Sun, snow & ice in Glen Affric, part 2

It was just eight days after my visit to Glen Affric that featured in Part 1 of this blog when I returned to the glen, and there was a fresh covering of snow everywhere. This middle blog of my winter Glen Affric trilogy therefore very much focuses on snow, although the sun and ice will also make brief cameo appearances. The snow was quite thin in depth as I drove into the glen, but in the sheltered gorge of the Dog Falls area it was deeper, so I stopped there to make the most of the wintry conditions.

It had snowed overnight and there hadn’t been any wind yet in the narrow part of the gorge, so the snow was still coating all the branches and trunks of the trees. This for me is one of the best experiences of a winter, as the all-enveloping blanket of snow transforms the landscape into a magical white wonderland. It’s an occurrence that rarely lasts for long in the Highlands though, because our near constant winds soon blow all the snow off the trees, greatly reducing the overall whiteness of the landscape and its spectacular beauty. I was very pleased therefore to have arrived in the glen before the wind on this day!

As I drove along near Dog Falls I saw a couple of red deer stags (Cervus elaphus) just beside the road, and managed to get a few photos of one of them before they moved off into the trees. This is the easiest time of year to see them as the cold weather brings them down to the low ground and the shelter of the trees. They know it’s not the stalking season, so it’s possible to get quite close to them by staying inside a car and taking photographs out of the window. That means it’s not always possible to shoot the best composition, though, as in this case where the out of focus branches create an unwanted frame for the stag!

After watching me with seeming curiosity for a minute or two, the deer went off out of sight and I turned my attention to the trees and the pattern of the snow on all the vegetation. It’s always a great source of wonder for me that something as simple as snow can so completely transform a landscape. A group of trees like this in the photograph here that I would perhaps not normally pay much attention to had become a beautiful work of natural art, just because all these white flakes of crystallised water had fallen on them. Every branch and twig was highlighted by its covering of snow, making the shape and branching structure of each tree more visible and obvious than usual. Even the fallen trunks and branches looked elegant in their recumbent whiteness. The snow also changes the acoustic qualities of the landscape, as it muffles and absorbs any noise, so it was very still except for the sound of the flowing water in the river.

There is plentiful and abundant natural regeneration of the trees taking place in this part of the glen, and my attention was drawn to a young Scots pine sapling (Pinus sylvestris) that had some of its green needles visible amongst the snow. Its twigs were all bowed over from the weight of the snow on them, but unless the snow froze and stayed there for several days I reckoned they would revert to their normal more upright position without any lasting effects from their temporary loading.

Those pine needles were not the only green colour that interrupted the monochrome whiteness of the landscape, as there was a bramble plant (Rubus fruticosus) nearby, with its green leaves standing out brightly against the snow. These leaves are from last year, and bramble is described as being semi-evergreen, because it can keep some leaves throughout the winter, usually on first year stems, whilst others are shed in the autumn.

Not far away, I came across signs of another plant that is also evergreen, although nothing green could be seen of it on this day. This was the common wintergreen (Pyrola minor), which as its name suggests, keeps its leaves throughout the year. However, growing close to the ground, they were not visible because of the snow and instead it was the dried seed heads that showed the presence of the plant. Common wintergreen produces clusters of globular flowers in June, and plants at this same location near Dog Falls featured in a previous blog I wrote from a visit there in June 2013.

The wintergreen seed heads were just beside a large goat willow (Salix caprea), and as I looked around the base of the tree I saw some small patches of moss sticking up through the snow.

 

 

 

I recognised these as being one of the shaggy-mosses (Rhytidiadelphus spp.) , and this was subsequently confirmed for me by Gordon Rothero, a bryologist who helps me with moss identifications – he identified them as being big shaggy-moss (Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus). They are one of the most distinctive mosses in the Caledonian Forest, but somehow with their bright green leaves vivid against the white snow they seemed more spectacular and dramatic in their shapes than usual.

They were another example of some green vegetation visible amongst the snow, and I was increasingly getting my eye in for these small instances of green in the otherwise completely white landscape. The trunk of the goat willow itself had some snow on its eastern side, as that is the direction that the wind had been blowing from, but the western wide of the tree was not covered in white at all. I knew from visiting this tree before that there are some good patches of tree lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) on it, and one of them in particular was especially vibrant and colourful on this occasion, standing out against the willow bark.

A larger patch of tree lungwort was growing in amongst another moss -slender mouse-tail moss (Isothecium myosuroides myosuroides). Both can thrive here in this location because of the narrowness of the Affric River gorge. The falling waters of Dog Falls produces a constant spray or fine mist in the atmosphere, which is confined by the gorge and thereby creates the constantly humid environment that arboreal lichens and mosses such as these thrive in. This area beside the Affric River is in fact a tiny pocket of temperate rainforest, as the conditions here mimic those of the much wetter west coast of Scotland, where the vast majority of the country’s Celtic rainforest formerly flourished. Today, as with the native pinewoods, only small isolated fragments of those mossy green forest ecosystems survive.

On another part of the goat willow, I spotted a different moss near the base of its trunk. This was one that I didn’t recognise, but it was quite beautiful, growing just above the snow and with abundant spore capsules visible on it. I had to call on Gordon’s expertise again to get it identified, and he confirmed it as being rough-stalked feather-moss (Brachythecium rutabulum), a species which is common and widespread in Britain.

This goat willow has several substantial branches separating out from its main trunk not far above the ground, and one of those must have been damaged in the past. It is dead and has fallen down, with its upper section touching the soil, but is still connected to the rest of the tree. Although it was covered in snow on its upper surface, the underside of the branch was clear and there were a lot of fungal fruiting bodies on it.

Because of the way the fungi were growing, on the downward-facing part of the fallen branch, it was their pore surfaces that were mostly visible, and these indicated they were one of the bracket fungi. I didn’t recognise the species, but when I sent a sample to Liz Holden, she confirmed they were the ochre bracket fungus (Trametes ochracea), a fairly common saprotrophic fungus that fruits on, and helps to break down, the dead wood of broadleaved trees.

 

 

 

It’s obvious how this fungus has got its common name as some of the older brackets were distinctly ochre in colour. The fresher fruiting bodies had intricate patterns of pores that all varied from each other, and are, in my eyes at least, another example of Nature’s endless creativity in producing beautiful works of art through the shapes of living organisms.

Not far from the goat willow there are a number of young eared willows (Salix aurita) growing beside the road. This is the commonest species of willow in Glen Affric, and it is considered to be a large multi-stemmed shrub, rather than a tree, because it doesn’t produce a single tall trunk. As I passed by one of them, I noticed it still had a couple of leaves left on it, which struck me as being unusual at this time of year, as they normally all get shed in the autumn. When I looked more closely, I saw that these leaves had black areas on them, indicating the presence of a fungus, and it was presumably that which had kept the leaves on the willow for so long. When I sent a sample to Liz, she identified it as the willow tarspot fungus (Rhytisma salicinum), a species which I hadn’t come across before.

Moving on again, I became aware of an inadvertent theme to my day, when I saw some more green vegetation amongst the snow. This time it was the bare stems of blaeberry plants  (Vaccinium myrtillus) that were standing out vividly in the white landscape.

 

Because of the chlorophyll in its stems, blaeberry is able to photosynthesise in the winter, which must compensate I suppose for the advantage that its close relative cowberry (Vaccinium vitas-idaea) gains from being evergreen.

 

 

 

 

 

I walked downstream beside the river, to where there’s a small footbridge across it, and where the trail continues towards Coire Loch. I wasn’t planning on going to the loch though, as time was getting on and I thought there might be some good views of the river, with the snow blanketing the trees on both sides. In fact, it was even better than that, as some parts of the river were frozen over and covered with snow. This was slightly surprising to me, as the river usually flows quite quickly where it comes out of the gorge below the falls, and I hadn’t thought it was cold enough for it to freeze over.

The snow was on the ice in the middle section of the river, just upstream and also immediately downstream from the footbridge. Its white irregular shapes made an interesting visual contrast with the black areas, which were formed both by the open water and places where the ice was too thin to have allowed the snow to settle on it. In this section of the river the water is deeper and, I now realised, slow moving, which is what must have enabled the ice to form there.

Both further upstream, nearer Dog Falls itself, and a little further downstream, the cascades created a faster flow that had kept the water ice free. However, there was enough ice for me to feel that the ‘ice’ element in the three part title of this blog is justified!

So what then about the third element from this blog’s title? It wasn’t possible to see the sun directly from the narrow confines of the gorge, especially when it is so low in the sky at this time of year. However, there was one spot on the footbridge where the angle of view revealed the reflection of the sun in the ice of the river, as can be seen here.

However, it was very much the case that snow had been the main element of the day for me in Glen Affric. On my next visit, a couple of weeks later, it was ice that would take centre stage, and that will be the main feature of part 3 of this blog. I’d like to finish this one off with a brief statement of thanks to Liz Holden and Gordon Rothero for their generous assistance in identifying the fungi and mosses featured in the photos here.