To see a world in a grain of sand...

 As William Blake said, there is a wonderful world to be seen if you look closely at small things. I think this is part of my fascination with lichens - there is always something new to be seen if you look closely, preferably with a hand lens or microscope. And if you have a UV torch, the world becomes even more colourful.

Last month, I had lunch at a restaurant on the Beauly Firth, The Storehouse (I can recommend it!). It was a beautiful sunny calm day.

Beauly Firth shoreline

As always, I had a look for fallen twigs, just in case there were interesting lichens...

It all became much more spectacular under UV light.

The yellow lichen (Xanthoria parietina) fluoresces bright orange under UV.  Different chemicals in the lichen cause the fluorescence.  In this case the chemical is called "parietin" and acts as a sunscreen.  I don't know which came first, the name of the chemical or the name of the lichen. I have no idea what is causing the deep red fluorescence between the 2 orange patches, as there is nothing visible on the bark. The small patch of pale orange to the bottom right is a lichen called Lecidella eleochroma.

The array of grey lichens along the bottom of the branch are more difficult to name but I decided  it was about time I tackled these grey "jam tart" lichens which I have avoided so far.  I picked up another fallen branch by Loch Imrich. Here it is:

I decided to look at the patch of lichens just above 18 on the ruler.

The "jam tarts" I mentioned are the round structures with white margins - just like jam tarts with a jammy middle and a white pastry case. I could see 2 different lichens; on the left, brown jam tarts (apothecia) on a white background  and on the right, frosted jam tarts which looked as if they had icing sugar on them (it's called pruina botanically) with a yellow background. When I looked a bit further along there was a third tiny green lichen, only a few mm across.

 In my quest to find a name for these lichens, I measured them, noted the different colours and tested them by putting tiny drops of chemicals on then looking for any colour changes.  Then armed with a book by Dobson, tried to key them out - with no success! So no names at present. Looking at them  with the UV torch was interesting.

The bright yellow and turquoise patches are where I applied a small amount of chemical, usually abbreviated to K (though it is actually KOH, Potasssium hydroxide).  As none of the lichens looked orange under UV, this ruled out some IDs and I still can't name the lichens. I think I will need some help! But I enjoyed the investigation.

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.)

Wood, Wasps, and Seasonal Greetings

With Christmas and New Year taking up the end of December, I have not  done a blog post for a while.

But Happy New Year from me and this tree!

It's a Norway Spruce (Picea abies) which is the traditional Christmas tree, and this one was growing on the lower half of Newtonmore Golf Course.  The lower branches have been pruned to give room for the golfers and the tree then weeps resin. Seeing faces in the trees reminds me of Lord of the Rings and the Ents.

And a friend in New Zealand sent me this picture of a NZ  "Christmas tree", a Pohutakawa which has lovely red flowers at Christmas (their summer) and is festooned with lichens which look very similar to the UK ones.

Pohutakawa

 My son and his wife visited us for Christmas and having extra eyes when out for a walk was useful.  My son spotted this lichen (on a birch tree):

Ramalina fastigiata

It's not one I see often and not usually on a birch as it prefers trees with a less acidic bark.  It's the bushy looking one that's a pale green.  (The blue green lichen surrounding it is a Parmelia, probably Parmelia sulcata, which is very common and covers most of the local trees and hugs the bark quite closely.)

The Ramalina bushy lichen (Ramalina fastigiata) has discs at the end of each branch, that remind me of sink plungers! Maybe it should be called the Dalek lichen.  The discs are the fruiting bodies (apothecia) that produce spores.

Another discovery came when we had to find an extra suitcase in the loft for my son to take the Christmas presents back to Germany!  There was an abandoned wasp nest (byke).  They are amazingly delicate and I'm afraid I broke it before taking a picture.  The outer globe is made of paper which the wasps make from wood pulp. I see them in the summer chewing away at old wood.  The inside is a perfect set of hexagons surrounded by several layers of spherical globes.

 There is more detail at the Natural History Museum. It seems that the queen starts the nest and then when her eggs have hatched into new wasps, they take over the work and she just does the egg laying.

Well, that is what I read, but there is even more fascinating detail on the Countryfile web site

"But aren’t we taught in schools that only queens lay eggs? In fact, workers in almost all Hymenoptera (bee, wasp and ant) colonies can lay eggs. Because of a genetic quirk of the Hymenoptera, females hatch from fertilised eggs and males from unfertilised eggs. Worker wasps have lost the ability to mate, but can still lay male (unfertilised) eggs."

The wasp that we are familiar with is called the Yellowjacket (Vespula vulgaris) but there are an estimated 200,000 other species, most of which aren't interested in stinging humans.

White stuff

Winter definitely feels as if it has arrived with sub-zero temperatures and snow for the last week. It looks so beautiful that I can almost forgive the weather for freezing our down pipes...

Newtonmore Golf Course

Birch tree with catkins waiting for the spring

Looking back a few months, I was walking near Craggan and I was surprised to find  some tiny white seeds:

Most seeds I find or sow in the garden are brown. These ones were so white that they stood out against the brown remains of the plant. They are also very small, less than a millimetre long.

Seeds against a 1mm scale

I had visited the site before and knew what grew there, so I was able to match the brown withered stems to a flower called Red Bartsia (Odontites vernus). It is not very common here - I've only seen it in 2 places around Newtonmore.

Red Bartsia

It has attractive purply-pink flowers with yellow stamens and the whole plant, leaves and flowers, is hairy.

It is indeterminate - which means that it keeps on growing more flowers at the top of the spike, like a foxglove. There were many plants growing on a grassy track to a farm gate.  It is an annual, so it will need those seeds to grow again next year.

The third white thing is a bit of a mystery. It was white fluff growing on a beech tree trunk near Monarch Apartments. 

Having passed it before, I thought I ought to go back and check if it was a lichen.  The fluff I am talking about  goes all up the right hand side of the tree.  It doesn't have a particular outline or shape (unlike the round white shapes which will be lichens). Here's a closer look:

I don't think it is a lichen. As coincidence would have it, I had been looking at the website of the Highland Biological Recording Group (HRBG) and found that they are encouraging people to look for something called Beech Scale  which is a tiny insect.  The info sheet says: 

"In heavy infestations it shows as fluffy white patches up to 1cm across on the trunks of old Beech. The ‘fluff’ is a waxy substance produced to protect the eggs and nymphs."

Maybe this is what I have found, but I will have to contact someone more knowledgeable to check it out. As I have joined the HRBG, I might be able to find someone!

Along the Calder

 I decided to test out the theory in my last post, that the Witches Whiskers on Beard lichen (Usnea subfloridana) were more likely to occur in damp humid areas, and headed off alongside the Calder river but on the West (Biallaid) side. There are plenty of old birches in boggy ground.  

Sure enough, there were (tiny) fruiting bodies on the lichen so the theory seems to be promising. 

 There were other things to see as well:

These strange jelly-like blobs were on a dead fallen tree and I am assuming that they are some kind of fungus that has swelled in the rain. The closest match I can find online is the Crystal Brain fungus (what a great name!) Exidia nucleata (= Myxarium nucleatum) Names get changed quite often nowadays, especially if they do DNA analysis. Or it could be Exidia thuretiana, White Brain.

The dog found a roe deer antler which I brought home.

I was unsure when Roe deer shed their antlers so I looked it up on https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/animals/article/deer-overview-antler-development-summary

"Under normal circumstances, antlers are shed and re-grown annually to coincide with the deer’s breeding season. Red, Fallow and Sika shed their antlers during April and May and the new growth is complete and cleaned by August/September. Roe, which breed earlier, shed their antlers in November/December and re-grow them over the winter and early spring"

So this antler must have been shed very recently. This was confirmed when I washed it as there was still some blood oozing from the end. 

Getting better...

 Exactly 2 years ago today I wrote a post about Beard lichens (Usnea) and re-reading it, I am pleased to find that after 2 years I am a bit better at knowing what I am looking at! I meet up (by Zoom) every fortnight with a few others who share my interest in lichens, and we have a little investigation going - about Usnea and the weird "flying saucers" with whiskers that grow on them:

The technical name is an apothecium and it is a structure that produces spores that  disperse to grow more lichen.  This is a picture of Usnea subfloridana, which is a really common lichen locally, but it is only rarely that I have found them with these circular growths on them.  I have a theory that they only produce them in damp areas near rivers but I will need to check out some more similar habitats to see if that is the case.

Further south there is a very similar lichen called Usnea florida which always has the circular structures and has the lovely name of Witches' Whiskers. Here's a photo from Wales - not my photo but from Radnorshire Wildlife Trust

Usnea florida

I found examples of these circular growths on Usneas by Tromie Bridge, part of the  Insh Marshes RSPB reserve.  The meadow is best known for the abundance of orchids in the summer, but the whole area is worth a visit at any time of the year.

River Tromie

There were the remains of puffballs: 

Mature puffballs

You may be more familiar with them as round white balls, but they mature and grow spores inside and then a hole forms at the top.  If drops of rain (or a foot!) lands on them the spores puff out like smoke.

Back at home, I regularly see wood mice in the garden and occasionally they get into the house (one of the side effects of living in an old stone house that does not have conventional foundations). Unfortunately a field vole got caught in one of my mouse traps:

They are much chunkier with short tails and blunt faces.  They are much more secretive than mice and I have only rarely seen them in the garden, but they are obviously about. It was rather sad to have caught one. A few years ago I even caught a shrew. These creatures are around us but we remain oblivious to their presence most of the time.