Hazel catkins

 Last March I wrote about finding hazel catkins (here).  These yellow danglies are the male part, producing pollen, but the pollen grains have to land on a female part if they want to produce seed (or in this case, hazelnuts).  I did not notice the female structures last year, but told myself I would look more carefully this year.  So I went up Strone again today.  It was a beautiful still, cold but sunny day with snow on the hills.

I was reminded to look out for the little red structures after seeing a video by Leif Bersweden here. I came across Leif when he gave a talk on how to improve your phone photos of plants, and he is a man of many talents. He posts regularly on Twitter (@leifbersweden), has just released a book called "Where the Wildflowers Grow" and has been trying to educate us on how to identify ten common mosses with #couchto10mosses.  I've not got far yet but maybe mosses will be another post in the not too distant future.  There are certainly plenty to find locally.

To get back to the Hazel... Here is one of those miniscule little red flowers.

To get a sense of scale, here is another photo with a catkin and a hand.

And a closer look

The little red strands (stigmas) are sticky to catch the pollen which is carried by the wind from the catkins. Once they have caught the pollen, they turn black and the pollen burrows down to the base of the stigma and waits for a few months until an ovary has grown which it can then fertilise. The process was new to me but it was explained in these research papers:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266867884_Hazelnuts_in_Ontario_-_Biology_and_Potential_Varieties#pf3

https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/em9074/html

 So there is a lot more to a hazelnut than I thought!

Life and Death or both?

There are usually flocks of Greylag geese on the fields between Newtonmore Railway station and the Spey, and I often see them flying overhead in a V-shaped skein. Its scientific name is Anser Anser.

 I have never seen them around Loch Imrich,  but there was a dead one there this week. Greylag geese have an orange bill. It was near the gate onto the main road so maybe it is a road casualty.

Greylag goose corpse

A more promising sight was some Winter Aconite blooming in the woodland round the Loch.  Just in the one place and I suspect it originates from a garden throwout.

 I had planted some in my garden so hurried back to check on it.  Not a sign! Not even leaves.  Though there are snowdrops.

Finally, a interesting fungus on a golf course fence (Second Tee), with my finger in the photo for scale.

It was a wet day so the fungus was a bright orange.  It is obviously alive but I think it is one of the  wood decay fungi that live on dead wood and will cause the fence to rot as it the fungus digests it.  The "feeding" part is not the bit you can see in the photo but thin threads that penetrate the wood.  The visible parts in the photo are the fruiting bodies which will shed spores.  It might be Gloeophyllum sepiarum which I thought I had found before (see this post), but  that time an expert who looked at the photos later thought it was more like Lintneria trachyspora. However, like lichens, it's not easy to ID species just from a photograph.  (And as you can see, there are plenty of lichens on the wood as well, but they won't cause it to rot.)