wait for four years for all the maps, data etc to be available, the fieldwork continues until 2011. The first of two visits was also made to my BTO 'Breeding Bird Square', a one-kilometre square located on moorland just north of Grantown on Spey. As explaind last year all through the country a series of these squares were selected at random and then an appeal went out for folk to visit them. I am the second person to cover this particular square and this is the fourth year I have visited it. Being a moorland square there are not that many birds to record, but, this is the beauty of the method of one-kilometre square selection, covering many squares that bird recorders would never normally visit. It is from this project that many of our national 'bird trend' statistics are obtained and, the longer the set of data, the more valuable becomes the information showing increase of declines in bird numbers at a UK scale. It's an early start and for my square, a long trek, but the views all around are well worth the effort as you can see from the photos (left, a view to the Cairngorms and right to Ben Rinnes).

A bit more early morning work involves counting the black grouse leks within Abernethy Forest, one count in April (5am start) and one in first week of May (4am start). Again the effort of an early morning start is well worth it (provided it's not pouring down) and the drive out through the forest in the dark, well almost dark with the first signs of dawn on the horizon, is always full of anticipation - more birds than last year or less? The lek I have counted for the last ten years or so, is one of the more remote and involves a bit of a hike to get to the location where you can actually see the birds. The May count this year was carried out in the warmest weather I have yet encountered, more noticeablee because of the long-johns and woolly vest being worn to supposedly keep out the cold. 10 degrees C! 10 degrees C at 4.30am is unheard of, and clothes had to be shed on the way in to the count location. Then the pink glow of dawn crept across the hillside as I sat counting the lekking birds and all was well with the world, despite the slightly damp clothes. On the April count a fox carrying food crossed the lek but didn't seem to worry the birds, and on the May count a buzzard flew over the lek scattering birds everywhere - was it trying to catch one? I don't know, but within a couple of minutes the birds were back and sparring between the males started up again as though nothing had happened. Magic. Overall, the number of lekking males was down slightly on 2007, not surprising when, due to the very wet summer, few chicks survived from the previous breeding season.

A funny thing happened when I was in the forest the other day, I came across someone (right) who has been in the news recently but seemed to be in trouble, up to his neck in a bog. Read on for the answer!

The mosses work continues, and with so many green shield-moss sites now available to monitor, a few interesting facts are starting to emerge. So far this growing season, 55 sites have been found with about 270 capsules recorded. Within the Abernethy area I have been able to visit all the logs more than once - the first visit when they were found (some as early as November 2007) and a re-visit of all the logs during the last week. Thirty six logs are involved and the first count total was 171 capsules. The recent visit found that 102 capsules are still growing showing a loss of about 40%. The real loss is actually very much bigger as a count of 144 stalks (mosses that have lost their capsules) shows that predation rates in the early part of winter is very high. In the last couple of months some mosses have been lost to sheep damage, the animals managing to knock off the moss and bark on which it was growing. The capsules are also changing colour, from bright green during the winter to a dull brown/green now. A few capsules have disintegrated, one looking like it has exploded, all have been photographed as we still know very little about this stage of the capsules' life-cycle. The capsules are also moving from being upright to tilting at an angle of about 45 degrees looking ever more like its close relative the brown shield-moss Buxbaumia aphylla. Now there is a story!

A few weeks ago I receive information from Sandy, a real moss (bryophyte) expert, saying that Buxbaumia aphylla had been found on Deeside, close to Crathie Church. Now Crathie Church is next door to Balmoral Castle and is the church that members of the Royal Family attend when in residence at Balmoral. So, one Sunday in late April I decided to set off early one morning to go to Deeside, but spend a bit of time on the wonderful moors between Tomintoul and Deeside to see if I could get a few pictures of red grouse or anything else that came close enough to photograph. After many stops (using the car as a photo hide) I managed to find one red grouse that didn't want to fly away as soon as I got the camera in position and got a nice picture. Eventually I arrived on Deeside about 10am, parking my car in the car park next to Crathie Church. As I parked I thought it a bit odd that there seemed to be police everywhere and then the penny dropped! I had decided to go and see the moss on a day when there had to be a member of the Royal Family in residence at Balmoral. So let me set the scene. There's this bloke, on a car park, on Deeside, by a church where Prince Charles and Camilla are just about to attend a service. He is loading a large rucksac with gear and on the outside he straps a tripod. He also has binoculars round his neck! As I leave the car park I explain to the police woman what I am up to, she says that the police up by the church might want to speak to me, which of course they do. I showed them my driving licence, and am asked to empty my rucksac, but can I remember the registration of my car? Not quite. I tell them I have met Charles a couple of times and that I'd been driven round Balmoral estate by his dad but decide it is time to stop digging! Eventually everything is sorted and they are happy to let me go on my way. I get the feeling that many eyes are watching me but from where I know not, especially when I need to stop for a pee and I need to get my GPS handset out to help me find the right stump! I do find the stump, I find five not four capsules as reported and with brilliant sunshine overhead, I get some very nice photographs of the moss. On my way back to the car the police stop me again - but this time because Prince Charles and Camilla are just departing (so no photo for the diary) and it would be best if I just waited for a few minutes. I show the two policemen my photos and it turns out that one of them was involved in a visit to the estate where I had found the poisoned buzzard back in January. Small world. So sorry, with all the stops I don't have a nice picture of the church and I thought better of asking one of the policemen to take my picture whilst talking to his colleague!


I was involved in a very interesting day at Abernethy in late April organised by Plantlife (http://www.plantlife.org.uk/), a deadwood and green shield-moss (Buxbaumia viridis) training day. An indoor session in the morning was followed by lunch at one of the log sites close to Forest Lodge where we could show them the moss. We then visited another site and let the delegates know that we knew of two logs with capsules in this bit of wood, and asked if they could find them? Well, they did much better than that and Liz and Alison actually found two additional sites with a total of four more capsules. Claire also managed to find one of the original logs and then went one better by visiting her own patch on Deeside a few days later and found another log with a capsule there. Brilliant, and worthy of their picture being included in the diary. Normally it would be illegal to do what Joe is doing (right) because it is illegal to pick or remove green shield-moss capsules, but this "bark divot" with capsule is the result of sheep damage. Amazingly, the bark was put back on the log and the capsule continues to grow. The day after the course I came across a wood ant nest that had been damaged and went to investigate. Guess what, the ant nest had been long deserted by the ants but there, growing out of the side of the nest where five green shield-moss capsules (left), something that hadn't been recorded in the UK before. Where should we look next! And that wasn't the end of the story. I checked another two deserted ant nests close by and both had capsules growing on them. A wood ant nest is made up of thousands of twigs, pine needles and bits of grit so isn't that different from a lump of deadwood. Not only that, but large nests like the ones that had the capsules are very ancient structures, the nest in the picture is over a metre high and a metre and a half across its base and must be decades old. It will be interesting to see if new capsules appear in November.


A work colleague came across a sad sight last week. He noticed something pale by the side of the track to Forest Lodge and when he went to investigate he found a dead pine marten, probably hit by a vehicle. It is only when you get close to a predator like this that you realise what a powerful animal the pine marten is, the close up of the dead animals head (right) show a very impressive set of teeth. Ross was also involved in the first round of goldeneye nest box checks last week and in one box he found a sleeping marten, which, on closer inspection turned out to be a young animal. We loose several clutches of goldeneye eggs to martens every year but whether they alone are responsible for the decline in our breeding goldeneye population we just don't know. It was a good job he looked before putting his hand in the box!





No, this isn't the answer to the question posed earlier but shows the diary writer using a natural bridge to cross the River Nethy. Quite handy really as the melting snow in the Cairngorms had pushed up the height of the river to above wellie height and saved having to get wet feet! Just before crossing the 'bridge' I saw my first painted lady butterfly of the year and round about there were several green hairstreak butterflies along with green-veined whites, orange tips and small tortoiseshells. The first damselflies - large reds - have also been on the wing.

Of course, it's the new Mayor of London pretending to be a tussock of cotton grass! A week later and I would have had to include a cycle helmet.





That's it for another couple of weeks, enjoy the read.

Best wishes

Stewart & Janet

The one & only The Famous Grouse

All photos © Stewart Taylor

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