Fording the Feshie

Last month I met with the Highland Biological Recording Group (HBRG) to do a Bioblitz on a patch on land in Glen Feshie.  It is part of the area owned by Wildland, who wanted to know what was in a particular area to give a baseline survey before they undertook interventions.  The idea of a Bioblitz is that you record everything you find that is alive (apart from the people!) and I wanted to look at the lichens whilst others recorded fungi, plants, insects and anything else that hopped or flew past.

The Feshie

The area where we were recording was on the other side of the Feshie from the road, so we were ferried across the ford in a vehicle.

The ford across the Feshie

We were lucky with the weather which was dry, though the midges were plentiful. Too plentiful for my husband who decided to return before the vehicles came back and forded the Feshie in his bare feet!   I found a few lichens that particularly interested me, on Scots Pine.  

A new one for me was Hypogymnia farinacea. Not surprising that I had not seen it before as there are very few records, though it had been found in Glen Feshie before but on an Alder. It looks very similar to the common Hypogymnia physodes except that the soralia (the powdery looking bits) are all over the lobes rather than just at the tips.

Hypogymnia farinacea

There was plenty of Hypogymnia physodes as well, though I did find one thallus with an apothecium on it – never seen that before!

Hypogymnia physodes with apothecium ringed in red

A large fallen trunk had a pattern of black lines following the grain of the wood which I thought looked rather beautiful. This is actually a lichen called Xylographa parallela.

I didn't entirely ignore the plants I saw, though I find it hard to combine botany recording with recording lichens on the same trip, so I usually stick with one or the other.

There was some Common Mouse-ear (Pilosella officinarum) in bud looking like a boiled sweetie:

And a new plant for me, Mountain Sorrel (Oxyria digyna), growing in the shingle. Presumably the seeds were washed down in the water from higher up.

Mountain Sorrel

Other excitements were seeing 3 Capercaillie which flew across the road as we drove in. I had never seen one “in the flesh” before.  And to cap it all, I found a Capercaillie feather elsewhere on a tree stump. A brilliant day.

Butterflies and moths in the garden

 Although it is only a couple of days since my last post, we have had some sunshine and I was delighted to see a Hummingbird Hawk-moth visiting the Buddleia.  I have seen one on three days so far but it is just luck that I happen to be passing the bush when one is visiting. I did manage to video one of the visits though. I'm including a still in case you don't want to download the video.

Hummingbird Hawk-moth

Other visitors were  Red Admirals, Small Tortoiseshells and a Comma, looking rather like an autumn leaf.

A Comma Butterfly

Down in England

 July and August involved visits to family in various parts of England. Although I am there to enjoy my family, I keep an eye out for plants that are new to me.  The first visit was to Sunbury-on- Thames. While walking along the road to collect grandchildren from school, I spotted a grass growing at the edge of the pavement that was unlike anything I had seen before, and looked like fingers. There was more of it growing in the adjacent drive, between the paving.

Hairy Finger Grass

It turned out to be Hairy Finger Grass, Digitaria sanguinalis. You can see where the name came from (digit meaning finger) and the stems were hairy.  The BSBI distribution map shows that it is spreading north but has not reached my area, yet.

I think it is very likely that in this case the seed was introduced with the imported sand used when laying the pavers in the drive. 

In a naturally sandy path in Sunbury Park, there were a series of little holes.  If you were patient and waited for a while, the digger of these holes came along.  

Apologies for the length and quality of the video (24s) but my video editing skills are nil. I can't identify what kind of wasp it is. Let me know if you can!

An easier insect to identify was a Jersey Tiger moth that got into the house and had to be rescued.

Another insect-to-be was spotted in Sunbury Park on the Ragwort: the caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth.

Later in the week, we went down to Somerset and I did a bit of botanising in Crewkerne. One new plant was Caper Spurge (Euphorbia lathyris).

Caper Spurge

The plant exudes a white liquid when broken which can produce nasty blisters on the skin and the plant is poisonous so not one to meddle with. There are lots of fascinating facts about it here including that medieval beggars used it to induce blisters on their skin in the hope of eliciting sympathy (and a monetary contribution). I also saw the red berries of Cuckoo Pint or Lords and Ladies (Arum maculatum), another plant that is common elsewhere but not in Newtonmore and the Cairngorms.

Cuckoo Pint berries

The final visit was to North Cheshire and South Lancashire. I was shocked by the amount of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) by any waterways. It is an invasive weed and it was certainly out of control in the places I visited.

Himalayan Balsam on the far bank of the canal

The bees and butterflies found it attractive though so at least it was benefiting some of the wildlife.

Small blue butterfly on Himalayan Balsam

Grasses, Caterpillars and Flies.

While at the Kingussie allotments, I spotted a grass in a waste area that was not familiar to me. It reminded me a bit of barley with the long awns (stiff hairs) sticking out.

Mystery grass

 I took a sample home to see if I could identify it.  It looked as if it was either Barren Brome (Anisantha sterilis) or Great Brome (Anisantha diandrus) but I had never seen either species and I could not tell which it was. I tried taking some measurements  - but as usual, if there are 2 options e.g., 70mm or 60mm, to distinguish between the 2 species, my measurement was 65mm! It was quite important to get the correct species as there were no records of either grass locally, so in the end I posted a sample off to a referee - nothing to do with football - but an expert in a particular area of botany. In this case, it was a man called Michael Wilcox who identified it as Great Brome.

Great Brome

I was quite pleased to find it was the  first time it had been recorded in Cairngorm National Park. (It doesn't take much to excite a botanist!)

Map showing distribution of Great Brome (Arrow points to my record) (BSBI map)

A few days later, I was parked near Inverness airport, waiting to collect a friend.  Rather than wait at the airport, I went to the car park at the new Railway station which boasted car parking for 64 cars.  Not a parking space to be had - cars parked everywhere, along the verges etc.  Pretty obvious that most were probably not using the train but going away and avoiding  expensive airport parking. After parking a bit further away I checked out the plants on a grassy slope whilst waiting.  And what did I find but another Brome grass, a different species that was also new to me! Strange how these things happen - find one and then you find  something similar once you have "got your eye in". This one was Soft Brome (Bromus hordeaceus).

Soft Brome

Back at Kingussie Allotments, there are a lot of nettles on the path from the car park. I have patches of nettles in my garden as you read that they are good for caterpillars. But I never see a caterpillar on my nettles.  But there were plenty on the Kingussie nettles! Black caterpillars with white dots and spikes.

They turned out to be the caterpillars of the Peacock butterfly (Aglais io).

Back in my garden, my perennial cornflower was attracting some insects. I was not surprised to see a bee on the open flowers, but I was surprised to see clusters of greenbottle flies on the dead flowerheads, on the part under the flower head. I could see that they were using their mouthparts on the surfaces so presumably there is something tasty there.

And finally, a view of the pond showing a water lily bud and a small white flower of the Water Soldiers (the spiky plants sticking out of the water). The other leaves are Iris  and Bogbean.

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A'lichening at Glenmore and Cairngorm

I wrote a long post which somehow got deleted so this one will be a bit briefer!

I spent several days at Glenmore Lodge on a lichen course which I had helped to organise. The weather forecast was dire but we escaped with just one downpour which was fortunately just as we got back to our cars.

The format of each day was to go for a walk in the morning to different habitats and then spend the afternoon with our microscopes, as many lichens can't be identified without finding spores.

Most things about lichens are small so you have to get up close and personal to see them well.

Maybe something interesting on this dead log?

Or this sycamore?

Or these big rocks?

Lichens are quite fussy about where they grow - some like rocks, others like trees, others like dead logs. 

Even a dead stump can attract a host of lichenologists!

My garden is full of flowers and  wildlife at the moment. There was a small (5cm) Common Newt under a log.

It was near the pond - which might explain why my tadpoles disappeared as newts eat tadpoles.

A Bee Beetle was on a Scabious flower.

And a pair of blackbirds have been following me around as I garden, collecting food.  Here is the female in the compost heap.

My bamboo plant has flowered this year for the first time. This might be bad news as they can die after that.  They are a grass, and I have some news about grasses in my next post.

Catch up

It has been a while since my last post as life has been very busy, so this month's post is a round up of photos.

 April saw a trip down to Perth to the Scottish Rock Garden Club show and a walk along the Tay. I came back from the show with 20 packets of seed.  Some are in the fridge as most alpines need a cold spell before germinating, so the fridge mimics the winter. I love the excitement of watching a pot of seeds awaiting little green shoots.

The walk along the Tay introduced me to a new plant with white flowers, which I thought was rather attractive. On looking it up, it was Few-flowered Garlic (Allium paradoxum). It is not native, but an introduced species which becomes invasive and it is an offence to plant it in the wild.  

My photos are rather poor but there are some much better ones here where there is a blog post all about this plant.

I am helping to organise a lichen course in June, in Glenmore, so there have been a few trips to find suitable rocks to study.

Plenty of unknown crustose species here!

 A walk near Loch Morlich found more lichens on old stumps, mainly Cladonias,

 and the surprise find of a dead bat at the base of a pine tree.

On a walk up Cairngorm, on the Coire an t-Sneachda path, a hairy caterpillar crossed our path:

Thanks to Audrey for the ID: it's a Dark Tussock Moth

I also saw some lichens that were new to me, including Allantoparmelia alpicola which looked like a blob of magma. To see it you need to be on high ground, over 600m. It is the black lumpy lichen in the middle of the photo.

The fibrous looking lichen at the top left is Pseudephebe pubescens:

There is a great variety of forms of lichens from lumpy crusts to these spiky strands. All beautiful in their own way.

A Post about a Post

 As promised, this post is all about a Newtonmore lamppost.  If you want to see it for yourself, it is opposite the entrance of the Folk Museum, on the  opposite side of the main road from the entrance.  It is metal and has been painted blue.  That does not sound like the most promising home for lichens but you may be surprised...

The lamppost

Each of those circles is a little world of lichens.

Lichens are sensitive to pollution, and the circles near the bottom of the lamppost probably get more pollution from the road which would inhibit growth so the lichens are smaller scraps. The yellow lichen is Xanthoria parietina which is tolerant of pollution.

At the top, the lichens are more abundant with green leafy lichens filling the circle.  There is also a bright pink blob in the right hand picture.  This is  a fungus that grows on lichens! Everything has its niche.  This one is easy to spot but its name is more complicated: Illiosporiopsis christiansenii.

There is an explanation for why the lichens are growing in circular patches. In the past, there was an admission charge to enter the Folk Museum, and you were given a round sticker with the day of the week printed on it which showed you had paid. As people left the museum and walked to Newtonmore village, they stuck their sticker on the first lamppost they passed. At some point, someone removed this litter from the post but it left a layer of glue which provided a settling place for lichen spores and produced these little islands of biodiversity. As there is a Scots Pine next to the lamppost, there would be a "rain" of lichens fragments falling down just waiting for a place to settle.