In the wrong place

The family were downhome over Easter and Dau.II took a proprietorial walk through the fields. She reported that the top corner of one of those fields was carpetted with a particular sort of dicot sprout with 2 elongated seed-leaves and a robust reddish stalk. WTF? she enquired. I investigated and admitted that I'd never noted such a phenomenon before. But I formed a hypothesis that the pair of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus in the ditch just to the South must have had a mighty year for seed set, as had several sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa down in the adjacent woodland. And sho'nuff Dr Google confirmed that sycamore seedlings looked just like that.

That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.

It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]

But, as I say, I've never seen so many sycamore sprouts and who knows of what digestive heroics our mixed bag of sheep are capable. The family had buggered off to the Gaeltacht within hours of alerting me to the sycamore nursery; I R retire; I finished my book; I chopped wood and hauled water; . . . dum de dum . . .; I went across the lane to pluck sycamore as prophylaxis against an unlikely but devastating event. At 71¾, I am no longer limber as a 7 y.o., so I can't pluck at a sustainable rate for a working day. The weather  was Irish-changeable sunny with showers and my shop-steward won't allow me to get rained on while bent double. After a few sessions over three days, I had a bucketful of sycamores untimely ripped from mother earth. How many?

Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.

In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with  the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF  twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food.  They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working.  Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.