Another Lepidoptera

Just like buses, nothing new for a while and then two at once! I was tidying up the greenhouse, removing some tomato and cucumber leaves that had started to wither,  and when I had finished I noticed a surprise on my arm!

This is when it is handy to have a mobile phone as I could extract it from my pocket  and  take the photo one handed. I don't know much about moths but I do have a book of photos - The Collins Complete Guide to British Insects. I have found that if you don't have a photo of what you have seen, it is remarkably difficult to remember exactly what it looked like!

This is a good book for matching photos rather than using keys, but there are an awful lot of moths...

Starting at page 156, the photos go on until page 270, and further if you want to see the caterpillars.  Given my level of ID skills for moths, it was just a matter of scanning each page of photos until I saw something similar.  It was nearly a hundred pages later that I found it!

Angle Shades Moth - 3rd photo down on the right

It is an Angle Shades (Phlogophera meticulosa). Not one I have seen before but  apparently occurs all over Britain.

A new butterfly

 Whilst doing some gardening on a sunny day recently, a butterfly alighted on one of my Shasta daisies and was different from any I had seen before. The silhouette was more like a leaf. And it had a tiny white mark like a comma. Which was a clue as it turned out to be a Comma butterfly, and is the only one with that jagged silhouette.

The wings were orange with brown spots.

I find it quite hard to take decent photos of butterflies with my phone as they fly away when you get close, so here is a picture from my (old -1987) Reader's Digest Butterfly book.

Interestingly, the distribution shown in my book is just in the South of England. Obviously things have changed in the last 30 years! It's scientific name is  Polygonia c-album.  I was going to say that I have no idea what the c- is for when it dawned on me that the c-album means white c shape.

...And strange things falling from the heights

 On the same walk around Loch Imrich, I came across a lot of unfamiliar cones on the ground.  Well, to be more exact, half cones.

Half a large cone amongst smaller larch cones

They were large - the half cone was about 2 inches (10 cm) long and quite solid and heavy. The broken surface was a startling pink.

The other end of the cone was sticky with a blob of resin oozing from the centre.

The side of the cone  was green and each section had a sharp tail poking out.

As I only had half a cone, I was not sure whether I had a top or a bottom half. Looking around, all the half cones on the ground looked similar and I could not find a matching half to make a complete cone.

I had never seen cones like this before, so I looked around to see what trees were nearby. There were the usual Birch and Rowan, but the only conifer was a very tall one with a grey trunk. The trunk was covered with blisters, some of which were weeping resin.

I looked up but could hardly see the top of the tree and the photo I took is very poor but it did tell me that there were big cones at the top and they were pointing up. (Whether the cones point up or hang down can be a useful characteristic when trying to identify a conifer.) 

The cones are the pale green blobs in the blown up section 

Having collected as much information as I could, I took a couple of half cones home. A young girl came to see what I was doing and was very taken with the cones and started stuffing them in her pockets.  I did warn her that they were quite sticky! As I was walking the dog, I had a handy plastic poo bag to put them in.

Now I wanted to get an ID. There are plenty of keys for identifying conifers, but they often ask you about the buds and needles and there were none within reach. I had once done a workshop with conifer expert Matt Parratt and he gave us a useful sheet on Silver Firs. Here's a quote:

"Cones are always upright on the branches, usually right at the top of the tree, and they disintegrate in situ leaving a central core.  For this reason cone characters are not easily observable but looking for shed cone scales beneath the tree and using binoculars can be helpful."

Unusually, the cones had broken and fallen - high winds? Very dry weather?  I decided the tree was a Noble Fir (Abies procera - though it  can also be called Abies nobilis which is easier to remember) which has huge cones. Did I have a top or a bottom of the cone? Looking at pictures of Noble Fir cones, the sharp green points point downwards on the cone so the halves that had fallen were all tops, which makes sense if the cones had broken in half on the tree.

I was able to detach one of the cone scales. The seed is at the bottom and the green "tail" is on a separate joined flap (bract) which I have folded back in the right-hand picture.

There is a YouTube video by Matt Parratt on identifying conifers. 

Introduction to Conifer ID

 He talks about and shows pictures of Noble Fir cones around 32 minutes into the video if you want  to hear from the expert. The video is on the BSBI channel and there are lots more botanical presentations there.

Update

I managed to get a better picture of the upright cones on the tree today:

Update: October 2022.  The tree has been chopped down! But there are plenty more Noble firs in front of the Highlander Hotel in Newtonmore.

Strange things rising from the depths...

 Rather strange islands have been rising from the depths of Loch Imrich. Large black lumps.... It looks as if as if part of the loch bed has floated up.

The ducks are finding them useful resting places.  A tree has also appeared recently with its bare branches resembling bones.

Loch Imrich

I have tried, without success, to find any explanation of what causes these lumps of sediment to detach from the loch bed and rise to the surface.  All I can think of is that there is a build up of gas (methane) as the sediment under the water decomposes and eventually it pushes a layer of the loch bed upwards. If anyone knows, please tell me!

I received an email via the Jungle Telegraph - when botanist friends share discoveries - about

another weird and wonderful plant that I had never heard of, let alone seen. This was the Yellow Bird's-nest  which was seen at Coylumbridge this summer.  Off I went to have a look.

Yellow Bird'snest

These plants are about 4 inches  (10 cm tall). Earlier in the year, the plants would have had white flowers, but the ones in the photo are fruiting.  There are no leaves, just brown scales up the stalks.  With no green parts at all, how does it get any nutrients? The answer is that its roots link up with a fungus  To quote from http://sppaccounts.bsbi.org/content/monotropa-hypopitys.html

"recent research shows that it is actually epiparasitic, using Tricholoma fungi to extract nutrients from living trees in its vicinity"

It's that wood-wise-web again. The fungus does not gain anything from the plant as far as we know.  This plant was last recorded in the area in 1875!  Surprisingly, the plants were easily visible from the pavement on a road that is walked by hundreds of people every day so it is always worth keeping an eye out for anything new - you might make an important discovery. 

If you want to look it up, it is now called  Hypopites montropa, though in my older books it was called  Monotropa hypopites. Hypopites means "under pines" and it was indeed growing in some pine needles in a pinewood.

Around the Loch and further afield

 This post will be a bit of a look back as I have not posted for a while so some of the flowers may have finished. Round Loch Imrich, an orchid appeared by the path.

Common Spotted-orchid

This is a Common Spotted-orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) but it is not at all common locally.  I have only ever found it at Loch Imrich, just one or two each year, and never in this spot.  The reason it is not common  for us is because it likes calcareous, basic soils (i.e. on the alkaline side).  The silted area at the end of the Loch must be basic whereas most of our soil is acid to neutral. The orchids we see most of are those that like acid soils, like Heath Spotted-orchid.  How do you tell the difference?   Look at the lower part of the flower, the lip. 

 

You can see in the photo that this one has three pointed lobes, well separated, and with the middle lobe the longest. So this is Common Spotted-orchid.

In the picture below of Heath Spotted-orchid (Dactylorhiza maculata) the lip of the flower is much broader and only has a tiny tooth shaped lobe in the centre.

Heath Spotted-orchid

It's not often I find  a flower locally that is new to me so it is quite exciting when I do. While walking on the Badenoch Way near Dalraddy, I saw a beautiful seed head. It was a bit like a Dandelion seed head but each seed had a parachute that was like an inside-out umbrella.

 This is Goat's-beard (Tragopodon pratensis) and has a yellow flower, though I did not get to see one. All I saw were closed up flowers.

This is because it was the afternoon, and apparently the flowers only open in morning sunshine, which gives it its other name of "Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon." 

It is not surprising that I had not seen it before as it is scarce locally. Here's the map of where it has been recorded (from BSBI site).  Each little square shows where it has been found and you can see that it is not common locally, and gets more common as you travel south.

Distribution of Goat's-beard

Here is a blown up section of our area.  The arrow points to a green square, which is the record that I sent in last week.  The pale pink one near it is a record from Kingussie in 1971.  So if you see it in Kingussie, let me know!