How could this not pull waders down from the sky?
Ahhh .. there you are:
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| Inland ringos are the best |
After seeing a splendid display of Springbeauty (Claytonia perfoliata) in St.Andrews over the weekend I was surprised to see, on the way to the shop this morning, a single plant at the base of the wall beside Tesco. Having concentrated on the flowering tips previously I was glad I had a look at less mature plants with only leaves.
The leaf similarity with Pink Purslane is obvious and I discovered that it has the alternate name of Winter Purslane. Maybe other people know it by this primarily. I've had that experience before ("Do you know Jack-by-the-hedge?" ... no - never heard of it)
Flowering plant 398 for Dalgety Bay. Vascular plant #296 for NT18, 2022.
At the south end of the St.Ninians area is Loch Fitty - a large, stocked fishing pond which I had never been to, somehow assuming it wasn't going to be very interesting. It turns out that this is now part of the Fife Pilgrim Way, a walk that takes you through St.Ninians south to Dunfermline. It also turns out that it can be somewhat interesting.
I wandered up from Kingseat, where you can park, to only the southern edge of Loch Fitty, where there's a causeway into the south of St.Ninians. Here there was a decent amount of flood refuse, which was obviously going to provide sufficient entertainment for even an extended lunchbreak.
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| Causeway with foreground flood refuse |
There were a good number of beetles, with several commoner species which were nevertheless new for the year (e.g. the ground beetle Paranchus albipes, the leaf beetle Hyrdothassa glabra). There were a couple new to me too, though these are relatively common and well recorded in Fife.
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| New for year, the click Hypnoidus riparius |
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| New for me, Dryops ernesti |
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| Also new for me, Calathus melanocephalus |
So far this area's been pretty good to me. Looking forward to joining the dots. The east side seems to have a lot of people and heavy machinery around, and I think they are actually working on completing roads/paths around the site. In some ways that will be a shame. It's very nice to visit the site with nobody else there!
Here's the Fife Pilgrim Way, from St.Andrews to Culross (or vice versa?). It's a pretty decent transect across the southern half of Fife.
No, not a throwback set of movies which would undoubtedly come under much closer scrutiny than they might have back in the day but a former opencast mine which has gone partway being made into ... well, I'm not sure. Sculpture park? Luckily the lack of decent access means it's very quiet, and looks like a place to have a lot of fun recording. No doubt at the right time there are professional dog-walkers out there who also love it, sadly.
I can't imagine that all that marginal stones and mud would go without migrant waders in season.
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| Panoramic from west of the large pond |
The small woodlands scattered across NT18 have turned up numerous surprises. They all seem to have something different in them. Another wander up Letham Hill between Dalgety Bay and Inverkeithing proved there was more than one plant of Stinking Hellebore. in fact, it's everywhere! Besides the patch below there are numerous individuals scattered across the hill.
Besides that, it must be about the most dull square in the hectad (so far). Note the complete absence of ground layer here.
A square in the SE corner of Dunfermline, close to where my office was, is infested with Spurge-laurel, which was new to me, at least insofar as recording is concerned. I don't remember seeing it before, though. I wonder if these are a result of my not bothering to look for plants in the early parts of the year.
Last year in the early part of the year I did a lot of beetling. This mostly centered around tussocking and rummaging through an enormous grass pile at Cullaloe LNR. Until early March I was able to record 75 species, many of them new to me. This year, early March, I have recorded 65 species. So today I checked them to see how much was overlap.
Remarkably the total list for both years has been 111 species, which isn't quite double, but it does show a big gap in the lists. Only 29 species featured on both lists, with 46 unique to 2021 and 36 unique to 2022.
Two main reasons stand out - no water beetling thus far in 2022 and no giant grass piles at Cullaloe. Both of those things are a shame, but at least the water beetles can be remedied at some point. I expect also many of the "missing" species this year will be encountered at some point.
One thing I didn't do enough of last year was gardening, apparently. Yesterday when trying to reposition some slabs on the front path I came across the ground beetle Platyderus depressus, which looks like the third record for Scotland
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| Platyderus depressus |
And the lists.
