Leaves and catkins and Common Whitlow grass

 We have just had a week of stunning weather - clear blue skies and sunshine - and spring seems to be here at last.  The tadpoles are wriggling in my pond, our garden blackbird is gathering worms, the blue tits are investigating the nest boxes and I am gardening - sowing seeds and weeding. Only the larches have green leaves but it can't be long before all the trees green up.  If you want to get to know your tree leaves, there is a FREE poster available at https://microcosmic.shop/products/tree-leaves-poster-free-download

You download the pdf file for free to print yourself or you can buy a paper version from them.

Most of the willows just have catkins at the moment and I was shown this photo of some unfamiliar catkins near the Calder.

After a  bit of research, I think these are the female catkins of the Grey Sallow (Salix cinerea) which is a Willow.  Male catkins are the yellow fluffy ones. Willows are dioecious which means that plants are either male or female, not both, so the male and female catkins are on different plants. There are many varieties of willow (at least 23) so only some are on the poster above.  They also hybridise with each other so giving a  hybrid tree an exact name needs an expert - or at least someone with more experience than I have.  To make things even more complicated, some species have variants called sub species.  So best just to settle for Willow!

Now is a good time to see a small white flowering plants called Common Whitlow Grass which is one of the first plants to flower.  It is tiny but easy to spot.  If you are passing Newtonmore School there is lots of it at the base of the wall near the children's entrance.

Common Whitlow Grass

It isn't a grass but a tiny crucifer (the cabbage family) and has white seed pods like miniature versions of Honesty. It has a rosette of leaves at the base and then some small stems with flowers  at the tips. It does not mind poor soil, and is adapted by being small and disappearing before the soil dries out in the summer.  It is an annual so its seeds remain, ready to germinate in the spring (and foiling the school Janny and his weed killer!)

There are more photos in a previous post here.

UV fluorescence - what causes it?

 I have been intrigued as to how UV (ultra-violet) fluorescence works, so have been doing some research on the internet to find out.  Before I attempt to explain the science, there will be some general information and pretty pictures.First of all, what items fluoresce? You already know about lichens, but there are some common but unexpected things that give results under UV light. Here's one - eggs!

Eggs: left normal light, right UV light

The chemical in eggs shells that fluoresces is called PPIX ( Protoporphyrin IX) which gives eggs their brown colour.  You can see that the bluer egg in the box is not quite as fluorescent. There is a lot of information about fluorescence in eggs here and the diagram explaining the science is further down in this post.

The other commonly occurring chemical that fluoresces is chlorophyll, the green compound found in plants that allows them to photosynthesise (create food from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water).  I now think this is the source of the  unexplained bright red fluorescence in the previous post, shown again below, which was probably algae. 

That stick again!

You may wonder why the glow is a red colour when plants look green.  In fact, plants absorb the red wavelengths and reflect the green light (which is why they look green). When I was cleaning my greenhouse this week, I did wonder why they make greenhouse shading green - it would be better to make it red as the plants want the red light not the green! 

The explanation for the colours under UV involves some science so stop here if you are not curious...

Every atom or molecule has electrons  surrounding it.  Each electron has a certain energy, called its energy level. However, it can absorb energy and become "excited" and jump up to another energy level.  It can't just be any amount of energy though.  It needs to be a precise amount to lift it to the next energy level. Imagine a set of stairs.  To get to the next higher step, you have to step up the precise amount.

UV light has a lot of energy and causes the electron to jump up more than one step.  When it then falls down the steps, it gives out the energy as heat or for its final step down the energy is given out as light - fluorescence. The colour depends on the height of the last step down. Different chemicals have different energy levels (step heights) so fluoresce  a colour specific to that chemical.

 Here is a diagram showing the process for eggs which is from here

A similar diagram for chlorophyll in plants is called the Jablonski diagram - google it if you want to know more. Basically, the last step down is the amount of energy in a red photon, so there is red fluorescence.

As lichens produce many different chemicals as part of their defence against sunlight, predators (slugs and snails) and other lichens encroaching their space, different lichens can glow different colours under UV. Here is one  on a rock by Pattack Falls that glows a beautiful bright blue:

Sphaerophorus globosus: normal light on left, UV on right

Technical note.  The UV torch used had a wavelength of 365nm.

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!