NATURE: Meet Carra’s crafty orchids

This is, you will agree, a most wonderful corner.
A great sheet of limestone shelves up from the water’s edge, or down into the lake basin, depending on which way we look at it.
Beneath and beyond the reach of wind-driven waves, the floor of Carra is a deep and richly alkaline, centuries-long accumulation of soft and powdery limestone dust. In the sun it glows golden at times, green at others, or nearly turquoise under a big wind in the bright sun of noonday. Given its customary covering of cloud it might be grey; but just wait for that shaft of light to break through the overcast and set the waves ablaze in watercolour flame!
Sunset is the time to be here, or sunrise for those who like solitude. Yet we are never alone, for here come deer, not to drink their fill but to taste sweet, clear water as clean as can be found, perhaps in all of this land.
The deer are non-native fallow (how we would love to see red!). Left to themselves they breed exponentially, until the woods about Carra’s edge must spill them into farmers fields and spread them ’cross the hill. On their way they eat, for eat they must, and wild flowers are very much on the menu. While the woodland edge is still filled with colour we wonder what plants might be there were the deer not.
On the limestone pavement we found orchids, including the last of the early purple orchids and the first of the marsh helleborines, these latter flowers quite extraordinary in their beauty. They are unusual, too, in the fact that many individual flowering stems can be thrown up from one sprawling rhizome, as the root of the plant is known. These tall and slender stems sport blooms of cream and custard topped with raspberry tinted, dark chocolate. They look good enough to eat, and if you are a fallow deer they really are too good to miss.
In places where the deer abound, many orchids are failing, but as these fade under heavy grazing so they thrive elsewhere. At least we hope they do.
Closer to home, in an area where the deer are few, a dozen fly orchids sport their imitation insect flowers in what to me remains a mystery. Male specimens of certain species of solitary digger wasp that go by the Latin name Gogorytes (otherwise Gorytes), find themselves attracted to the flowers of fly orchid, thinking these are sexually receptive females of their own kind.
The wasp, lured by pheromone-like scent and the deceptively alluring shape of the flower, homes in on his petalled bride-to-be. Imagine his surprise when his attempts to mate are thwarted! Away he goes, speckled with pollen, to find another equally attractive but similarly disappointing inamorata, and there he does his work, leaving his unintentional gift of life-giving grains and getting nothing in return.
Yet why he works so hard I do not know, for his fly orchid looks nothing like the female of his kind. We can only assume he is rather short sighted, and that when it comes to love he relies more on his nose than he does on his eyes.
As is the case with all of the orchid family, our fly orchid only succeeds in the presence of specialised fungi, with which a mycorrhizal association is formed. This enables nutrient exchange between the fungi and the host plant. Plant photosynthesis helps to feed the fungus, which in turn breaks down organic (and sometimes inorganic) matter into simple forms that can be absorbed by plant roots.
For this reason, orchids removed from their natural environment by collectors quickly die when their partner fungus doesn’t like its new situation. Also, given the absolute dependence of native orchids on fungi, we quickly grasp the importance of keeping fungicide out of the natural environment.
In their own season, many types of fungi manifest themselves here, at first in a bloom of mycelium and then, when conditions are right, as the fruiting bodies we know as mushrooms. Already, reports are coming from around the country of an unseasonably early edible harvest.
Nobody can be certain why this is the case, but there is likely a link between last month being the warmest May on record and the appearance of temperature-dependent fungi.
There is so much to learn. For now, though, it is enough to merely be, with enough to just see, on this simple shelving rock with its few scattered flowers and those coloured waves beyond.

Michael Kingdon, a naturalist and keen fisherman, lives on the shores of Mayo’s Lough Carra, the best example of a shallow marl lake in western Europe, and therefore an SAC of enormous ecological and conservation importance.