BY HILL AND SHORE
Angus Martin
While climbing the steep, eastern side of the Ben Gullion trail on Sunday afternoon, 20 July, I saw a large, unusual insect fly towards me from the trees. If I hadn’t guessed what it was - an inch-and-a-half long female horntail, sawfly or WOODWASP Urocerus gigas - I’d have quaked a bit because it’s quite fearsome-looking. The first feature I noticed was its large fawn-coloured antennae; the second, a long rear protuberance which looks like a big sting. It isn’t that, however - it’s an ovipositor, for boring into conifers to lay eggs. She demonstrated not the slightest interest in me and flew by.
I seldom see WHITE HEATHER on my walks, but a clump - the biggest George or I had ever seen - appeared near the Hawk’s Peak on Ben Gullion towards the end of July. The plants which make up the entire mass are mature, to say the least, and since we’d never before noticed a concentration of white flowers there, the obvious conclusion is that existing plants have somehow mutated. No book I have consulted has so far explained the phenomenon. Can any reader advise?
Walking to Peninver on 31 July, my daughter Bella and I came on a RABBIT with myxomatosis on the footpath at Trench Point. Blind and swollen about the head, the pathetic creature was oblivious to our presence and continued nibbling feebly at grass. Other sightings and reports followed, and on 24 October the Herald published a full-page report on the upsurge in the disease nationally.
Despite weekly searches, by mid-September no horse MUSHROOMS had been found, just a few shaggy inkcaps (which I don’t eat, anyway) and only one field mushroom, broken. In the Herald of 11 September, I noticed a small item headed, ‘Heatwave takes toll on mushrooms’. I quote the entire piece: ‘GRENOBLE. France’s withering heatwave and drought this summer are also wreaking havoc underground. Mushroom pickers say they’re coming out of the woods empty-handed. Many mushroom festivals scheduled for September have been cancelled.’ Certainly we in Kintyre suffered neither heatwave nor drought, but it was a very dry year and, even before reading that piece, I’d begun to suspect that the vital missing element in bringing on the horse mushrooms, at any rate, was water. George McSporran and his brother John found some in late September and early October, but I had no luck.
I had been monitoring ‘my’ customary horse mushroom sites around Knock Scalbert and, during August, George and I had a few forays to our old mushroom grounds at Auchenhoan. On impulse, on the evening of the 18th - still and hazy and heavy with that peculiar atmosphere evocative of other such evenings and companions of old - we cut down to the First Waters in order to walk the shore to the Second Waters. We weren’t long on the shore when George spotted a pair of OTTERS. We watched them for a good ten minutes as they swam to and from a narrow offshore reef, communicating with their distinctive thin piping call. One of them dived and caught something, which in the dusk we couldn’t make out, and took it to the reef to eat.
Fired with enthusiasm by this sighting, we returned to the Learside on the 22nd, parked George’s car in Sweetie Bella’s Quarry, and walked to the Second Waters to complete the outing in a northerly direction. We didn’t see the otters again, but having gained the shore at the Second Waters found the sea boiling with small fish - sandeels or sile (herring fry) - on which a shoal of lythe (pollack) was eagerly feeding. The lythe were constantly flipping out the water in their energetic pursuit and George reckoned they were up to two pounds in weight.
At the start of my summer holiday, on 8 August, George and I walked around the Ben Gullion trail. Since it was a blazing hot day, we had no inclination to go any higher. Sightings included gold-ringed dragonflies Cordulegaster boltonii, common blue damselflies Enallagma Cyathigerum, a small copper butterfly Lycaena phlaeas and primates Homo sapiens. Of these, the latter were the least pleasing. They appeared, by motor vehicle, via the Knockbay track, in a group comprising one large male and several smaller males. We observed them immerse themselves in the reservoir, then engage in playful activity using large sheets of white polystyrene, brought there for the purpose. After a few hours, they tired and departed; but the polystyrene remains, disintegrated into thousands of pieces and blown all over the dam, around the shores and down into the valley. In a list of Inventions That Should Never Have Happened, I’d place polystyrene very close to the top.
On 16 September, I had an interesting letter from George John Stewart, artist, in which he described a NOCTURNAL RAINBOW: ‘ ... The moon was bright a week ago, and there was a light smirr in the air. At about 11 pm I was returning from a walk along the shore at Kildalloig with our small Jack Russell ‘Paddy’ and ‘Bill’ the cat, when I noticed a curved shaft of light reaching out of Davaar. The closer I studied this oddity, the more I realised that it was in fact a complete rainbow arch stretching from the island to Kildalloig Farm (or so it appeared). Colours were visible, but each was infused with a silvery texture which was quite enchanting.’ This was certainly a novel phenomenon to me and I enquired among friends, fishermen included, without success ... and then George McSporran and I saw one, albeit a poorer specimen! We were returning from our Friday night Ben Gullion walk on 3 October and stopped just by the ‘Paddling Pool’ at about 9 pm. George was looking into the north and noticed a peculiar beam which we both thought might be a distorted car headlight from the Carradale road. Then we realised that we were looking at an arch of light which we could follow visually from Trench Point to the harbour. There was merely a suggestion of colour to it and the entire manifestation faded after about ten minutes. There was, at the time, a bright half-moon rising invisibly behind Ben Gullion and chilly rain-showers from the north-west.
More next time
No 55 Spring 2004
Wee Drams E-mails, comments, queries and enlightenment from around the world
Page 2: Oatfield House - An Exchange of Emails
Page 3: Interesting Articles from the MOD (with permission)
Page 4: It Is a Small World After All
Page 5: The Italian Community in Campbeltown - A Memoir
Page 6: Memories of Macharioch
Page 7: By Hill and Shore - Angus Martin