Wildlife in the garden

 Apart from the rabbit, which I am hoping I will manage to transfer out of the garden so I can plant out  my plants safely without them being its dinner, I  love seeing wildlife in the garden. I have managed to take a few videos which I will share.  First of all, a red squirrel:

 Whilst  I was gardening, the blackbird was having a forage in the compost heap:

Those of you who have read earlier posts will know that I do a regular hunt around the garden to remove New Zealand flatworms (which eat native earthworms). They rest during the day under anywhere dark and damp.  I disturbed a whole nest of field mice and was not quick enough to video them all, but one seemed unaware of the dangers of sitting out in the open and was undisturbed by my taking out my phone to video him/her having a wash! This is quite a long video but it seems a shame to shorten it. There's a photo if you don't want to use data to watch the video.

A field mouse having a wash

STOPPRESS! Frog spawn has appeared in the pond.

More happenings in the garden

 It seems as though Spring is trying to appear as there are bulbs starting to flower in the garden.

Crocuses, irises and snowdrops

However, not all the bulbs have succeeded in flowering this year as some have been cut off or dug up in their prime.

Remains of the crocuses

Something has dug them up.  I am a bit puzzled as to the culprit as they have not eaten the flowering shoots and I can still see most of the bulbs.  The suspects are:  a rabbit, a pheasant or a squirrel, all of which have been in the garden. I have put some of the discarded shoots in water to see if they will flower, but I am not very hopeful. Time to set up the trail camera to see if I can catch them in the act!

In my last post, I mentioned a small yellow lichen that I had found on a garden branch.  I was not sure what it was and have had (Zoom) discussions with more knowledgeable lichen people. One reason I had confused myself was that there were actually two different yellow lichens, both tiny.

The first one was  just a tiny bunch of yellow lobes with even tinier bumps on the edges. There are two examples in the photo, and the lead from a propelling pencil is an easy way to give an idea of the scale.

The pencil lead is 0.5mm wide

The brown discs with white rims at the bottom of the picture is a different lichen, probably Lecanora hybocarpa. The discs are apothecia (fruiting bodies that produce spores), whereas the yellow lichen did not have any.  A help when trying to name yellow lichens is to put a drop of potassium hydroxide (KOH) on them and see if you get a colour change.

A red reaction with KOH

This red reaction rules out a whole group of yellow lichens in the Candelaria family.  It looked as though this little one was a Xanthoria and eventually it was named as either Xanthoria candelaria or Xanthoria ucrainica.  I won't go into the details here but the two species are hard to distinguish from each other.  Even more confusingly, they have now been renamed as Polycauliona instead of Xanthoria!

The second similar lichen  was on the same branch but these ones had apothecia, and turned out to be Xanthoria (now Polycauliona) polycarpa.

The ruler is numbered in cm with mm divisions

 I rather went to town with some microscope investigations. I cut a very thin section of an apothecium to get some spores. The spores are dumbbell shaped inside and have the tongue twisting description of polarilocular. 

Microscope photos

I have more pictures but I expect that is enough detail for most of you!

A scarcity of lichens

 Whilst staying with family west of London, the house was opposite Sunbury Park, a green space with ancient trees as it once belonged to an courtier who was gifted it by Elizabeth I. To my surprise (and disappointment) the tree trunks were bare of lichen apart from a new one for me, Flavoparmelia caperata.  This is a very common lichen in the UK apart from the North of Scotland.

You can also see some tiny specks of yellow lichen, which is probably Xanthoria parietina, more of which later.  The lack of lichens is linked to the air quality  and pollution as we were in a highly populated area with plenty of traffic.  Some lichens manage to thrive in the extra nitrogen  and Xanthoria is one of them. There are more lichens in the park, as there is a booklet available:

I bought a copy at an excellent café and embroidery gallery in the Park. Two more of my pastimes catered for - eating and crafts! Most of the booklet was about fungi, though there were 10 or so lichens mentioned.  A poor count when I can find more than that in my garden. 

I also did the New Year Plant Hunt and managed to find 11 species flowering.  One was a species I had not seen before, Gallant or Shaggy Soldier. These are actually 2 different species Galinsoga parviflora (Gallant Soldier)  and Shaggy Soldier (Galinsoga quadriradiata)  and I think my specimen was Gallant Soldier as it did not have the glandular hairs of Shaggy Soldier, but  I could not be sure as it is a  plant I am not familiar with. The plant was introduced at Kew in 1796, having come from Peru. It seems that the name Gallant Soldier is a corruption of the Latin "Galinsoga".  You can find lots more about this plant in a blog post at Botany in Scotland here.

The other "foreign" plant I saw was in the park, and there were just leaves, no flowers. But very striking leaves.

With the help of a plant app, it turned out to be Italian Arum or Italian Lords and Ladies (Arum italicum).

Once I got home, I decided to tackle some of the Bird Cherry tree prunings that had been lurking on the picnic table, as I did not want to throw them away until I had looked at the lichens growing on them. So much joy in looking closely at ordinary things!

Branch from Bird Cherry, with 6 inch ruler for scale.  

You can see a few brown scars where I have already taken off some of the lichens to look at under the microscope. Most of the lichens were familiar to me. There were some Lecanoras, most of which have  a white background and "jam tart" fruits:

This one was Lecanora carpinea (now renamed Glaucomaria carpinea) which has a white frosty look (it's called pruina) and the discs turn egg yolk yellow when a drop of bleach is added (C+yellow).

Glaucomaria carpinea with a drop of bleach

Another really common one is Lecanora hybocarpa. To ID it you have to take a slice and put it under a microscope with polarising filters to see the crystals glowing.

Lecanora hybocarpa

The section shows small crystals along the top which "snow" downwards, and bigger crystals lower down in the green area.

Some  of the lichens were easier to ID just by looking, with no special tests needed. This warty one has big apothecia. It's Melanohalea exasperata.

A rather wet lichen

There was one tiny yellow lichen that I had not noticed before.  Here it is next to Xanthoria parietina. 

The bigger yellow lichen at the top is the  X. parietina but I was interested in the  small one on the bottom twig which is only a few millimetres across. I have spent several days investigating it and I think I know what it is now, but I will check in with some of my lichen friends on Zoom to confirm it.  I'll share the details in another post!

New Year Plant Hunt

 Each year (since 2017, I think) the BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) have a citizen science project to find out what plants are in flower around New Year.  This Year, the days to go out and look are from 29 December 2024 to 1 January 2025.  There are lots of resources to help you here, including some spotter sheets with photos of the top ten or top twenty flowers you are likely to find. Here is an extract from their page:

Never too young to start! Photo copyright BSBI

"visit our spotter sheet page to view or download our brand new selection of Top Ten and Top Twenty spotter sheets for England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. They will help you find the plants most likely to be in bloom in your area!"

I am normally in Scotland at New Year and given the cold local conditions, there are slim pickings when looking for flowers in bloom. However, this year I will be in the south of England and I am looking forward to going out with my 6 year old grandson and seeing what we can find. In preparation, I have printed out and laminated the Top Twenty sheet.  I also went to look on the BSBI database to see what had been recorded near his house.  Well, that was a bit of a shock - there was only one plant recorded nearby which was ivy!  I'm sure we can find more than that - watch this space...

If you wanted to know what plants have been recorded near you, anyone can view the list by going to the BSBI database here. You will need to know your grid reference and if you don't have special permission, the results are no more precise than a 2km square. Go to Tools and pick "Taxon list for a grid square" and you will get a list of plants.

I really enjoy checking  a database to find out what has been recorded in a place I am visiting.  The British Lichen Society also has lists of lichen records so I went and checked there as well - none at all recorded where I am staying, and there is even a graveyard nearby - usually a good source of lichens.  I will be somewhat limited as I won't have all my lichen kit with me but a handlens and a notebook will have to suffice.  Maybe my next post should be on the lichen kit I keep accumulating....

A slime mould and a flower

Today we had the first snow of autumn which turned the lawn white and produced a thin crust of ice on the standing water.  So it was a surprise to find a whole heap of flowers blooming.  Literally, a whole heap, as my walk took me past a heap of topsoil in the working area/dump at the back of the local golf course. I don't know where the soil had come from but it was covered with Bugloss (Anchusa arvensis or now Lycopsis arvensis.) The older name is the one you'll need for most field guides if you want to look it up.

A heap of Bugloss

It is a very bristly plant, and if it reminds you a bit of Borage that's because they are both in the Borage family, Boraginaceae,  along with Comfrey and Forget-me-nots.  They all have 5 petals, usually joined into a tube and encased in a calyx of 5 sepals. When it comes to the seeds though, each flower produces 4 seeds or nutlets. The description in my Wild Flower Key book says " bristles with bulbous bases" and flower "throat closed by 5 hairy scales." This is difficult to see with a hand lens but you can see these features with a x20 microscope.

Blue arrow showing bristle with bulbous base, and centre of Bugloss flower with hairy scales.

Whilst doing some tidying up in the garden, I came across a slime mould growing on a lilac sucker. I've written about slime moulds in a previous post as they don't fit into the neat categories we like to use such as animal, plant or fungus. I found a really good series of articles at  https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/outreach/slimemold/    including how to grow one and keep it as a pet (!) I decided to cut the piece of lilac and take photos every day. Here is the life cycle of a slime mould (from the site above):

 Here is the one I found on  4 November 2024.

You can see the original slime phase (plasmodia) at the bottom of the stick. I was hoping to see some dramatic changes and it did change to start with, from an yellow fingery mass to a white one.

The same slime mould a day later

However, since then it hasn't changed (now 17 November), though I was hoping it would go black and develop some spores. But I did manage to find another clump in the same area of the garden that had already started making spores.

I shook it over a glass slide and the spores looked like black dust.  Under the microscope they looked like spheres ornamented with lots of tiny spikes. 

Spherical slime mould spores

They measured about 10-11 microns across.  A micron is a millionth of a metre or a thousandth of a millimetre so 100 of the spores would fit into a millimetre. Tiny! This spells the end of the slime mould but the spores will disperse and germinate if they land somewhere damp and will hatch into a kind of one celled creature called an amoeba (do you remember them from O level biology?). When it finds a suitable mate they will merge together and start another slime mould. I thought they were quite rare as I don't see them very often, but apparently the spores are everywhere and if you get some rotten wood and  keep it damp in a container, you will probably start a slime mould growing.  Go to the Warwick site for more details!

 

Fame? and Dundreggan

Unusually, I have featured in 2 publications this month.  The BSBI News and a BLS publicity flier.  These are hardly likely to be read by the vast majority of people (just like this blog!) The BSBI mention was for a plant I found on the waste ground between Church Terrace and Clune Terrace.

You might well ask, why bother to record a plant that has probably originated in someone's garden and then grown when they dumped some garden waste.  I suppose the answer is that if it became established or even invasive, it is good to know where it started off.

My other appearance is rather anonymous and I didn't spot it until my husband pointed it out. I'm the one in the turquoise anorak in the bottom left photo.

The pictures have come from a lichen course I went on in Fife last year.  It was called a LEAF course though I can't remember what the acronym stood for - basically it was for people who had done a LABS course to enable them to meet up and improve their skills.  Now I will have to explain what a LABS course is!  Lichens for Absolute Beginners.  This was an online course that got me started on learning about lichens in 2022.  It was really helpful for me so I volunteered to run the course myself for newbies and I am about to start with my third LABS group.  If you want to learn about lichens, you know whom to ask!

Dundreggan Rewilding Centre was the venue for a field meeting for the BLS last week.  This is when lichen enthusiasts get together and visit various sites to record what we find and to learn more, especially as there are usually some professional lichenologists attending who are generous with their expertise. Dundreggan is in Inverness-shire, on the road alongside the North side of Loch Ness.  I really enjoyed the week, though the only wildlife I came back with was  a bad cold and several ticks... all dealt with now.   One of the sites we visited was a graveyard near Glen Urquhart with the appropriate name of Kilmore Cemetery!

You would not believe how long keen lichen hunters can spend looking at one tree! Up high, down low and round the back...

Lichen hunters barking up the (right) tree

We were very fortunate with the weather which was clear and bright and we avoided Storm Ashley which was the next weekend. The good thing about having an interest in any aspect of nature is that it gets you outside into areas you might not normally visit.  As well as looking at trees and rocks, there was a lovely water fall on one of the Dundreggan walks, and the centre has an attractive avenue of limes that were just dripping with lichens.

The avenue of lime trees and a lichen called Pectenia plumbea

A waterfall on the Allt a'Choire Bhuidhe

But you don't have to travel far to see lichens if you live in Newtonmore - there are plenty to see here.

Back to Spey Dam - with friends

My lonely lichen life (!) was enlivened by meeting up with 2 keen lichenologists that I had only previously met on Zoom.  As they were up on holiday locally we arranged a lichening trip together and went to Spey Dam and Laggan Churchyard.  We were blessed with the most glorious of days. Sunny, clear and no wind which made for fantastic reflections in Loch Spey.

Loch Spey

My husband also came along and took the not so flattering pictures of  us looking closely at lichens!

This has led to some discussion as to the collective name for a group of lichenologists - a "peer", a "bottoms-up, a "myopia""... maybe you have some (polite) suggestions that you can leave in the comments!

On the way back, we called in at Laggan Churchyard.

The church is for sale for only £35,000.  A bargain - though you would need funds to do it up and install water.  The graveyard is not included in the sale and I think it belongs to, or is managed by, Highland Council.  I love the graveyard as it is full of a great variety of lichens, mainly on the headstones.  Because the headstones are made of different stones, mainly granite or sandstone, each kind of rock hosts its own community of lichens. The church would make a great Lichen Education Centre!

One new (to me) lichen I found in the church yard was an Umbilicaria,.  These are leaf like lichens which attach to the rock at one point (like an umbilicus). Some of them have black fruiting bodies (apothecia) which look like coiled licorice (the scientific term for this is gyrose).

In close up it reminds me of a biscuit with raisins it it.  It's called Umbilicaria torrefacta.

From further away it looks like something that has been deep fried and left in too long and burnt.

On the way home, I called in at Biallidbeg cemetery and was impressed by the very simple but ingenious gate closer.

Look at the big stone hanging on the left.  It is attached to the centre  of the top rail of the gate.  

When you open the gate it raises the stone so when you let go, the stone  falls and closes the gate. Just genius!