Rinkhals

Looking back over the years there are certain places which I would describe as being as close to paradise on Earth as is possible. This is one of them, the cottage beside the ford over the Pungwe River high in the Inyanga Mountains along the eastern border of what was, in those days, Rhodesia. We went there with friends - mostly the Witts - and the main purpose of these holidays, as far as I was concerned , was to....

....catch the rainbow trout which teemed in Inyanga's rivers, especially the Pungwe and Matenderere.

However, as in every paradise, there has to be a snake. We were quite used to the idea of living with snakes - we had them in our garden and, at times, in the roof of our house - but I recall being warned of a snake which was only to be found in the steep grasslands of Inyanga region and which was particularly dangerous - partly from its habit of feigning death and, when picked up, directing a stream of poison into the eyes.

Its name was the rinkhals, and all this only comes to mind because last week's 'New Scientist' has an article in it about the Inyanga rinkhals.

Scientists have been rather intrigued by it as - despite its looks - it isn't a cobra and the nearest rinkhals population to the Zimbabwean rinkhals is many miles away in South Africa. The Zimbabwe snake is now so rare that the University of Bangor had to carry out their research on a skin found in the 1980s and stored in a museum in Bulawayo. Using recent advances in DNA analysis, they discovered that it was a subspecies of the South African species, Hemachatus hemachatus, which they have named H. nyangensis.

I don't recall there being any suggestion that rinkhals were rare when we were in Rhodesia in the 1960s. I may have been frightened of bumping into one but I would be deeply saddened to have it confirmed that this unusual and rather beautiful snake is no more.

See Bangor article here.

Rinkhals photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Fungi Season

As winter advances upon us the wildflowers are dying back along the hedgerows and in the fields and woodland, while the fungi are coming into their own - in breathtaking variety. This bouquet of golden chanterelles was blooming in the mown grass along the roadside in Backies while....

....this delicate, almost albino brittlegill seemed to have thrust itself out of a mossy bank at the edge of spruce woodland, its faded colour in such contrast to....

....another brittle gill, this one in Littleferry Woods, which is descriptively named the sickener for its effects on anyone who eats it.

The boletes are the bruisers of the fungus world, heavyweights, their stem sometimes almost as wide as their caps. This may be an orange birch bolete - well, it was growing in birch woodland.

The woods are full of brown fungi but this one, judging by the number of families growing on stumps of rotten pine in Littleferry Woods, seemed to be doing particularly well.

Silhouettes

As we stepped out of the door for our morning walk geese were passing overhead, heading north, and as we walked....

....more and more skeins crossed the sky, the sound of their calls suggesting they were pink-footed geese, flocks which return here every year in their thousands for the early part of the winter. They seem to like the fields to the north of us for foraging, returning each evening to roosts south of Loch Fleet.

With the constant calling of geese above us we walked north along the coast. It was just after low tide with not a breath of wind and a layer of clouds above us with open sky away to the southeast across the Dornoch Firth.

We were hoping to see an otter as a rising tide and calm conditions are ideal for this rather forlorn pursuit, the edge of the water being busy instead with....

....a variety of birds - several grey herons, mallard, cormorants, a few oystercatchers, curlews and redshanks, and well over a hundred rock doves.

The layer of cloud did finally clear, the sun warm enough to tempt out another red admiral - one which had very slim pickings on the dying wildflowers when compared to the feast available in our garden.

Winter Admiral

Winter has arrived here in northern Scotland. The air temperature last night dropped to two degrees above zero laying a frost in sheltered hollows, and today's midday temperature only just made it to ten Celsius - yet in the brief minutes of warm sunshine a red admiral was doing the rounds of the remaining verbena flowers in our garden.

I stood for some minutes watching it. Every movement was slow and, when I approached, it ignored me, as if feeding was as much as it could manage.

If all goes well, this beautiful butterfly will find somewhere safe and secluded in which to hibernate over our long winter, continuing to emerge briefly on warm days to feed.

Primary Fungi

The approach road to the local primary school runs through carefully-mown lawn but below this, to the right of this picture, under the deep shade of some conifers, there's a garden of fungi. It only extends a few metres and we wouldn't have noticed it had not one of the fungi been....

....a rather fine specimen of fly agaric the size of a small plate. Near it are....

....several more fly agarics but at the button-like stage.

It seems that fungi like to stick together for, with only a brief search, three more species were found within a few metres, including a white fungus and....

....one of the small boletes with a stalk almost as large as its cap. 

The last was a rather unusual fungus, a bolete with stunning, chestnut-coloured pores and matching pale yellow cap and stalk. It may be a lurid bolete but, as with all my identifications, this is little more than a guess.

Last Thursday I wrote about a similar gathering of fungi near the pedestrian gate into our local hospital's grounds - see post here. I found the same three species gathered there today but they had been joined by a fourth....

....which may be a funnel cap.

There must be good reason for four or more fungus species to be found in locations extending only to a few square metres.

Inverness

One of the reasons we moved to Golspie was that it offered easy access to the facilities, such as shops and medical services, of the Highland capital, Inverness. We don't go often but we did yesterday, taking the X99 bus which whisked us there in just over an hour, depositing us in the centre of the city.

I like Inverness. It's the right size for a city, small enough to access all of it on foot but big enough to offer a good range of services. However, the city centre, while outwardly appearing busy, is suffering from the closure of shops, many the sorts of places which, a few years ago, we would have visited. A good example is Clarks shoeshop, now empty. And with the loss of rent the owners of these premises are beginning to neglect them, opening the door to various.... 

....invasive shrubs, such as this elder, which, in their turn, offer refuge to birds like wood pigeons. However, the most common shrub taking hold in Inverness is....

....buddleia, which seems to be able to survive in the very smallest of cracks.

Looking at this from a positive angle, perhaps Inverness should try selling itself in future as a 'garden city'.

Old Friends

We drove out to Littleferry this morning for a walk in the pine plantations around the shores of Loch Fleet with their views across the loch to the hills of Sutherland, mainly, after the recent period of wet weather, to see if....

...the fungi were in bloom. They were, not with anything excitingly new but with several old friends such as this rather faded orange-peel fungus....

....a yellow stag's horn and....

....these puffballs. We also found....

....four small slime moulds on a rotten log - you can almost see them on the move.

A brisk westerly was blowing across the mouth of Loch Fleet where something like a hundred oystercatchers were keeping the heads down on the shingle bar with, near them, thirty or so ringed plovers. Otherwise, the place was deserted, the only other humans being a few dog-walkers.