Ireland: A Bit of Killarney

Our base for our first two nights in the southwest was Killarney in County Kerry, famous for its beautiful lakeside scenery.  From here we visited such non-natural-history venues as the English Market in Cork (well worth a visit, by the way), and began our exploration of the Ring of Kerry, the subject of my next posting.  The Killarney countryside, though, is so lovely that it deserves a brief post of its own.

Killarney features the highest peaks in Ireland, the McGillycuddy's Reeks, though at 1000 metres they hardly rival the Himalayas.  More famous are the lakes that lie at the mountains' base, and the wooded landscape that surrounds them (much of it protected as part of the Killarney National Park).

The view from this particular spot won the particular approval of Queen Victoria's ladies in waiting back in 1861 – hence the name, though it seems perfectly appropriate for Eileen as well.

 Here is what the ladies were looking at.

In early spring there are a few flowers about to add decorative detail, including the prickly, unloved but nonetheless beautiful Gorse (Ulex europaeus).

These are the flowers of a sort of raspberry, a plant referred to in Britain and Ireland as a bramble (Rubus sp.). Telling the various brambles apart requires, I'm afraid, more skill than I can muster.

These bright green leaves spreading from a muddy lake edge are certainly a sign of early spring, but they shouldn't really be in Ireland. This is American Skunk-Cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), an introduced plant, probably derived from garden escapees. Of course, in North America seeing an alien European plant is nothing new – most of our roadside wildflowers would qualify – but the reverse is far less common.

Irish attitudes towards one of the island's most common mammals, the Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) would seem to be, at best, ambivalent.  Foxes benefit agriculture by keeping down the numbers of rabbits and rodents, but chicken farmers don't like them and neither do sheep ranchers (though as far as sheep are concerned foxes are more likely to be scavengers and active hunters, even for young lambs). The owner of this particular gateway, alas, did not appear to approve of them.

Ireland: To the Far Southwest

Only a few weeks after our return from South-East Asia, Eileen and I were off again - this time, for a Joint Meeting of the Animals and Plants Committees of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Dublin, Ireland.  This was our first visit to the Emerald Isle, so Eileen and I booked off two weeks after the meeting for what turned out to be a circuit of the entire island.  Late March and early April in Ireland are far from a guarantee of good weather, but we were quite lucky, at least most of the time.  We began our trip, on March 27, 2012, with a drive to the most scenically famous part of the island, the peninsulas that jut out into the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland's extreme southwestern corner.

 It can be hard, in Ireland, to separate natural history from prehistory.   The signs of early human settlement, even at this extreme end of Europe, are many.   We got our first taste of Ireland's distant past at the Drombeg Stone Circle, a roughly 3,000-year-old monument near the south coast in County Cork. Though this is reportedly one of the most frequently visited bronze age sites in Ireland, this early in the season we had the place pretty much to ourselves.

Along with the lovely scenery and the seventeen sandstone pillars that make up the circle itself, we found scattered signs of early spring – in particular, clumps of blooming Primrose (Primula vulgaris).

Further along, on the coast itself, we visited the Altar Wedge Tomb, a much older structure than the stone circle - perhaps four or five thousand years old.

Here. too, were spring flowers, including Common Dog-Violet (Viola riviniana).

Though I wasn't carrying my telephoto gear on this trip, I was able to get close enough to this Stonechat (Saxicola torquata) for a reasonable photo.

This was our first (of many) chances to explore the rocky edge of the sea, where we could look out to the peaks of the Mizen Peninsula, the most southerly of the three southwestern peninsulas...

...or admire the rocks covered with clumps of yellow lichen and dotted with spring flowers growing from cracks in the stones.  The pink flowers here are Thrift (Ameria maritima).

Most prominent among the lichens were the patches of Yellow Scales (Xanthoria parietina). Lichens are symbiotic combinations of a fungus and an alga, and the bright yellow colour of this one is produced by the outer coating of fungal thalli protecting the algae beneath.

Eileen was content to hang back a bit as I scrambled down to the shore to look for sea life.

Here I found Common Limpets (Patella vulgata) clinging to the rocks along the tideline…

…and fronds of Oarweed (Laminaria digitata), one of the subtidal giant kelps, stretching out beneath the water's surface.

We pressed on further into the southwest, finally reaching as far as you can go in a car: Mizen Head, Ireland's most southwesterly point.

We admired the spectacular cliffs, and were blown about by the spectacular winds.

From Mizen Head we turned back eastward, passing on our way the little town of Rosscarbery.  Here we passed a coastal estuary dotted with a few Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) and an immense brown mass of shorebirds.  Naturally I called a halt.

The birds proved to be a wintering flock of Greater Golden Plovers (Pluvialis apricaria), perhaps soon to depart for their breeding grounds.  Unlike the Pacific Golden Plovers (Pluvialis fulva) I see in Borneo, they may not have far to go; there are breeding populations in the highlands of both Great Britain and Ireland.

The Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) is a recent colonist in Ireland.  It first started breeding here only in 1997, but can now be found around much of the coast.  County Cork is its Irish stronghold.  Could the Irish birds be beneficiaries of global warming?

Singapore: Lion City Dragons

Singapore's Macritchie Reservoir is a great place to get on close terms with an array of damselflies and dragonflies.  Our walk around the boardwalk on March 4, 2012, described in my last posting, turned up so many that I have had to give them an entry of their own.  I'll start with a dragonfly I spotted just as we started our tour, one I had not seen before (and have never come across since).  It is Rhyothemis obsolescens, referred to among Singapore dragonfly-watchers as the Bronze Flutterer.

Odonate fanciers in Singapore, like butterfly-watchers, now have the advantage of an excellent guide: A Photographic Guide to the Dragonflies of Singapore by Tang Hung Bun, Wang Luan Keng, and Matti Hämäläinen.  I have found it very helpful, both in Singapore and in Malaysia.  Mind you, identification can still be tricky, especially with the damselflies.  As far as I can tell, this is a Blue Sprite (Pseudagrion microcephalum), a common Singapore species. The trouble is that there is another damselfly that looks almost exactly like it.

This, I think, is the other species, the Look-alike Sprite (Pseudagrion australasiae).  See the difference? No? I'm not surprised. Yes, there is a very slight difference in the intensity of the blue coloration, and that does match the photographs in the guide, but the clinching differences appear to be the width of the black band between the eighth and ninth abdominal segments (in other words, the thin black line crossing the large blue blotch at the end of the abdomen) and the length of the superior appendages, the two little prongs you can see sticking out the back of the tenth abdominal segment. In the Blue Sprite the black band is slightly wider, and the superior appendages are as long as the rest of the segment they are mounted on rather than somewhat shorter. If you feel confident that I have identified these species correctly (or incorrectly) then you undoubtedly know more about them than I do!

I think these are australasiae, too.  I say I think they are.

Now this one is a lot easier. It's a Crenulated Spreadwing (Lestes praemorsus decipiens), a member of the spreadwing family (Lestidae) and surely one of the few damselflies decorated with polka dots.  Like other spreadwings, it poses with its wings open rather than folded over the back as do most other damselflies.  

It's a particularly handsome and unusual-looking little creature, too (The authors of the dragonfly guide feature it prominently on their title page).  "Crenulated", by the way, means "having a margin with small rounded teeth".  It's usually used by botanists to describe certain types of leaves. Why it's been applied to this particular insect I haven't the faintest idea.

On to dragonflies.  We'll start with the large and striking Common Flangetail (Ictinogomphus decoratus), the commonest and easiest-to-find member of the goggle-eyed family Gomphidae in both Singapore and Malaysia.  

Of the dragonflies we found perched on the tips of emergent plants around the reservoir edge, it was the largest (and one of the most striking).

As usual, all of the other dragonflies here are members of the Libellulidae.  Neurothemis dragonflies are almost unavoidable in open country, as long a there is even a little water about.  These are males of Neurothemis fluctuans, known in Singapore as the Common Parasol.

One of the easier dragonflies to identify at Macritchie is the Sapphire Flutterer (Rhyothemis triangularis).    It is supposed to be an uncommon species in Singapore, and this was my first chance to get reasonably close to one.

It is particularly attractive when the light is right, and the dark patches in the wings are revealed to be an iridescent bluish-purple.

One of the most helpful features of the Singapore dragonfly guide is a section helping to distinguish between a number of very similar dragonflies with either red or blue bodies. With its assistance I was able to sort out several of the red-bodied ones, starting with the common Spine-tufted Skimmer (Orthetrum chrysis). In this case notice the grey eyes, red face and dark brown thorax; this is also one of the larger of the red dragonflies in Singapore.

A somewhat similar pattern but a very different body-shape marks this out as a Variable Sentinel (Orchithemis pulcherrima), probably a young male. This species also comes in a dark form, one that I had seen a couple of months earlier in the Panti Forest of West Malaysia.

The two black spots near the end of the abdomen identify this as a Scarlet Basker (Urothemis signata insignata).  Also notice the red eyes and wing veins. The top photo shows an individual in the so-called "obelisk position".

Here is a quite similar dragonfly, also in an obelisk pose.  This one has even more red-veining on the wings, though, and its abdomen is not so much red as a violent pink.  This is a young male Crimson Dropwing (Trithemis aurora).

In adult males the abdomen is fully pink, making it the most psychedelic-looking of Singapore dragons.

At the opposite end of the brilliance scale is this insect, perched flat against the trunk of a tree at the far end of the reservoir and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.  Most libellulids don't perch like this, but this proved to be one anyway: a female Tyriobapta torrida, appropriately known in Singapore as the Treehugger.  This is a swamp forest dragonfly, quite unlike the open-country species we had seen up till now (it is, for example, almost always to be found around the Frog Pond in Kubah National Park in Sarawak). I was glad to see it; after all, I'm a bit of a treehugger myself!