Winter Plans

I've tended to move around the country a bit over the years. I started life in the Midlands, then headed down to London, back to the Midlands, up to Scotland, down to Surrey (and that was all before I'd even left school!) and a few extra places in between since then. And now I'm on Skye, the furthest north I've ever lived and I'm loving it. 

However, the flipside to being this far north is that there's not a huge amount of daylight during the midwinter months and it's usually pretty wet when it isn't being dark. Yesterday's beautiful weather was a stunning exception, and actually today wasn't too bad either once the rain passed. But I do need to come up with some sort of a strategy that will keep my Challenge from stagnating at this quiet time of the year. Hah, Day 2 and already I'm worried!

It turns out that the Skye winter weather can be a bit shitty at times, who knew! But being this close to the sea means we don't really experience much in the way of minus degree air temperatures here in Uig. Of course, the wind can happily make up for that. But the winter-active spider and fly species are all used to that, they will still be around whether it's a crisp clear day or a horrible icy wet night. They don't just disappear, they still have their lives to lead. The point I'm trying to make is that spiders and flies are always available to find, it's just a lot easier to find them when the weather is calm and mild rather than in horizontal sleet and snow showers. 

Alright, so we know there's stuff to be found here in midwinter. How best do I find it? There are options. 

Firstly I could be very lazy and still manage to find a few flies and spiders. How? Just stay here in the hotel and see what turns up. Spot-lighting the white walls after dark is one easy method to find flies and spiders, none of which happen to be white bodied, so that helps. In fact, lazy or not, I plan to do precisely that on a regular basis. It's just a great way to find additional species, and some of the flies at least won't be around in the summer months. My second lazy trick concerns the outbuilding in the gardens. It has an internal light that never turns off, not unless I kill power to the whole building at least. It has large double doors which are always wide open, thus it attracts quite a few flying insects at night. Which in turn attracts spiders. A couple of years back, I painted the walls and ceiling a horrible insipid pale magnolia kind of colour. It really is quite a revolting colour, but it does mean that any insects and spiders sitting on the walls or ceiling now show up rather well against the pale background. All clever stuff, huh? This outbuilding houses the washing machines/tumble dryers, so I do have a legitimate excuse to loiter in there from time to time anyway. 

Or I could be a bit more pro-active in my endeavours to find species. Let's look at the spiders first. 

Lots of spider folk go out with a sieve and white tray, grab handfuls of moss and give it all a good shake. The moss stays in the sieve and the spiders fall through and into the tray. Something like a cheap cat litter tray is ideal, though naturally I went ahead and bought the entomological version which is maybe two inches deeper, won't fit into my rucksack and cost around nine times the price of anything I could have picked up in a pet shop.

I've seen this moss-sieving technique used before on the dry, chalky South Downs. But I'm on peaty gleys where everything is wet, especially at this time of year. I'm still going to give it a go regardless, worse case scenario is that I get wet hands and no spiders. Winter is the season that many money spiders become sexually mature, and hence identifiable, and the north west of Britain is actually very rich in money spider diversity. Uig Wood is the largest patch of broadleaf woodland in northern Skye, I'm thinking there must be some really good species in there. That logic applies equally well to the flies too, I imagine. Though not in January, their time is still a few months away yet.   

My nocturnal hunts needn't be confined to the walls of the hotel either, I suspect tree trunks and fence railings will provide me with excellent opportunities to find spiders on the prowl after dark. Uig Wood is a mass of tree trunks. My beating tray is about 3ft square and has flexible edges, I could probably push it tight against a tree trunk and brush the mosses, lichens and bark above with a paintbrush. That should provide me with quite a few specimens, I reckon. 

Regards finding more flies, I think I may have to set out a few bait traps and start rootling through the rotting piles of grass clippings and leaves that I created whilst mowing the lawns. I need to be aware of disturbing hibernating hedgehogs, but they should be at quite a depth I'd suspect. Certainly deeper down than the flies I'm after. 

There are also the larval stages to consider, as the Dasysyrphus albostriatus from yesterday proves. Most of the mature trees in Uig Wood are either Wych Elm or Sycamore. Both have a rich aphid fauna, which means there are plenty of aphidophagous hoverfly larva just waiting to be found in the leaf litter. I did a bit of leaf litter larval searching last year and found a few species. It was quite good fun actually, though most larvae remained unidentified. It's something I shall definitely be doing again soon. Finally, there are leafmines to look out for. The agromyzids have leaf and stem mining larvae, a couple of which are relatively easy to find here on Skye, even in the winter time.

I plan to populate this blog with images of my finds, the habitats I explore, even of the kit I'm using. But I didn't take any photos today and I'm determined not to use old images from last year. So here's a photo of yesterday's male Metellina merianae showing you his boxing gloves. The pedipalps of male spiders are sometimes quite extraordinarily over-developed with prongs, teeth, balloons and spurs sticking out at the most unlikely of angles. This one appears to be wearing mittens with immense hooked thumbs!