The Leaper

Like a lot of people, I like a bit of salmon: fresh, smoked, tinned, en croute, in chowder. But I would survive if I never got to eat another morsel. Salmon is served at weddings or as stamp-sized canapés and has the whiff of de lox luxe. Back in the day, salmon was so abundant that indentures for London apprenticeships would limit the amount of salmon the poor young chaps would be obliged to eat in the Summer.  The transition from feast to famine is explored in Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky - my latest audiobook.

A large part of my post-graduate education was the formal study of ecology: the complex tangle of interactions and inter-dependencies in the living world. We talk about food-webs nowadays rather than one-dimensional food chains because, on occasion, top predators are partial to a locust or two, or even a bit of grass. But Kurlansky indicates how little I know about what makes the world pulse or what causes one species to drift off-stage . . . forever. By extension, to the nearest whole number, even professional ecologists know <nothing> about the role played by a given species; let alone what other species impact on its life.

Take logging. Forests served a vital role in the life-cycle of salmon: 

• Their roots retained the soil when it rained in winter, minimizing the fine silt that entered the salmon-run rivers. No silt meant that the up-stream gravel beds were more easily exposed for the female salmon to prepare the redd in which to lay eggs. The fertilised eggs had to sink into the interstices of the gravel or be dinner for birds, frogs, caddis-fly larvae and other fish.
• Fallen trees created pools where salmon could pause for a breather in their foodless fight upstream to spawn
• The trees shaded to river from the beat of Spring sunshine and kept temperatures low. More oxygen dissolves in cold water to give the salmon muscles the oomph to carry on.
• The forest supported a wide variety of insects, the eggs and larvae on which the young hatchlings start to feed to fuel their journey back to the sea 

When the trees are felled out and sent down stream:

• The roots lose hold on the banks, so the river straightens out and runs faster; which is good for fluming the logs downstream. Nevertheless the logs are felled in Winter and typically stockpiled inland until snow-melt gives the water depth and impetus to carry the harvest down stream to the sawmills. Which is just the time the poor salmon are fighting upstream against the traffic. And did I mention sawmillsdust? A highly organic waste-product which is dumped in the river where bacterial degradation sucks all the oxygen out of the river.
• You are likely one of the 40 million people who have bought into the NatGeog wolves change watercourses just-so-story
• Take it with a pinch or three of salt [debunkarama]
• But you get the idea. The great salmon rivers (Columbia, Fraser, Snake) of the Pacific Northwest have been straighten and dredged to facilitate commerce in ships - Lewiston, Idaho is a seaport 500km from salt-water!
• No trees; no shade. No trees; different insects. No trees; no topsoil. It takes a long time to wash the silt down-stream to expose the river gravels again.

Tree-huggers, like you and me might have an unthinking affection for clean blue hydro-power. So does FAANG, they site their server-farms right next door. Once you start using electricity it's hard to cry hold enough. More demand requires more damn dams. For more than 100 years, planning permission for new dams has been contingent on allowing migrating fish to by-pass the obstruction. Part of the budget accordingly went towards incorporating fish-ladders but neither the power-company nor the industries and services there-dependent, in their rapacious souls, gave two toot-toots about salmon. Fish & Wildlife Services, let alone distant [first-nations] fisher-folk had a very small voice and short pockets compared to Big Power.

I could go on [and on]. I could fill in the details. But this map review is not the territory. Ya have to read this book, even if you're not a piscatarian. It's not fun but we really need to reset our base-lines. In Ireland Salmon is Salmo salar [the salmon that leaps] but there's many more species in the Family: broadly Salmo in the Atlantic, Onchorhyncus in the Pacific. Here's a list, not least because the common names are so evocative of A River Runs Through it.

Oncorhynchus apache Arizona trout

Oncorhynchus chrysogaster Golden trout

Oncorhynchus gilae Gila trout

Oncorhynchus kawamurae Kunimasu

Oncorhynchus masou Masu

Oncorhynchus mykiss Rainbow trout

Oncorhynchus tschawytscha King, Chinook

Oncorhynchus nerka Sockeye

Oncorhynchus kisutch Coho

Oncorhynchus keta Chum

Oncorhynchus gorbuscha Pink, humpback

Oncorhynchus clarki Cutthroat

In the Atlantic, it's way more complex with 50-60 recognised Salmo species mostly trout: Salmon salar, of which we feast, and Salmo trutta with brown trout, lake trout and sea trout as sub-species. All delicious, all at risk. 

Prev: Green corrie - anadromous - Bradán an Eolais - Ecocide - Russianside - Smoked - Lox - 

Wot a day's work looks like

 Someone with a proper camera located at the same position could, by subtractive technology, overlay and compare these two photos to show the work done on Weds 23rd. But the Department of Ag's satellite will have perked up and reported a change in the landscape last week.  Despite the hill-face being steepest in this view the area cut of ferns looks foreshortened here: drone or satellite would be better.

Prev. Pic tok tea tim Tue 021 Sep 021 [recording Monday's work]:

Pic tok mor nin Thu 023 Sep 021 [recording Wednesday's work]

It's not every day that you can see a clear result from that day's labour.

Sun End Sep

beg

• Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling - The Water
• Rohin meets Sabine
• Steve Mould beats Matt Parker to 1 millions subs
• Map men nerd it for English counties
• Anne Saxelby on cheese: cutting and pairing [40 mins, mind]
• Caitlyn Greene's short The Diamond searching for meaning in the dirt
• Granite splits
• Cutting? Ice . . . by community.
• Tribs to Clive Sinclair, Z80, ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum
• Chris Sharma climbs from the sea

Am I the Oilhole?

Unless you've been living under an Internet stone since June 2013, you will be aware of the AITA sub-reddit and/or AITA twitter feed: "A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you".

Soooo, I was up the hill again with the neighbours, cutting the [dying] ferns Pteridium aquilinum to improve the quality of grazing on our commonage. I was up there on my ownio in mid-August mapping the cuttable territory. Since then, I have put in five days of physical scything labour with a good bit of phatic chit-chat on the side. As an in-blow with the wrong accent and lily-white hands, it's important to show that, while I cannot harrow a field or shear a sheep, I can keep up my end as a labourer.  My scythe is by far the best tool for the job . . . so long as the rocks and woody heather [Erica cinerea Bell Heather Fraoch Cloigíneach; Erica tetralix Cross-leaved Heath Fraoch Naoscaí; Calluna vulgaris Ling Fraoch Mór] are not too plentiful. The Lads turn up with a variety of slashers and bill-hooks which are real heavy-duty over-kill for the task . . . except that those tools can take numerous dings from hidden stones. A boulder as big as a suitcase can be completely invisible behind 15cm of bracken.

You may not be able to see any difference [L] between the 4m wide strip I've laid low and the untouched still standing ferns on either side. This is because a) cut ferns don't lie flat like grass or oats b) it's late and the bracken is turning brown anyway; making the whole exercise a bit of a futility closet. Should be done in June, while the growing stems are still depleting the underground reserves and before the plant starts replenishing supplies through photosynthesis. And avoid bracken in July when the spores are present as brown scabs on the underside of the leaves! Those spores are carcinogenic.

Getting paid by the day means breaks in the work for re-fuelling with tea and sangers and farmerly chat about the GAA, the weather and prices at the mart. Some of this is more interesting, some less; and I now have a better idea of who married whom before I was born and how that attached certain fields to still living descendants.  During one lull in the conversation, the community wag offered "I guess this is where we gossip about the neighbours . . . ooops, no, they're all here".

The talk became animated when it turned to the price of agri-Diesel. This product retails for about half the price of regular diesel and is dyed green to stop farmers filling up the Mercs with the stuff. As the world knows, the price of oil is creeping up [again] and farmers get through a lot of diesel. They are also notorious for driving a hard bargain to determine what the market will bear for hoggets and hay-bales.

Farmer calls regular diesel supplier and is told that the price has gone up to 80c/lt. Orders a load but then >!thought!< calls rival supplier down the road and is quoted 76c/lt. Goes back to original supplier, retails this information and threatens to cancel the order . . . boss comes on phone and says, rather than lose a valued customer, they will sell at 76c. Delivery fulfilled 0800hrs the following day. Farmer "Harrumph, what price loyalty, hey? Sure these oil-men are just codding us all." Listening to this, I wondered whether I should be asking for discounts like my neighbours. 

But a restless night and some dreams later, I concluded that loyalty is a double-bed. If you believe that all your suppliers and servicers are out to gouge you to the extent you no longer trust them to be offering a fair-price then that leaves you in a rather uncomfortable bivvy-bag on Isolation Island. And if Jerry the Oil [who really pushed the tanker out when we were snow-benighted in March 2018] is forced to shave his margins to the bone, maybe he'll have to let go the really nice woman who answers the phone. Is that really what you want? Is 5% = €40 worth that much to you?

A good thrashing

Sorry to disappoint if the title suggested an insight into the virtues of my very expensive education. I first went to [this] school in 1959: I was hit, with a stick, by an adult at the various schools I attended up until I got the vote and left school in the same Summer. But the tide was going out for such assaults in my part of the education system in England, so it really didn't happen much. YMMV [James O'Brien's did] , and I'm sorry / outraged about that.

Today's post today is about cutting ferns / bracken Pteridium aquilinum on our hill [above]. It was my task a month ago to map out the territory to be cut in 2021. The 20 acre = 8 hectare treatment section had been draw with a ruler on a satellite map by an ecologist who'd spent precisely 3 half-days on our hill in his life. Our ecologist is a personable fit young bloke, competent at his mètier, but his knowledge of our hill is strategic rather than tactical. The 200m x 400m rectangle included a) dense forests of head-high ferns [dark-green above] b) rough pasture where grass, gorse, heather and fraocháns are at least holding their own against the invasive [brown / spackled above] c) blank bouldery scree where neither sheep, nor folk, nor ferns can cop a reliable toe-hold [grey above].  That photo was taken from the valley on Tuesday afternoon after The Lads had been cut, cut, cuttin' along on Saturday and Monday. I was amazed at how clear was the evidence of clearing that I stopped on my way back from a trip to town and took the picture. I appreciate that it will be much less clear to you, dear reader, WTF I'm talking about, so zoooom:

Any fule can see the trees to the left of the scene. The line to their right (green below, not green above) marks the mountain wall which separates the commonage from privately owned fields. What thrilled me was the straight green line running parallel to and above the mountain boundary: both clearly the work of human hands. Begodde, I done that! With a bit of help from the neighbours, d'ac.

But having been the boots on the ground as well as the photographer, I can add some detail to this broad-brush.  My scythe is the tool of choice for thrashin' fields of bracken, especially if the ground is even and not too steep. It is, contrariwise, a liability if the footing is uncertain and/or the target is sparse and rocks abound. Under those circumstances a sickle, a deftly handled bill-hook, or even shears are better. Our gaffer, accordingly, sent me off a bit from the main party to scythe away all Bobby-no-pals. In contrast to a slasher or bill, scythes are definitely right-handed, they don't have a reverse gear but cut from right to left. Ideally, this leaves a windrow on the leftside of the scyther. The process only works if you start on the left edge of the field and work right in rows, so that the spoil falls away from the working face. Just before knocking off on Monday, I noted a white rock further up the hill and elected to cut a bight / bite out of the fern-forest to delineate a couple of separate squares for The Lads to work on the next labour-day. I actually laid down 2x 2m windrows before the works whistle blew and we all trudged home for tea and medals scones. Very satisfying to see the result of concentrated work. Pity the task will never be repeated here; because fern-thrashing works . . . but only if it is persistently executed for several consecutive years and in late June.

Mrs Orwell

I devoured George Orwell [L,L] when I was acquiring my very expensive education. This wasn't particularly subversive in the late 1960s because Orwell was nearly 20 years dead and his late public successes Animal Farm [two legs bad, four legs goat L] and 1984 were assigned reading in British schools. Animal Farm was allegory light, and was read as a children's story like, say, Charlotte's Web - another book in which a pig is the star. As a devastating indictment of corruption by totalitarian power, the cartoon format insulated the reader from looking critically at, say, the government of Britain. The success of the Cold War, which got in the pores of the first half of my life, was that it othered the Soviets and diverted our attention to Them and allowed us to be smug about Democracy. With hindsight, it looks like the welfare state - NHS, council houses, the dole, nationalized industry - was a sop to the under-class to prevent a revolution such as had changed the political landscape in the Soviet Union and the PRC. The fall of the Berlin Wall and dismantling of the Iron Curtain was co-incident with the ending of mainstream socialism in these islands: council houses were sold off to the current incumbents, industries were privatized, and inequality became far more extreme.

The Orwell books which I read more than once were Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London. From the Paris section I took on board the belief that plongeur was an heroic métier: I think it helped shape me as an infrastructure guy rather than a centre-forward. I've just finished Orwell's Nose a pathological biography by John Sutherland, which The Beloved snagged for me from Wexford County Library Service. 

The conceit is that Orwell was hyperosmic - reeling from the smells of the lower classes [the poor bugger was a scholarship boy at Eton] - the drains, the boiled cabbage, the oxters - while being patriarchally indifferent to his own contributions to the personal odourscape. Sutherland also indicts him for writing brutal lightly fictionalised portraits of people who went out of their way to support him: his parents, his younger sister, his teachers and most of his literary patrons. We also learn that Orwell was partial to outdoor bonking. The women of his circle applied NSIT not safe in taxis to Arthur Koestler; Orwell was more NSIH not safe in heathland.

The two women who did the most thankless skivvying for Le Grand Auteur were his sister Avril Blair and his first wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy [R from passport photo]. Eileen gave up her almost completed Master's in Psychology at UCL to become Mrs George Orwell and facilitated his fantasies about running an honest yeoman small-holding by doing all the mucking out and heavy lifting. Pausing only to bring Himself a cup of tea as he pounded away on his typewriter. She was afar better typist than him and made the fair copies of his works which were sent to publishers. Sutherland: "Heretical to say so but, from the small samples one has, Eileen often strikes one as the more vivacious writer of the two." She was no mere typist; at least an Oxford trained copy-editor who helped make the prose more lucid. For example, she midwifed The Road to Wigan Pier when Orwell ran off to fight in Spain. And she was a much better socialist than her husband. In many Orwell biographies Eileen shimmers, almost invisible, in the background doing the chores. It's looking much more likely that, like Mrs John Le Carré, she deserves co-authorship on much of Orwell's most productive and influential work

Eileen died of neglected cancer, aged 40 in 1945. George died of neglected lungs aged 46 in 1950.

Wexford Science Cafe

Founded in February 2015, the Wexford Science Café used to meet in The Sky and the Ground, South Main Street, Wexford, the third Tuesday of every month at 8pm. Since the pandemic we have been meeting on-line and [so?] shifting to earlier [7pm] in the evening. One of the silver-linings of Coronarama is that, while I've gotten my monthly WexSciCaf fix, I haven't had to drive 40km [and 40km dark km back] to get it. I've been the convener since inception. As with any organisation, there are more people who rock up on the regular for a warm bath of scienciness than people who will actually undertake to make a presentation or lead a discussion.  You'll notice that a disproportionate number of the topics we've discussed have simultaneously appeared on The Blob. As soon as possible [October?] we will return to in-person meetings, probably with a video option and likely in the Wexford Town Library, Mallin St, Wexford, Y35 AY20. Meeting in a pub is all very well and The Sky has been wonderfully hospitable but none of us drink any more because a) we are old b) all have to drive home afterwards.

Finally, after pissing and moaning to the inner circle for a couple of years, someone else has accepted the mantel of convener and will be trying to line up a schedule and send out invites each month. All I need do is appear [or not; if something more pressing demands my attention, or I forget]. That's a relief but also intrinsically A Good Thing because New Convener has other interests and a barely overlapping network to draw on. 

The other excellent bit of initiative is that one of our techy members has acquired a domain and set up a webserver powered by nginx at www.wexfordsciencecafe.ie. But our new webmaster was unsure about how to actually populate the site with WSC announcements, gossip, and propaganda. 

I replied thusly: In ~1995, I was one of the top web-designers [in a field of maybe 15] in Ireland, hand-cranking HTML for one of the first WWW servers in the country. The ratio info:<html> was about 5:1 because default HTML is miraculously efficient and elegant. Now the ratio is nearer 1:500 - contributing enormously to the internet's carbon footprint. You defo don't want me to lay hands upon the page: I doubt even if teen-nerds do this sort of thing anymore. 

But the new website needed something, even if it was a placeholder and I was probably the only one in the room who is still writing HTML, like, by hand. Almost every Blob needs a bit of HTML tweaking of the text in ways that Blogspot defaults don't offer. What you see at www.wexfordsciencecafe.ie is what I cobbled together with minimal HTML interventions. If you CTRL+U or right-click on the page and ask for "View Page source", you can see how it works. HTML syntax is simple: each <tag> requires a closing </tag> is all. Signal-to-noise about 3:1.

You can, and web-writers do, make it far more complicated than that making access detectably painful for folks in the Third World or with crappy internet connexions elsewhere. For white folks, who can afford €20/month for their connectivity, bandwidth is not a real problem and the invisible cost of serving pretty pages with enticing graphics is a plume of carbon emissions from the power-station adjacent to the server-farm which is hosting and delivering the data.

Stop Press: Tonight is 3rd Tuesday so we have a session.