Yellow Staghorn

We saw so many species at Delamere that I couldn't possibly actually do an entry on each one -- partially because I'm not sure that any one person got a full species list.  I can, however, do entries on the ones I got good pictures of.  One of those species is Calocera viscosa, which has a few common names including yellow staghorn, staghorn jelly, jelly antler, yellow false coral and yellow tuning fork.  We were lucky enough to find a fantastic looking one:

Yeah.  I know!  This is one of the reasons I was so happy about yesterday's mushroom day.  I was going to write about how I was surprised that there wasn't a common name for it along the lines of "false fire" until I looked up the literal translation of the scientific name for it.  Calo refers to calor, which refers to heat, inflammation, glowing, fires of passion.  Cera literally just means wax and viscosa, well, viscosa refers to the fruiting body being viscid or greasy.  "Greasy fire wax" is how I prefer to think of it, especially as a bit more research also tells me that a taxonomist called Wallroth in 1833 decided to call it Calocera flammea, but the name didn't stick.  I agree with him though.

This beautiful fungus can get up to 10cm in height and is often found on dead conifer wood.  I believe this one was on a felled pine, though it was a bit past it in terms of identification.  If this fungus looks like it's growing from the floor, it's probably actually growing on dead coniferous roots under the soil.  It's a saprophyte, preferring really and truly dead trees and is present between June and December.  It's pretty common and widespread in Britain and Europe; I also found out that it's present in Canada and North America (at least in parts). It also has a white form, but that's a pretty rare find.

It's not poisonous, but being a jelly fungus means it's got an odd texture and from all accounts it's got a nondescript taste and odour.  It's another one of those that sounds like it falls into the "technically edible" category.  I recently read a book that used the term "edible, but not worthwhile", which sounds perfect for this species.  Personally, I'd rather just look at it in vague wonder and take some great pictures.

I still say that it looks like suspended pixie fires.  Yes, it's really that bright a colour.

Edit:  Ironically, during the writing of this post, a candle just burned a hole in the carpet.  /facepalm.

Mushroom day

Despite the starter motor in the car being knackered, I still went to Delamere for the fungi day today. There's a train station in walking distance, so I took that option. It was fantastic and totally worth it. I learned so much today, saw some fascinating things, got lots of pictures, and met some lovely people. It's safe to say that I'll be writing about some of the species I saw on this visit for the next several entries on this blog. Looking forward to getting it all onto a computer as posting from a phone totally shortens what you want to say. If you do ever visit Delamere, I recommend the cafe at the station that I'm currently sat in. It does ace tea and scones.

Hmph.

Sadly, there's no follow up on the traps from yesterday.  The (usually incredibly reliable) car wouldn't start this morning.  Here's hoping that the OH can sort it for tomorrow...

On the bright side, I really needed to do some business-type stuff.  So I did that instead.  The time hasn't been lost, at least, but I can't help but feel I've really missed out.  I was really looking forward to it too.

Oh well.  Keep on swimming...

It's a TRAP!

This afternoon I popped over to The Barn Countryside Centre in Manchester for a couple of hours.  This afternoon's activity with the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit was laying out traps for checking tomorrow.

Firstly we were introduced to two different traps -- Longmans (top), which I've already talked about before (and got a picture of this time!) and tube traps (bottom):

The Longmans and the tube traps both work on the same principle:  Open door with food.  Small mammal enters, hits a trip, which closes the door.  In the tube trap, this trip is the white bar at the top (the paddle at the bottom is the door).  Longman traps cost around £60, but tube traps cost around £20.  However, tube traps don't do so well in the wet as the door doesn't necessarily function properly because the plastic sticks, so it's all about when and where you're using them.

We took out 30 Longman traps and baited them with seed and dog food.  The dog food is added for your insectivorous types, i.e. shrews.  I have to admit to putting quite a large teaspoon in due to residual guilt of previous trappings.  We also added a tennis ball sized amount of bedding in the form of hay and dried grass.

We laid out three transects of 10, spaced at 5m intervals.  On our way out to lay the Longmans, we passed by some hedgehog tunnels that had been laid out.  Two of them had been pulled into the path and the sausages had been nicked, presumably by dogs.  Shame.

Tomorrow morning, we'll get to see what turns up!

Green Alkanet + Update

This week is turning out to be quite busy.  Not only did I do my day at Record this week, and I'm in work (and working outside of work too), but I've also got two mammal trapping days and a fungi day on Saturday.  Big week, so expect some updates later in the week and across the weekend.

Outside of that, on my days at work I often get to walk through a park.  I've seen a few interesting plants and things on my way in (I often plunder the hedge, if I'm honest) and snapped a few pictures.  Recently, I've noticed a wildflower called Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens) on my way to and from the car.  It's a charismatic very green plant with very blue flowers that have a white centre.  The plant is also pretty hairy -- to the point where it can feel a bit like stinging nettles in some of the older specimens.  It's part of the borage family, which is fairly obvious once you know that plants in this family tend to have blue flowers and be hairy:

Look at that stem! 

Anyway...

It's scientific name has stuck in my head ever since I heard it; literally translated, it means "five-tongues always alive" (or five-tongues evergreen).  Green Alkanet has also confused me as a name, so I've decided to look into both of the names as well as the plant.

Apparently the "five-tongues" part refers to the five tongue-like petals.  The corolla does kinda look like five tongues, complete with that central groove you've got underneath... as long as you squint.  It's more about the shape than the colour in this case.  It's called "always alive" because it's an evergreen plant that keeps it's leaves over winter.  The scientific name is something of a descriptor, really.

As it turns out, the name "Green Alkanet" is also a descriptor.  In this case, the word "green" is referring to those evergreen tendencies.  Alkanet's an odd one though because it's a hand-me-down word.  Alkanet is a Middle English word which was a conversion of an Old Spanish word, alcaneta, which is a form of the Old Spanish word alcana.  Alcana comes from the Medieval Latin alchanna, which has been nicked from the original Arabic language, where it started of as al-ḥinnā’.  Al-ḥinnā’ literally means "the henna".  It's literally called evergreen henna because red dye can be extracted from it's roots.

That's why it was brought here.  It's an invasive plant from the continent, native to southwest France and, fairly obviously, the Iberian peninsula where Spain is a main feature.  Britain used to have a lot of monks that really liked having that red ecclesiastical cloth, so they imported the plant in order to create dye.  It's hard to say when this happened, but it's fair to say it was quite some time ago.  Green alkanet is considered naturalised as it's very common in hedgerows, though as you move north, there is much less of it.  I was surprised to find it near us because the land here is quite acidic and it's a calciphile.  Here's a better picture of the tongue shape from Wikipedia commons:

I still can't help but feel that after likely being here for over 1,000 years, it's part of the historic landscape, despite my usual loathing for many invasive species.  Having said that, it's not as destructive as other invasives like knotweed or rhodi, so that's definitely colouring my view.  But I shan't go into that here as that is a massive subject for discussion!

Small Mammal Trapping

Today I went small mammal trapping in Stockport with the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit.  It was a morning collection, so we were picking up the contents of traps laid out last night.  Sadly I wasn't able to help out yesterday due to teaching on my only Thursday all year.  This was double sadly as I'd also been offered both an evening and a morning bat survey by a firm, but so it goes.  Keep on swimming...

The traps that we were using were humane traps -- Longworths to be precise.  It's been some time since I used them, but they're awesome little things.  They don't hurt the little critters at all as long as you stock up the trap with a good deal of food and warmth, which is precisely the kind of thing that these creatures are after in the first place.  The traps look like this:

(Image from University of Aberdeen as I forgot to snap one...)

They come complete with a little door and everything.  The mammal survey at Etherow was two transects of 20 traps set at 10m intervals.  The first transect was near a field margin and had largely been disturbed by either dogs or badgers -- both were really likely in that part of the woods.  We did manage to get our hands on one that wasn't disturbed and that had caught a woodmouse (Apodemus sylvaticus).  In order to get a good looksee, you have to dump the trap into a plastic bag, which gives you a confused looking mouse, looking up at you:

On this survey, we were recording the state of the trap (disturbed, open, closed); what, if anything, we caught; mortality and any other notes (juvenile/adult, gender).  We also took hair samples from the mice for DNA analysis for a study of genetic drift in populations of mice.

The second transect, which was up in more dense woodland and off a path, yielded more variety as we also found bank voles.  These chaps are a far more reddy brown than woodmice.  They've also got smaller ears by comparison and have (I think) a blunter, less refined muzzle.  We caught a juvie (so small!):  

And we shall call him Bitey, because that's exactly what he did to the lass who was holding him.

We also caught and sexed a couple of others, which were mostly male.  Apparently, if you hold them a certain way, the vole stops struggling and you can tell it's gender: 

 
And this one I shall call Peevish, because he looks not only indignant, but peeved.

We didn't catch any shrews, which is a first for me, but also makes me quite happy.  Shrews have such a fast metabolism that unless you cram the trap with food and rescue it sharpish, they starve to death.  In fact, they can die of starvation in only 5 hours as they need to eat up to 300% of their own body weight every day.  To do this, they must eat every 2-3 hours.  That's one hell of a downside, but they do eat everything and anything -- including canned hotdog sausages.

Canned hotdog sausages are great bait for hedgehog traps.  These traps don't trap the animal, but they do attract them and cause them to walk through either ink or some kind of paw print capturing surface for ID purposes.  The trap below used a mixture of ink and washing up liquid, with paper to capture prints and a hotdog as bait:

These traps were laid out as one transect of 10 traps, along the edge of a path, with one trap every 100m.  We think that the first trap may have had a shrew in it, but that's only a maybe based on paw prints and teeth marks.  We also found evidence of bank voles and woodmice in the other traps -- did I mention that I can now ID rodent poo?  Well, I can now for these two species. We also found slugs in some of the traps as well as evidence that one of the little critters had pulled the hotdog out of the trap and off somewhere.  Inky dragmarks are a dead giveaway!

Sadly, we saw no evidence of hedgehogs.  I do not know if this is normal for this site, but I do know that hedgehogs are in decline but no one really knows how much by.  Here's hoping that either they went to ground last night or that they just never really liked that site.

All in all, it was a really interesting and productive day.  Incidentally, Etherow had a diverse amount of fungi about, so it's well worth a further investigation.

Learning to See

This isn't so much a post about ecology, but a couple of times now in both my hobbies and whilst out on bat walks and such I've noticed that people assume that they can't see in the dark.

I've been guilty of it in the past.  For years I was told by my mother that I was night blind.  I had this all but confirmed by both a doctor and an educational psychologist when I was diagnosed with Irlen Syndrome.  Irlen Syndrome sounds terrible, but it's just a perceptual disorder that means I see after images a lot.  It also means that I'm a bit clumsy, I like low contrast lighting conditions and I suck at reading graphs, music or anything that's lined or with high contrast patterning.  It can also mean that you are night blind.

About five years ago, I started doing hobbies that meant that I had to be outside at night, without artificial light and for long periods of time.  It was really difficult at first, I won't lie.  I felt unable to do much and even a bit helpless on occasion.  But in time, I learned how to see and it made me realise something -- sure, I struggle in the dark at night, but I wouldn't call it blind (anymore).  I've had to learn how to see in the dark though; it's not been easy and sure, I still have some problems that other people don't.  It still takes me several minutes more than my friends to adjust to the lighting levels, for example; but I can do it if I hang in there and I use the following coping strategies:

• Peripheral vision!  I all but ignore most of my central vision at night.  If you're looking for movement in the dark, you'll see it in the peripheral vision first.  You'll also see things like trees and branches in your periphery first.  This can be demonstrated pretty well with stars -- there are several stars that are so faint that you can't see them if you look straight at them.  If you look with your peripheral vision though, you suddenly can. 
• Lose the torch or go for a torch with a red light option.  Red light means you can still see to write without losing your night vision or affecting anyone else's.  Carry a white light torch though in case you really need it (emergencies, ID purposes, etc).
• If you're cordoning off an area for safety with glowsticks, use red spectrum glowsticks for the same reason.
• Don't just assume that because it's dark, you can't see!!!  On a night with a moon -- especially a full moon -- it can be bright enough to cast shadows.  Sure, there are some nights that are moonless, where you are out in the middle of nowhere, with no city light glow or perhaps there is no cloud cover to reflect light down from neighbouring cities.  Maybe you're in a wood and it's too dark to move.  Fine.  But give your night vision a chance first.  Give it 10 minutes.  Move slowly.  Your own eyes will surprise you.  Only use a torch if you really need to. 
• If someone is blinding you,  politely say something.  Usually they'll be pretty apologetic.  And don't hesitate to preserve your night vision by looking away or shielding your eyes.  Edit:  A friend of mine suggested the pirate trick of covering your dominant eye in order to preserve night vision.  I forgot that I do this too as it's now fairly instinctive.  He also suggested closing your eyes for 60 seconds in order to acclimatise to the dark.  It works for him, but I know I'd fall over!

Night vision can be really quite an important thing to have if you're doing nocturnal surveys.  Some bats actively avoid light (even the red lights) and you've little hope of looking at that moth if you shine a torch at it.  I've seen folks do this and the moths usually fly into the torchlight.  Use a jar to collect the moth and then bring it into the light -- you'll have much more success with your ID.

As I said, learning to see in the dark is a learned skill for me.  It probably is for a lot of people, whether or not they've got night vision issues.  Keep an open mind about it.  Sure, I still stumble often and it takes me a while to get going in the dark, but if I can do it, so can others.