Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, 22/10/16

A recording outing to Blackford Hill / Hermitage of Braid had the usual handful of new species to the mass of species you come across regularly. This Grimmia lisae had to be taken home to be confirmed while the Syntrichia intermedia was also nice. Even nicer was Syntrichia papillosa which I was too full of lunch to remember to photograph apparently.

Grimmia lisae - confirmed by leaf section

Syntrichia intermedia

Carlingnose quest

For the past couple of days been recording Carlingnose Point nature reserve for brief spells (lunchtime). Could be fun to work over the area one 10m square at a time. Not that big a reserve so I could build up a decent picture of what's there by nibbling away at it. Experimenting with recording at a finer granularity than normal. As you would expect, some species will feature in every 10m square. Hypnum cupressiforme is winning the race so far, along with Kindbergia praelonga. Wherever there are rocks there is also Grimmia, but only pulvinata (so far?). My polygon needs some adjustment to resemble the reserve boundaries more closely too.

I might try to do this with Cullalor LNR, but that's a much bigger challenge because of its size. Would be an interesting project though.

Grimmia and friend (Orthotrichum?)

G.pulvinata map so far

Hypnum cupressiforme

Kindbergia (Eurhynchium) praelonga(um)

Grimmias of the world

A remarkable site on the Grimmias: link

Probably more about grimmias than most people would ever dream of knowing