Light pollutes the world

I'm back on MetaFilter - I furloughed myself for the month of August  after it all got a little too intense. One of the Ozzie contributors posted a piece about how streetlights force birds to sing longer than they are designed for.

My pal Rene lives in a mill building on the River Barrow (Ireland's second longest river). The mill, long defunct, used to draw water from a modest tributary which could be crossed by a bridge where it debouched into the larger river. In the olde days eels Anguilla anguilla ran, even across the fields, on moonless nights. For a few years, Rene had a pet eel about the premises. Some years ago, the County decided to pop a street-light on the bridge to stop people pitching in while returning home from the pub. It was cheaper than making a balustrade on both sides of the bridge. 

The once abundant eels promptly stopped running up the tributary. It has been illegal to catch them since 2007. But nobody can prevent the relentless spread of street-lights. Oops, I see I have had my rant about this in 2019. But we can surely reflect again on the unintended consequences of serving the convenience and comfort of humanity while everyone and everything else just has to get out of the way.  Wot are we like?

Carlow fence ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪ ! is a local sight. So much granite in the county, and so much time in the old days. Long square-sectioned chunks of granite were split from mighty granite boulders to fashion as lintels for houses like ours. It was trendy, and efficient, to cut a v-notch in the top of each square pier and join each pier with a horizontal lintel turned 45°. They are kinda useless: never high enough to prevent stock passing over and, at knee-height, a trip-and-fall hazard for [drunken?] walkers.