The first signs of spring

We’ve been having some unseasonably mild weather recently, and, at Findhorn where I live, snowdrops and crocuses have been in flower for a while and catkins have unfurled on hazel trees. I was going to Dundreggan for the day on Saturday, and I wondered if there would be any signs of spring there, as things are usually a week or more later in Glen Moriston, because of the colder climate in the mountains of the western Highlands.

Arriving at the lodge, I saw some snowdrops and crocuses blossoming in the garden, but I was keen to see if there was any new life in the forest, as well as in the domesticated context of the garden. The staff here have put out some bird feeders, so there was plenty of activity around those, with chaffinches and several species of tits all taking advantage of the free food. They certainly seemed to be heralding the coming of spring, with their beautiful songs and frenetic flying around.

I don’t often take many photographs of birds, as it can take a lot of time to get reasonable images, and usually requires working from a hide, which I don’t have. However, this day I spent about an hour near the bird feeders and managed to get a few reasonable images of some of the birds when they were perched in nearby trees, in between feeding sessions.

Some species were easier to photograph than others, as they were happy to come a little closer to me. However, none of them stayed still on the trees for long, so it was a case of grabbing what shots I could in the few seconds that each one was perched on a branch. Some day perhaps I’ll dedicate a whole visit to Dundreggan to watching and photographing the birds in the vicinity of the lodge, but on this occasion I was ready to head out into the forest.

Walking up into the edge of the woodland behind the lodge, I stopped to have a look at an old birch log that I knew had some good lichen colonies on it. I’ve photographed those before, but that was a couple of years ago, before I started this blog, so I decided to take some more images now. There’s a particularly dense cluster of the podetia, or stalked cups, of one species (Cladonia squamosa) there that are especially attractive and visually interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although all the cups look the same at first glance, looking at them in more detail reveals that they are all slightly different to each other.

 

Going to a nearby oak tree (Quercus petraea), which had a mossy, spreading base to its trunk brought a rueful smile to my face. In my blog last week I wrote about textured lungwort (Lobaria scrobiculata), and mentioned that I didn’t see it as often as tree lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria), but here on this oak were several patches of ‘lob scrob’, as it is affectionately known to lichenologists, which I hadn’t noticed before!

There was some tree lungwort nearby too, but the lob scrob was definitely more abundant in this spot, so I’ll have to retract my statement from the previous blog! The textured lungwort looked more grey today, and less blue than last week, due to the drier conditions. However, as I looked at it, some rain began to fall, and wherever the lichen’s thallus (as its main body is known) got wet, it turned from grey to a dark blue colour.

That oak is growing on a slope where primroses (Primula vulgaris) bloom in profusion each spring, and as I walked around I was delighted, albeit quite astonished, to find a number of them already in flower! The plants weren’t fully grown yet, and had just a few small leaves, but several of them had got one or two blossoms open, poking up through the bracken (Pteridium aquilinum).

I normally see primroses in blossom at Dundreggan in April, but here they were on the 25th of February – exceptionally early, and a reflection of the very mild winter we’ve had, possibly due to the effects of global warming. Whatever the cause, it was great to see these first signs of spring, and the primrose blossoms seemed to radiate the joy of new life in their vibrant colour and perfect form, as yet undamaged by the weather or the attention of insects.

A little further on from the primroses, my attention was drawn to a standing dead tree, or snag, as they are also called. This one was an old birch, and I hadn’t looked at it closely before. However, dead trees have become increasingly attractive to me, as they often host interesting fungi, slime moulds and other organisms such as lichens. Even before I reached this one, I could see that it had a distinctive fungus growing on it.

I didn’t recognise the fungus at all, so I suspected it isn’t very common, at least in our area. I spent quite a while taking photographs of the various sections of the fungus on the tree, in between showers of rain. Those wet spells provided a good opportunity to eat my lunch though!

It was a resupinate fungus, meaning that its fruiting body and pore surface grows flush against the surface of the substrate (ie the trunk of the tree in this case) not on a stalk, like most mushrooms. Looking at my guidebook on fungi at home later, I suspect it is a species called Phellinus laevigatus, which the book says grows on dead stems of broadleaved trees, especially birch, but I’ll have to get that provisional identification confirmed (or corrected) by Liz Holden, the mycologist who helps me with fungal IDs. (Two weeks later, and Liz has identified the fungus as Phellinus lundellii – one for which there aren’t many records in this part of the Highlands).

Satisfied that I’d got a good series of photographs of this fungus, I headed further west towards the Red Burn, the main watercourse in the western part of Dundreggan. In its lower reaches the burn flows through a flat area amongst a woodland of birch, with some alders growing alongside the burn itself. I hadn’t been there for a while, and I was also aiming to take some more video footage of moving water in the burn, testing out a new video head I’d just purchased for my tripod.

Some of the alders had a distinctive pattern of growth, with their main trunks and branches growing out over the water and then upwards from there. This was due most likely to grazing pressure from deer when they were young. They would have been unable to grow straight up because the deer would have eaten their leader shoots, whereas side branches that grew out over the water would have been out of reach, and the young trees could then grow upwards from there.

In instances like this, I feel like I am learning to read the story that is written in the shape of the trees, and in the land itself. A few metres upstream there was another opportunity to do this, when I saw a prominent line of leaves parallel to the burn, but about a metre away from it, on the bank I was walking up. This was the result of a recent flood, with the leaves being deposited there when the floodwaters reached their peak, before subsiding again. This was another sign of spring, as floods like this are most common in spring when a lot of snow melts quickly, due to a sudden rise in temperature, causing the burns to swell and burst their banks.

Looking around I spotted another sign of the floods – in the burn itself, caught amongst some stones, were a cluster of deer droppings. These were the dung of red deer (Cervus elaphus), and they don’t normally defecate in watercourses. Most likely the droppings had been deposited near the grassy banks of the burn, and had got washed into the water by the flood.

Walking further upstream, I came to a steeper area, where there are some cascades and interesting rock formations – this was where I was intending to shoot some more video. I took a few still photographs first with my standard ball head on the tripod, then replaced it with the fluid-damped video head. This enables the use of smooth camera movements when shooting video, which the other head doesn’t allow for. It was my first time using the video head, so I was experimenting with simple camera movements:

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Moving a little further upstream, there’s a very interesting section of the burn, where it flows over a wide expanse of bare sloping rock. In times of flood, this entire rock area is covered by fast-moving water, but on this day the burn was flowing down over only a relatively small section of the exposed bedrock. It can be quite a torrent here at times, and I’ve also seen it one year, when we had an extended period of sub-zero temperatures, with the whole area covered in a mass of ice, when the burn froze over completely.

There’s a lot to see in this section of the burn, with interesting rock formations,  lichen patterns on the bedrock, and the cascades, which vary constantly, depending on the volume of water flowing down the burn. However, I haven’t fully explored the area, and I’ll have to return again for that another day, as it was time to head for home.

I packed up my equipment and headed back towards the lodge, where my car was parked. I didn’t intend to take any more photographs, but I had only gone about 20 metres when I came across the cast antler of a red deer lying on the ground. This is a relatively uncommon sight, so I pulled out the camera again, to take a few last photographs for the day. The antler was quite old, with a green tinge showing where algae had begun to colonise the bone. The tines of the antler were missing, and had most likely been chewed by the deer itself, or possibly by a small mammal such as a vole – both of those will feed on an antler like this, to gain the calcium that it contains.