Sieving in the Snow

Last night we enjoyed a decent snowfall and I was keen to head into the hills to enjoy it. As of tomorrow I'm back on duty, so this will be my last outing in daylight until next weekend. 

The view up Glen Conon is stunning

I couldn't see myself making too much use of my net today, the only things I saw in flight were birds rather than insects, so I headed into the woods to retrieve my cunningly hidden sieve and tray. 

Still exactly where I'd left them, thankfully  

 

Now I know what you're wondering - what the heck was I intending to sieve with all that snow on the ground? Well it wasn't deep snow, just a couple of inches worth beneath the trees. And the tussocks here grow taller than that. 

et voilà, a tussock!

I unearthed about half of this tussock, teased the base apart into smaller pieces and shook the whole lot through the sieve. I have to say, the pickings were rather slim - a couple of springtails, a small sphaerocerid, the beetle Anotylus rugosus and a couple of very small millipedes. Not exactly the bountiful reward I was hoping for! I sieved a couple of nearby tussocks with similar results when I suddenly realised I was no longer alone.

A man I've never seen before came wandering down the hill and clambered the fence about 40ft from where I stood motionless, nose in my tray, pooter in my mouth. Then he took his coat off and yelled "Good morning world!" through the woods. "What's that, mate?" I asked, causing him to spin around in startlement. "Oh aye, er yeah..." he said, before pulling at his jumper. Was he about to strip naked right in front of me, I wondered? And there I was thinking that I was the biggest weirdo in the woods. Luckily he soon finished rearranging himself and stood there facing into the trees ahead of us. I figured it was a good time to quit the tussocks and head off in the opposite direction, which I did with purposeful strides, trying my best to look impressive and definitely not the kind of person you'd want to mess with. 

There's a short section through the woods where you're effectively pinched between the fence line and a long drop into the river far below. At its narrowest point the woodland floor here is only about twenty feet wide. I walked through this narrow squeeze and continued ahead into the woods. After a hundred metres or so, I circled back to view the narrow point from about fifty metres dowhill. I then waited to see whether the weirdo was following my footprints. Eventually I figured not and resumed my tussocking. In all the times I've been in these woods, this is just the third occasion I've ever seen another soul up here, and the first time I didn't recognise the person. Happily, the tussocks were rather more productive beneath these larger trees and I even found a few handfuls of dry leaflitter amongst the roots of a huge Sycamore. The dry leaves in particular revealed lots of invertebrates for me to pick through.

Stenus sp. - that's one I don't have to worry about this year! 

Othius punctulatus - another one I don't have to worry about this year

This bizarre thing is actually a fly larva

I didn't retain this larva, it was still active and could be months away from pupating. It would only die if I tried to rear it through, so I put it back in the leaf litter. The diagnostic 'lateral extensions' tell me that this belongs to the genus Fannia, which are the Lesser Houseflies. As adults, these flies often fly around my face when I'm mowing the grounds, occasionally even landing on my nose and lips! Quite annoying really, I'm very glad they don't bite. With snow laying all around me, that seems like a dim and distant memory, but I know they'll be back in the summer, waiting for me beneath the trees on the back lawns. 

Nemastoma bimaculatum - I had eight of these in the tray at one point!

I think I found more of these black harvestmen today than I ordinarily find in a month. Clearly they like to use piles of leaves at the base of trees as an overwintering site. I also found a few money spiders, but they went straight up the pooter and into alcohol so no pics of those, I'm afraid. 

I stashed my sieve and tray in a different part of the woods, I'm worried that the weird fella will be back again and I don't want him messing around with them. (Ha, he probably has his own blog and is currently writing about the weirdo he encountered today, staring into a cat litter tray with tubes hanging out of his mouth...) 

Back indoors I managed to identify the three sphaerocerids I collected as Ischiolepta denticulata, Leptocera fontinalis and Lotophila atra, the latter being my second for the site this month and the others being lifers for me. They are all common species, often associated with tussocks and small mammal runs in woodland, but according to the NBN only L.atra is already known from Skye.

This is a male Ischiolepta denticulata with its amazing scutellar teeth and warty-looking surface

Being a male, it has a tiny tubercle (arrowed) near the base of the hind femur. Not easy to see!

But it was the same old story with the spiders I collected, either subadult males or adult Tenuiphantes zimmermanni. Yet again. Supposedly you can often find several species of Tenuiphantes together, but Uig Wood seems to be bucking that trend. One was a particularly darkly-abdomened individual and I felt confident it would be a different species. Nope, still a flippin' zimmermanni! 

The palps don't lie

And here's a more typically patterned male Tenuiphantes zimmermanni

I do hope I'm not overlooking other species amongst the zimmermanni I'm finding. Trying to translate the image in the book to what you're looking at in real life is not as easy as you might think. Spider palps are complicated 3D structures, stunningly so in fact, but that makes them difficult to accurately reproduce on paper. Hence the 2D figures in the books, magnificent though they are, inevitably fail to adequately convey the various different parts that you see whilst looking down the barrels of a microscope. So saying, I'm fairly certain I haven't misidentified any tenuis yet. He says...

This is a female Lepthyphantes minutus that I found in the laundry shed a couple of days back

I suspected that's what it was straight away, due to the heavily annulated orange legs and mass of leg spines. But I needed to check the epigyne to confirm that ID. Oh boy, what an epigyne it is too! All attempts at a 'head-on' shot failed, it projects outwards too much for the camera to stack properly. So here's a profile view of it instead

In my head, I see epigynes as being rather flat objects laying against the 'belly' of the spider. But this thing juts out almost like a weird proboscis! Happily it matches Lepthyphantes minutus perfectly, so that's another bit of learning done and confirmed. 

Ok, so that's my adventuring outside of the hotel grounds done for another week. Not sure what the weather is doing over the next few days, but I'll be checking the walls and laundry shed after dark in search of who knows what. I may have to get some bait traps going at some point soon too, especially now that I know Sylvicola are attracted to them. Then again, if the snow keeps up it may not be worth it. I won't know if I don't try! 

Number of people encountered during this outing: one.