Curracag – the Outer Hebrides Natural History Society – held
their first indoor meeting of 2019 in the Dark Island Hotel on 8
January. The speaker was John Love who has been a member since the
Society’s inception. Based in South Uist, John was formerly an Area
Officer for Uist, Barra and St Kilda with Scottish Natural Heritage,
also a former Chairman of Curracag and, for several past issues,
editor of their journal Hebridean Naturalist. Appropriately his talk
was about Highland Naturalists, tending to focus on the Hebrides with
a selection of home-grown individuals and a few other notable
characters.
The Hebrides has
long been a fertile stamping ground for naturalists from home and
‘abroad’ and John began his talk with Skyeman Martin Martin, a
tutor to the Macleods of Dunvegan who visited the remote archipelago
of St Kilda back in 1697. His popular book on the voyage was soon
followed up with another on subsequent visits to many other Hebridean
islands, both Inner and Outer. One has to bear in mind that his
travels took place only five years before the Massacre of Glencoe and
also before the ill-fated Jacobite Rebellions. Martin wrote how these
islands had never before been ‘described till now by any Man who
was a Native of the Country’. Indeed he went on to lament how
‘foreigners sailing through the Western Isles have been tempted
from the sight of so many hills that seem to be covered all over with
heath and faced with high rocks, to imagine the inhabitants, as well
as their places of residence, as barbarous; to this opinion their
habits, as well as their language, have contributed.’
Being a native
Gaelic speaker he was able to glean from his fellow islanders a
wealth of folklore, natural history, traditions, customs, cures and
remedies that would otherwise now be forgotten. ‘In the course of
my Travells,’ he went on, ‘anything that was remarkable fell
under my Observations’ . . . ‘the field of Nature is large, and
much of it wants still to be cultivated.’
After the ’45,
travel through the Highlands and Islands became easier and even the
elderly Dr Samuel Johnson was able to journey extensively in 1772. An
eminent naturalist of the 19th century was William
MacGillivray. Born in Aberdeen but raised in Northton, Harris,
MacGillivray later walked all the way to attend university semesters
in Aberdeen. He claimed ‘the solitude of nature was my school’
and how he had ‘reaped most advantage from solitary travelling.’
He even walked all the way to London to visit its Natural History
Museum and went on to become a museum curator himself first in
Edinburgh then assuming the Chair of Natural History back in
Aberdeen. MacGillivray wrote many scholarly books and was well known
for leading his students ‘to take to the fields and the woods, the
mountains and shores, there to examine for themselves the rich
profusion of nature.’ Indeed, it was said, he frequently walked
‘the most active of them into a state of limp helplessness’.
John Love himself
gained his degree in natural history at Aberdeen where he first
encountered the name and exploits of William MacGillivray. William
was also an accomplished artist and many of his fine bird paintings
are now in the Natural History Museum.
Our speaker went on to highlight other distinguished naturalists who shared a profound interest in the Highlands such as JA Harvie-Brown, Seton Gordon, Robert Atkinson, Frank Fraser Darling and J Morton Boyd – all greatly influencing him as a youngster. On joining the Inverness Bird Club in 1959, he was to meet Seton Gordon himself, Morton Boyd – who would later become his boss in NCC/SNH, George Waterston and Lea MacNally – all eagle enthusiasts. George was then Scottish Director of the RSPB who inspired John to volunteer at the Loch Garten Osprey hide in the summers of 1963/64. Lea MacNally was a stalker/naturalist in Fort Augustus who went on to take some wonderful photos and write several books about Highland wildlife.
From his
schooldays John was mentored by two birdwatchers in particular. Dr
Maeve Rusk was an ophthalmic surgeon at Raigmore Hospital who held
regular clinics in the Hebrides. She was president of the local Bird
Club, took John on her monthly duck counts and taught him how to
mist-net and ring birds. The Club secretary was Inverness Police
Inspector James MacGeoch, a keen photographer and island enthusiast.
At the time MacGeoch was Honorary Warden for North Rona and
Sulaisgeir National Nature Reserve and had recorded on film the
famous Gannet or Guga hunt by the men of Ness. Sadly Jimmy died soon
after retiring from the police but Maeve died in 2011 aged 93.
Recently, with the MacGeoch family and his friend Dr Finlay Macleod
from Ness in Lewis, John was able to see MacGeoch’s classic
photographs of the guga hunt published by Acair. North Rona was to
feature prominently in John’s island experiences, ringing Leach’s
Petrels, one of which was retrapped there no less than 30 years
later. From his time in Rum John became good friends with Dr John
Lorne Campbell, the eminent Gaelic scholar and folklorist from
Argyll; it is less well known that he was a passionate lepidopterist
and planted many trees to create wildlife habitat on the Isle of
Canna which he bought in 1938.
In 1975 John became involved in the White-tailed Sea Eagle Reintroduction Project on the Isle of Rum – championed by Morton Boyd, encouraged by Roy Dennis and George Waterston, and assisted throughout by a host of others. Shetlander Bobby Tulloch typically provided John with a couple of amusing anecdotes in his talk. As did Professor George Dunnet from Caithness who, as lecturer at Aberdeen University, initiated a long-term study of fulmars in Orkney. John showed a photo of George handling the first fulmar he ringed there in 1951 and then another taken in 1986 as he held the very same bird – it looked exactly the same but George had not weathered quite so well!
John could not
end his talk without mentioning Murdo MacRury from South Uist who
became the first Nature Conservancy warden at Loch Druidibeg. Also
two redoubtable naturalists (and columnists in the local Press),
Peter and Andrew Currie. There are many others of course it was clear
at the end of the evening that not only have the Highlands, and the
Hebrides in particular, attracted many fine naturalists over the
centuries but they have also generated many of their own. John just
felt fortunate to have encountered a few of them in his own lifetime.
Nature’s Recyclers: from Dumbledore to Dung Roundheads
Christine Johnson gave a talk for Curracag on 13th December 2018 in the Dark Island hotel; it was organised by Martyn Jamieson.
Christine
started with a diagram to show the importance of ‘Nature’s
Recyclers’; in both terrestrial and marine environments there is a
huge range of plants, from tiny plankton to huge, old trees. These
take in from their surroundings water, air and various minerals, and
through the power of sunlight digest them and form further plant
material. Over time ephemeral parts of plants and eventually the
whole plant will die, if it hasn’t been eaten: various animals from
tiny larvae to elephants, consume different types of or parts of
plants; then, in due course some of these ‘Primary Consumers’ are
themselves eaten by carnivores – the ‘Secondary Consumers’, and
they in their turn may be eaten by other carnivores: the ‘Tertiary
Consumers’.
All
these life forms consuming inevitably produce waste, and indeed in
time die themselves, leading to masses of dead plant material, dung,
droppings, faeces, and carcasses.
Where
does it all go? Why are we not wading through a morass of waste
products? – which, in a temperate woodland would amount to 5 tonnes
of plant and animal material per hectare.
Although
this is waste to the producers, it contains useful elements which can
support a huge range of organisms: up to a thousand species per
square metre, e.g. bacteria, fungi, and small invertebrates such as
nematodes and larger worms, springtails and woodlice.
Christine
then concentrated on the fungi, explaining that the part we see above
ground is the fruiting body – which may drop spores [the
‘toadstool’ type], or catapult them over a distance [like
puffballs]. The part in the growing medium – underground or embedded
in leaf litter or wood – is a network of very thin tubes [hyphae]
which collect and digest the material for growth; this network can
extend over huge distances, in Siberia, for instance, over hundreds
of square miles. Only fungi can digest cellulose. There are very
small ones which grow on leaves and conifer needles; once they have
started the process of breaking down leaf litter other large types
move in, and may appear to be growing from the soil rather than
reduced plant material. Fruiting bodies on the edges of some of these
networks produce ‘fairy rings’. Some fungi grow on dead wood, the
hyphae extending into the wood and softening it; when timber falls,
other fungi may move in. Some opportunistic fungi will grow on
processed timber such as pallets and chipboard.
Not
all fungi are processing dead material; some cause problems in live
plants, such as root rot in conifers; the oyster mushroom grows on
standing trees and derives its nutrition from trapping and digesting
nematodes.
While
animal scavengers generally deal with the soft parts of other
animals, fungi will grow on hard remains such as hair, feathers and
bones, eventually digesting them.
Dung
consists of partly digested plant material, mainly cellulose, and
there are fungi that grow on dung and break it down. As these
deposits are often scattered, to ensure that some spores may reach a
hospitable site, they are scattered over the grazing area and
ingested by the animals, then emerge already within a good growing
medium. In the UK alone, there are about 400 species of fungi living
on dung.
Christine’s
talk was well illustrated with pictures of some of the amazing range
of fungi, from large and robust ones to tiny delicate ones, some of
them microscopic. It was a fascinating introduction to a small number
of an extraordinary range of species and their very important
function in the environment.
On Thursday 8th Novemeber 2018 a small group assembled in the Dark Island Hotel to hear Carl Smith speaking on ‘North Uist – the Scottish Galapagos: a hotspot of stickleback biodiversity’, a talk organised by Martyn Jamieson for Curracag, but open to anyone interested.
Those
of us with any familiarity with North Uist are well aware of the
numerous lochs scattered across the island in the range of local
habitats: moorland and peat bog, machair and the blacklands, and the
lagoons in which the salinity can vary from almost marine to
practically freshwater, depending on rainfall, tides and spray. Few
of us will have realised that these support an extraordinary range of
forms of the three-spined stickleback – and that the Queen
Charlotte Islands off the west coast of Canada are the only other
area in the world known to have a similar diversity of sticklebacks,
though there is no suggestion that there is any connection between
the two populations – they have developed their differences
independently.
Carl
Smith, a reader at the University of St Andrews, has been studying
sticklebacks for twenty–five years, including ten years in North
Uist.
Our
sticklebacks will have arrived in the islands only after the last
glaciation which covered the islands so 15,000 years ago or less.
Probably marine sticklebacks were stranded in freshwater systems or
entered them as sea levels changed after the glaciers melted.
Marine
three-spined sticklebacks are nearly 3” [7cm] long, have three
spines on their backs, bony plates on the sides of the body and fins
in the pelvic area with spines that can be locked in place, so small
but well protected. In the lochs of North Uist the same fish takes
various forms, from something very close to a marine type to a much
smaller creature about half the size of the marine form, with no
spines, no bony plates and no pelvic fins or spines. There are
intermediate forms with varying sizes of spines, areas of plates and
pelvic fins or not. One gene controls the differences in the plate
formation.
The semi-saline lochs have fish close to the marine type; the machair loch fish range between those with medium protection and those with little, and the peatland lochs contain a range of fish with some plates to those that are completely defenceless and small. Low levels of calcium in these lochs may partially explain the lack of bony features, though other kinds of fish manage to extract enough calcium from their environment to grow normally.
Trout,
together with birds and eels, are great predators of three-spined
sticklebacks; trying to assess predator levels in lochs led to Carl
Smith and his teams fishing a range of lochs with special flies made
to look like three-spined sticklebacks, and the conclusion that
predator numbers did not explain the presence of small defenceless
fish. At present he is working on another explanation as to why there
should be so many different forms of these fish.
How
does North Uist compare with the Galapagos? One species of finch
arrived there about 5 million years ago and over time their
descendants have adapted to the different habitats and food sources
on the islands in the archipelago, and developed into different forms
now recognised as fourteen distinct species. It looks as though the
North Uist sticklebacks might be undergoing the same process, but
much more rapidly. Whether the tiny defenceless form found in some
lochs can really be regarded as the same species as the stoutly
armour-plated and spined fish in the sea and lagoons is debateable –
but there are all the forms in between.
Dr
Smith kindly answered numerous questions and there was some
interesting discussion following his fascinating talk. One point of
some concern is that other researchers are interested in the North
Uist sticklebacks and specimens are in demand. The numbers of the
different types in the different lochs are unknown, so whether they
might be endangered by over collecting is also unknown. In some lochs
there may also be a detrimental effect from, for instance, run-off
from application of agricultural fertilisers on the adjacent ground
or close to feeder streams, or the presence of fish farms with
associated nutrients and build up of fish faeces.
So
far the lochs of Benbecula and South Uist seem not to have attracted
the same attention; perhaps they also support a diversity of
three-spined sticklebacks.
Dr Smith has contributed a paper to the latest volume of the ‘Hebridean Naturalist’, available through the Curracag website, so anyone seeking an authoritative account should look there!
Nature’s Recyclers – From Dumbledore to Dung Roundhead
Without the decay of animal and plant matter and the recycling of nutrients, life would grind to a halt. Fungi, together with bacteria and some invertebrates, are the main agents in the process of decomposition, and the participation of fungi in this process is probably their most important role. This talk will illustrate the great diversity of fungi and some of the invertebrates which are nature’s recyclers.
A talk by Christine Johnson
13th December 2018 – 7:30pm Dark Island Hotel, Benbecula