More Extreme Orchid Spotting

Spotted on the roundabout outside Blandford. A common spotted, I think (Dactylorhiza fuchsia) I believe that this area was seeded with wild flowers a few years ago, unlike the previous roadside orchid spot on the Isle of Harris(http://punkrockecology.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/more-orchids-morchids.html), which was a genuine wild flower in an actual wilderness!

Wildflowers by roadside seems to be the new thing and, although I used to be one of the people who's job it was to mow roadside verges a few years ago, I believe that this is very much a good thing.

More here: http://www.plantlife.org.uk/our_work/campaigns/flowersontheedge/roadvergeexamples

Stag Beetle

A female stag beetle that I spotted out walking the dogs a few days ago. 

Should you spot one, please report it to the People's Trust For Endangered Species and their Great Stag Hunt survey, which can be found here: https://ptes.org/get-involved/surveys/garden/great-stag-hunt/stag-hunt-survey/

More on stag beetles and the the survey here:

 https://ptes.org/campaigns/stag-beetles/

The beetle in question was ambling up a fairly busy street, so I moved it to a garden where it was less likely to be squished or eaten by magpies.

Bring Me The Soil Horizon

Up at my Mother-In-Law's place, there's some construction work going on, shoring up the house next door or some some such. We went to have a look at and there, where the soil had been dug away, was another of those wonderful times that the text book description that you've been looking at in various books for years is perfectly rendered in real life. In this case, a perfect example of soil horizons.

Here's the text book version:

And here's the real deal:

So yeah, looks like a load of dirt, huh? Well, on the top layer is, ya know, grass and stuff and you don't have to be a biologist to know that grass 'and stuff' is organic. Organic - i.e. living - matter dies and then decays, being broken down by microbes and fungi and stuff. This creates what gardeners call a 'rich humus', which is kind of food for plants. Not hummus, that's food for vegetarians.

Anyway, from the bottom of the picture up, is the underlying rock, which is chalk and is fairly typical of the south of England. Chalk is basically dead sea shells, built up over a very long time and is alkaline, if you remember the post I made a couple of weeks ago attempting to explain acid and alkaline soils: http://punkrockecology.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/orchidorama.html 

Also, it doesn't hold water very well, as we can see as the darker brown soil at the top washes out very quickly to light brown and then the pure white of the chalk. This creates the alkaline and not very fertile chalk downland that I also attempted to explain here: http://punkrockecology.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/over-hills-and-far-away.html

If you're a gardener, or a farmer, or indeed if you're a plant, then there is a 'perfect' soil, which is called loam and is a rich dark brown, very mildly acidic and a mixture of clay, sand and silt. Rusty coloured soil, incidentally, is coloured that way precisely because it is full of tiny particles of ferris oxide, or rust, and this rust is an indication of air and water being able to penetrate deep into the soil. White soil, grey soil and black soil (the latter being peat soils, such as that described in 'Orchidorama') show the opposite of this, usually that the iron and everything else is being washed away or that air is not able to penetrate.

If ya wanna get even more geeky, then look up 'munsell soil colour chart', or have a look at the following links:

Soil types explained for gardeners: https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=179

A very tech description of soil horizons: http://passel.unl.edu/pages/informationmodule.php?idinformationmodule=1130447025&topicorder=4

Or you can just slack off and watch this. I like it. It's got a citroën van in it.

Bun Fight At The Ebblake Corral

Just to get everyone up to speed: I'm back home in Dorset and, yesterday, was back at my work placement at The Hedge Project. Manpower was needed as this was round up day. We have a herd of cows that are let out to graze on various sites, including Holt Heath, Sopley (near Hurn airport) and Ebblake, which is a patch of forestry commission land near Verwood.

The cows graze these patches and this has many ecological benefits if the correct amount of grazing is allowed (see http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/conservationgrazing). The trouble is that, with these sites a good few miles apart, the cows have to be transported there and back. This has to be done via a  trailer. Think of the smallest space that you could fit four cows into and you've got an idea of what the trailer involves. The trailer has to be small, and the cows crammed in for their own safety, basically. You can't put seatbelts on them but, if you're a cow, another cow crammed in right next to you works pretty well as an airbag in an emergency. Now, considering that it's hard enough persuading people to act in their own best interests, cows are not much different. They don't particularly want to go into the trailer and weigh over a tonne, which makes persuading them quite difficult. But then there's the fact that they all have to be rounded up in the first place.

Ebblake is a forestry commission site, as I mentioned, and as such is mostly pine forest, plus a marsh and some very thick scrubby new growth pine and birch. All in all a very primeval looking place, and not at all ideal for a cattle round up. In one corner was a gate, next to a corral, which is a pen specifically for putting cows into. The site itself was a large rectangle with a barbed wire fence surrounding it, and we could be pretty certain that they were inside that.

In fact, as we arrived, we could see them up a path in the distance and, when we were all ready to go, a rattle of a feed bucket and the round up call (basically 'yeeeeeeeeeeeeep') had the whole herd trotting towards us. I had been warned that the round up 'could take an hour, could take five hours' and, one time, took three weeks. Everything was just looking good for the 'one hour' end of this spectrum when one cow, a British White who appears to be the matriarch of the group, got spooked and ran off into the woods, taking most of the herd with her. Two had successfully been got into the corral and were standing there with a 'wait, what the hell's going on?' expression while the rest bolted.

Now cows are all about gentle persuasion. Especially these ones, which are easily spooked and so we had to locate where they'd got to and then for a line behind them, gently persuading them forward. Our team consisted of Dale (who's cows they were) Kayleigh, David, Callum, Mark (I think? sorry) and myself, all armed with 'cow persuasion sticks', or 1m lengths of blue pvc piping.

Now, persuading them forward was easier said then done. We located them on the far side of the scrubby bit of woodland and, with the fence at one end of our line, ushered them forward. You'd think that eight cows would be easy to locate in these circumstances but you'd be wrong. In the densest bit of the woods, you had to really move to keep them in site and, out of site of each other, we had to keep talking so the others would know what we were doing.

Long story short, everything got a bit complicated in there and I ended up tailing three cows, the British White and a Devon Red and her calf*, while the rest of the herd emerged ended up a few hundred metres to the left of me, luckily with most of the rest of our team tailing them. They seemed to be getting on just fine, with the cows on the path and heading towards the coral, so I continued tailing my cows as they meandered back through the woods.

The path that I mentioned ran in a sort of crescent shape from one gate to another, and the cows and I relocated each other by one of these gates. By now, the rest of the herd were in the corral and were not feeling particularly happy about it. The big British White that I had been following began bellowing back at them and then, taking the Devon Red and the calf with her, began ambling up the path towards them. At this point, I couldn't believe my luck. After all this effort and fumbling around in the undergrowth, they were just going to amble right up to where we want them.

And they did. I'd phoned ahead to warn as a four of the cows were being persuaded into the trailer. This had just been completed when my three turned up.  Then came the final, intensely nerve wracking, bit of getting the final three into the corral without either spooking them or loosing any of the others.

This was completed, the cows were loaded and delivered to our other site at Sopley, several miles away, where they were put out to pasture while we spent the rest of the day pulling ragwort.

There they wandered around, getting know their new pasture and eyeing us suspiciously as we passed.



*A joke based on the Northern Ireland accent: Three cows in a field, which one's on holiday? The one with the wee calf.

Porpoises In The Minch

Heading back home and we took the 7am CalMac ferry from Stornaway to Ullapool. This involved getting to Stornaway for 6am, which meant leaving Callanish at 5.30am and so on. Luckily, I was wide awake as, about 40 mins into the 2 1/2hr journey the sea out to the side of the boat began boiling, as at least a couple of dozen porpoises popped out of the water. The display must've lasted at least 30 seconds - long enough for me to get my phone out of my pocket, unlock it, get the camera fired up and take THIS picture.

So, yeah. At this point I should point out that, the reason that most of my pics are of plants is that they have the advantage of staying the heck still. Animal pics have a major disadvantage from this point of view. Still, the sea was as glassy smooth as this for the entire crossing and on the right of the pic is the nice, wide window of the 'Loch Seaforth' that gave us such a panoramic view.

Using the magic of modern digital technology, I managed to enlarge the pic so you can see that it is indeed a breeching porpoise and not a bouy or a bit of flotsam.

I'm afraid that you'll have to believe me when I say that this was the tail end of the entire sea being full of porpoises doing just this.

And then, just as quickly, they were gone.

More Orchids. Morchids.

When I said a couple of posts ago that orchids just litter the roadside around here: here's a fairly extreme example of that.

This is a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) which, as the name suggests, is one of Britain's commonest wild orchids. The roadside that I spotted it next to was the main road between Stornaway in the Isle of Lewis and Tarbert in Isle of Harris. Technically, they're the same island - as in there is no water between them - but while Lewis is predominantly flat, Harris is not. The road winds up the side of a mountain over looking Loch Seaforth and we stopped to admire the view. 

You can't blame us, really, can you? Harris makes Lewis look like the garden of eden. This, we joked, was 'troll country' and were listening to Norwegian band Wardruna just to add to the effect.

I went for a short wander up the hillside and spotted this little beauty on the marshy soil. Photographing the picture at the top came at the expense of my knees, kneeling in the damp bog but I think it was worth it.

Still more orchid pictures to come.
The Common Spotted Orchid http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/common-spotted-orchid

Wardruna. The song's about Odin and sung in old Norse.

Pretty Pictures Of Flowers

In yesterday's post, I mentioned 'matter', which was the 'fertile plain' between the alkaline sea and the acid moor? Well here's an example of that. The yellow-ochre patch to the right is seaweed and I'm afraid I don't know a damn thing about seaweed so can't help you on that. To the left is grass (I'm guessing marram grass) and the pink flowers are thrift (Armeria mafitma). Thrift is tolerant of salty sea water - I've seen it quite happily living underwater in a nearby loch - and so can handle the occasional high tide.

This is the same patch of land, showing the large tussocks and the channels of water running between them. The area is prone to very violent winter storms, and these patches are built on tiny patches of earth on a bed of very tough rock. The rock in question is lewisian gneiss, which is a type of granite and igneous, if you remember your geology from school. Some of the oldest rocks in the British Isles apparently, although I thought they were all pretty old.

Now, moving inland, the place where we are staying comes with a croft, which is a patch of land that comes with the house and is intended for agricultural purposes. It is used occasionally for agricultural purposes - specifically grazing sheep. However, a quick jaunt around provides some surprising finds. Not just the northern marsh orchids as described in the previous posts (I've counted six in the immediate garden of the house alone) but such beauties as these:

This is Red rattle (Pedicularis palustris) or marsh lousewort, which was very prolific on the site. This is a 'hemi-parasitic' plant, which attatches it's roots to the roots of nearby grasses and 'borrows' water and mineral salts. Back down south, it  and it's cousin yellow rattle are often sewn into fields to improve biodiversity, as the grass there would otherwise crowd out everything else. Here, it just grows of it's own accord in a scrubby, rush infested bit of sheep grazing land.

According to the 'Reader's Digest Field Guide To Wild Flowers of Britain', which I found on the shelf here, it got the name 'lousewort' from a theory that it infected sheep with lice. However - and again according to the same book - lousewort is popular with snails and snails are carriers of liver fluke, which can infect sheep. Unhealthy, liver fluke stricken sheep would have been prone to catching lice and then spreading lice through the rest of the flock. Happily for sheep, shepherds and wildflowers, sheep are inoculated against liver fluke these days.

This is a round-leafed sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), which is a carnivorous plant. The leaves are covered in red hairs, each of which is covered in a droplet of sticky liquid. Midges mistake them for water and get stuck, where upon the leaf curls inwards and the insect is digested. Like all carnivorous plants, it also photosynthesises, so the insect-eating is an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the actual nutrient factory of photosynthesis. Chomping the occasional insect allows the plant to thrive on a highly acid bog with very few essential plant minerals.  

So there you go. There's more, much more but we'll get round to that presently.