A new species of springtail seen for the first time, magnificent and unique fungi, plus a lesson in camouflage from a wolf spider – these are some of the finds in the lens of Alan Watson Featherstone. By Alan Watson Featherstone Although we’re moving into the more dormant time of year in terms of the biodiversity out on the Hinterland, there’s actually still quite a lot to be seen there. As I write this, we’re in the middle of the fungi season just now, and it appears to be a particularly abundant year for them. They’re also a little later than usual in showing themselves this year, and perhaps both those phenomena are a result of the warmer than usual summer that we had, with relatively high temperatures continuing into early November – it was only in the second half of the month that we had the first frost of the season. As a result of surveys in previous years we have a total of 233 species of fungi recorded on the Hinterland so far, but there are undoubtedly many more still to be found. I added one to the list a couple of weeks ago when I found some orange cup-like fungi in the dune heath area of our site. They turned out to be (Neottiella rutilans), a species that hadn’t been seen here before. The fungi were quite small, but very beautiful and rich in their colour – the species has no common name. Three days later I made quite a significant discovery when I was looking at a fallen piece of old bark from a pine tree. My eye was drawn to it because there was a white fungus on the bark, but unfortunately it had no fruiting bodies visible on it, so it was not possible to make an identification of it. However, as I looked at it I noticed a tiny springtail crawling across the fungus so I photographed that. I was later able to identify it as a species called Willowsia nigromaculata (there’s no common name for it either), for which we have no previous records on the Hinterland. Significantly, this appears to be the first record for the species north of Perth in Scotland. One of our special ‘Star Species’ on the site is the sandy earthtongue fungus (Sabuloglossum arenarium), which is known from only two sites in Scotland – Findhorn and one other – and from a small group of records on the south coast of England. It appears to be a very good year for the species here, as there are more examples fruiting at the moment than I’ve seen in previous years. On that same day in early November I made another interesting observation while I was in the area where a lot of the sandy earthtongue fungi occur. A slight movement caught my eye, and when I looked closely I realised there was a spider there, perfectly camouflaged on the sand.