Home and Away (Part2)

 I had helped to organise a field trip for Inverness Botany Group, which was a walk up "The Big Glen" in Golspie to look at ferns with an expert (Dr Heather McHaffie). The weather forecast was pretty grim so we were all dressed up in waterproofs, but apart from the odd shower, it was much better than expected.

Heather explaining about ferns to some well wrapped up botanists!

One of the ferns we were looking at grows on walls and trees and rocks, and is a Polypody.  It is quite common - here's one I found  locally near Pattack Falls.

Those round brown spots on the underside are called sori and hold little packets of spores. The colour and shape are key features when you are trying to identify ferns, as different species have different shaped sori. I found out that there are three different polypodies, which look much the same, but have different spores (this is starting to sound like lichens!). I took a little bit home and put it under the microscope.

Close up of sori on polypody

The orange blobs are made up of lots of little spheres, which - if you look closely - have a wormlike strip along one side, and are full of tiny bean shaped spores

Here's one of the spores, much enlarged:

So what is the purpose of the wormlike strip?  When conditions are right, it pings open the sphere into 2 halves and the spores are flung out. AS you will see my video skills are minimal but if you have the patience,watch the 27 second video and keep your eyes on the bottom right to see a "ball" opening and then flinging the spores out .  It reminded me of a trebouchet (one of those siege engines that lob boulders at castles!)

On the way home we  passed a sandbank with basking harbour seals.

At Embo, there are some striking sandstone rocks and a long sandy beach. 

Embo beach

I have been reading a book titled Sea Bean by Sally Huband who took up beachcombing when she moved to Shetland, so I kept my eyes open for any finds.  The beach was very clean with no piles of plastic, though I did find a little monster...

The path to the beach was covered with a sprawling bindweed.  To identify it, I had to look closely at the green and brown portion (sepals and bracts) cupping the flower.  The two outer bracts didn't overlap. This arrangement identified it as Hedge Bindweed (Calystegia sepium).  The other similar bindweed is Large Bindweed (Calystegia silvatica)

Large Bindweed on left, Hedge Bindweed (at Embo) on the right

Large Bindweed can get very large - here's some climbing up the  trees near Clune Terrace Play Park in Newtonmore.

In Newtonmore, you can also find Bindweed  growing in the Jack Richmond Memorial Park and by Loch Imrich.

What, a whole post and no lichens? Maybe in the next post!

Home and Away (Part 1)

 I have been trying to catch the rabbit that is eating my plants but it ignored the lettuce in my live trap. However, I was delighted to catch (and release) a hedgehog, which is very welcome

Some of the the foxgloves in the garden deviated from the usual form.  Foxgloves are indeterminate flowerers - which means that they keep on flowering, producing more and more flowers on the top of the spike.  However, sometimes things go wrong and they just produce one enormous flower  on top and then stop.

Left to right: normal foxglove, strange form, and both together.

The bees seem perfectly happy with either form of the flower.

 A few weekends ago, I helped at a workshop organised by the BSBI on identifying composite flowers - these are ones in the daisy family but it covers a huge range from thistles, to daisies, to dandelions.  The trickiest ones to put a name to are the yellow ones which might look a bit like dandelions but aren't. There are plenty around at the moment.  The verges of the A9 are full of yellow flowers (which you pass too quickly to get a good look at) but just now most of them are  Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis).  Here's one I found growing along the Main Street in Newtonmore.

Autumn Hawkbit

It's a bit like a smaller more elegant  dandelion, but the main characteristic to look out for is that the green part under the flower tapers gradually into the stem.

Last weekend I was involved in the Garden Club Show, held in Newtonmore Village Hall, and by the fire exit outside there were a lot of weeds - including some of those pesky yellow flowers. Feeling confident after the workshop, I identified some of them.

Here is a fairly delicate one that is easy to ID because it only has 5 petals and has lots of branches so it looks quite airy and delicate. It's called Wall Lettuce (not edible as far as I know) (Mycelis muralis) and was not common round here several years ago, but now it is all through the village.

Wall Lettuce

Another delicate one, just a few inches tall, was Smooth Hawk's-beard (Crepis capillaris). This time, the green part under the flower is more flask shaped rather than tapered.

Smooth Hawk's-beard

All these yellow flowers produce seeds with little hairy parachutes which are blown around in the wind, which explains how successful they are at spreading themselves around.

If you would like a free guide to plants found growing in pavements, the Natural History Museum has one you can download from here.  There is also a free ID guide for plants that grow on walls.

 I have just come back from a trip to Golspie to look at ferns so there will be more about what I saw in my next post (and of course, lichens, but I still need to work on them!)

Dark Bordered Beauty Moth

In July, I went to an event organised by Butterfly Conservation at the nearby Insh Marshes.  One of the things that I had always fancied doing was seeing what got caught in a moth trap. These are traps with a light that attracts moths and butterflies (and some other insects).  They are set up at night and then have to be emptied very early in the morning. So in the summer, you would have to be up around 4am to check them. Luckily for me, this event had  left the traps until later in the morning to be opened so it was not an early start.  The traps were much bigger than I expected.

The moth trap and some keen observers

Hats off to the volunteer who lugs these traps about (using a wheelbarrow) and checks them very early the next day.  The moths are drawn to the electric light  (powered by a mobile generator) and go into the base (blocked off by a teatowel in the photo) and rest in the egg boxes beneath until checked and released.

I know that some people are very keen on  identifying moths  but I have to confess that although it was interesting to see the whole thing once, it did not grab me!  There were a lot of brown ones.... (and I know, maybe lichens are not as fascinating to others as they are to me!)

The focus of the day was the exceedingly scarce Dark Bordered Beauty moth.  It only breeds in two places in Scotland and Insh Marshes is one of them. Its caterpillars eat Aspen leaves, but are very fussy as the Aspens have to be very young as it won't feed on more mature trees. As luck would have it, the last but one moth in the trap was a Dark Bordered beauty female.

And the last moth was the flashy Garden Tiger.

There is a breeding programme at the Highland Wildlife Park to produce more Dark Bordered Beauty moths by releasing caterpillars and adults at suitable sites. You can read about it here and see some much better pictures of the moth as well.