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.

Wet, Wet, Wet

 I have just come back from a week on the West Coast at Lochaline, with friends from the Inverness Botany Group.  We stayed in the very grand Ardtornish House, in the South Wing, where the hall was  the size of some people's flats!

The first day was relatively dry but the rest of the week was very wet - but we went out every day botanising, with time for other interests such as lichens (for me) and moths.  The moth trap caught some bigger moths, which look very hairy in closeup.

Moths: a Drinker and a Buff Ermine

I was very taken with the variety of seaweeds along the coast, especially this yellow collection, with different shapes. Seaweeds are algae - similar to the algae in lichens, but bigger.

Of course there were plenty of plants as well, especially those that like boggy conditions, like the yellow Bog Asphodel and Butterwort clinging to the rock where the rain drained.

It was so wet that newts had taken up residence in one of the puddles on the track up the Black Glen.

It's Orchid Time

It’s orchid time down on Newtonmore Golf Course and I took advantage of a few warm days to have two leisurely walks through the golf course and along the Wildcat trail. I managed to find all five kinds of orchids but have not yet gone looking for the Frog Orchids which are much harder to find.

Orchids, left to right: Fragrant, Northern Marsh, Greater Butterfly and Heath Spotted

The distribution of orchids was a bit different this year. There are several Greater Butterfly-orchids on the top golf course quite near the extensive sewage pipe works which has completely destroyed the grassland alongside the track. Luckily the golf course rough on the other side of the track seems to be flourishing.

 There are plenty of orchids on the lower golf course in the rough especially alongside number 16 fairway where I was astonished to find 52 small white orchids which is the most I’ve ever seen and they are spread widely. Small white is quite a scarce orchid. If you are looking for it – it’s small and white! It is quite easy to confuse with Alpine Bistort (Persicaria vivipara) from a distance. Alpine Bistort has small flowers at the top but little bulbils lower down so that it can either reproduce from seed if the flowers get pollinated or vegetatively as the little bulbils will grow into new plants when they fall.

\Left:Alpine  Bistort, Right: Small-white orchid 

There were plenty of insects to do the pollinating. The heads of the Hogweed were covered with little flies:

and the Melancholy Thistle had attracted the bees which were completely covered in pollen.

I also found a weird -looking fly lying in the grass beneath a Birch tree. It seemed rather groggy and allowed me to take pictures of it without flying away. It was about 2 cm across and had a distinctive yellow bar across the top of its abdomen and had yellow antennae and legs as well.

 

 It was easily identified by Google lens as a Birch Sawfly (Cimbex femoratus). They spend most of their life as larvae and only last eight days as flies so I suspect this one was on its eighth day! You do have to be careful with Google lens and checkout its suggestions but it can be helpful to know where to start. 

Bees and lookalikes

 At the moment, the garden is buzzing with bees. Especially bumblebees. These can be identified from the stripes on their body and the colour of the end of their abdomen. There is a good guide to the common species here

 

Of course, it is not that easy when they are flying around but I often find dead ones either in the sun room or just on the ground which makes it a bit easier to look closely. It is also confused by there being different sizes, with the Queen who is larger being seen first and then smaller male bees of similar patterns. Here are some of the ones I have found in the last week.

2 cuckoo bees and a white-tailed bumble bee

Important note: On submitting this photo to an insect expert, I find I am not very good at identifying bees! So take any species names as guesses...

On the right of the photo is a white-tailed bumblebee which is pretty common in my garden. The two bees to the left are cuckoo bees. They do not bother to make their own nest but lay their eggs in the nest of another bumblebee which then raises the cuckoo grubs as if they were its own. Each type usually resembles the bumblebee that it takes advantage of and looks pretty similar to it. They never have pollen baskets on their legs because they have no young to feed, and they are usually not as hairy as normal bumblebees.

A Drone-fly

The next insect in the photo above looks as though it could be a bee but in fact it is a hoverfly.

I have no idea what the advantage is for this fly to look like a honeybee.

Apologies for the poor photograph, as this seemed to be the only one I have of the orange tip butterfly. This one was taken at Nethy Bridge this weekend. I have seen lots of orange tip butterflies in my garden, and if you can see the orange tips they are male. The females lay their eggs on Honesty, of which I have lots in my garden, and I was about to pull the plants up before they self seed but now I will leave them and see if any little orange caterpillars appear. 

Single or Double

 All of a sudden, the garden has burst into bloom with the recent warm weather. It has been somewhat frustrating that I am unable to do much gardening as I have a broken arm, but in compensation there is no need to feel guilty for sitting on the bench watching the pond in the sunshine.

Single Marsh Marigold

At the moment the marsh marigolds are blooming. There are two varieties in the pond, one is the wild single flowered sort, and the other has "double" flowers though in fact each flower has many rows of petals. This will be a cultivated variety rather than a natural one. In fact, I prefer the single flowers, both for appearance and the fact that they are far more accessible to insect life. All those extra petals look pretty but they make it difficult, or even impossible, for the insects to get at the pollen or nectar.

Double flowered Marsh Marigold

One of the other flowers around the pond, spring sweet pea, (Lathyrus verna) had an interesting visitor. It was a bee I had not seen before but was very distinctive being covered in orange hairs. It was a Tawny Mining Bee. No it's not! see below:

Update:  An insect expert tells me it is  Bombus pascuorum, the Common Carder Bee.

 (Tawny Mining Bee: These are solitary bees which make a nest in soil and feed their young on pollen. Apparently their nests look like little volcanoes of soil with a hole in the top but I have not yet managed to see where it is nesting.)

The Bogbean flowers in the pond have just started to open, and if you look carefully a fly has already decided to visit.

If you are choosing flowers for your garden, consider buying the single flowered varieties and you will be doing the local insects a favour. And they will return the favour by visiting your garden. 

Arran and Arms

Partway through April, my husband and I joined a group from the British lichen society on Arran for a few days of lichen hunting. Although my husband is quite happy for me to go lichen hunting, he spent his time cycling. The weather was rather unpredictable resulting in our ferry from Ardrossan being cancelled with an hour’s notice and deferred for two days to 7 o’clock in the morning. After the initial panic, we managed to drive to Troon and get an alternative ferry, with a sigh of relief. We were very fortunate has the ferry after that was cancelled as well, and some people had to wait until the following day to get over.

 

As most of you will know, Arran is an island on the West Coast of Scotland. Although small, it has a range of interesting habitats from a mountain, Goat Fell, to plenty of coastline and Glens. Each habitat has a different selection of lichens, and I particularly enjoyed the coastal visit to Kildonan which included dinosaur footprints in the rock. 

I am not familiar with coastal lichens as Newtonmore is a long way from the sea but there was a big expanse of Dermatocarpon miniatum on the boulders where water ran down. I don't know why it is called miniatum as the lobes weren't mini at all, being over an inch across. There was another species of Dermatocarpon in my last post which again was in a place where water ran down the rocks.

 

Another visit was to an old graveyard. Graveyards are very popular with lichenologists because the gravestones are made of different rocks and lichens have their own preferences for the acidity or alkalinity of the rock they grow on. This means that you get a good range of species in a small area.

Noses to the gravestone!

 On returning to Newtonmore, I went for a walk along the Spey to advise on where they might put wildflower information boards. It is bit early for flowers on the Wildcat trail down by the Spey but there were some interesting fungi.

A morel

One was a morel with a contorted top and the other was a  puzzle until I got home and could look it up.

Moon Poop

 Apologies for the awful picture but there were two large hand size white blobs on an old Alder tree. On touching one, it had a skin but was squishy inside. A bit like custard that had set in the jug.  Research revealed that it was not a fungus but a slime mould, Reticularia lycoperdon or False Puffball or even better, Moon Poop! I had plans to go back and take pictures when it had developed more and produced spores but as you will find out in a moment this was not to be.

 The next day I went to a meeting in Strathpeffer of the HBRG, the Highland biological recording group and heard some interesting talks about beetles. There was a speaker called Ashleigh Whiffin who is a curator of the insect collection at the National Museums of Scotland. Ash loves her carrion beetles and gave a really interesting talk. She has a YouTube video available here. Carrion beetles bury little corpses and use them to feed their young.  After the meeting I went to do some shopping in Inverness and had a bit of a disaster when I tripped on an uneven paver in the car park and broke my arm. I am attempting to dictate this blog post but hope I will be able to type again in a few weeks.