A DEAD SEAL

Funny but as photographers we tend to only photograph pretty things and if we photograph something ugly or unpleasant we do not show the picture. It is a pity because one can learn from ugly images.


The large male Cape Fur Seal washed up in the Cape Recife Nature Reserve on the Indian Ocean in South Africa. It was very dead, eyes bulging, bloated and the fur was coming off. Very worrying was that this seal had no flippers; they had seemingly been torn off. My first thought was that people had done this, that the poor seal had got entangled in a fishing net and to get it loose the fishermen had simply cut off the flippers and let it drown, similar to the way sharks are finned and dumped alive to drown.


When I got home I searched for a possible explanation with Google and I was glad that I was unable to find any record of any such practice similar to shark finning in seals. While Googling deeper, to my horror, I found a recipe for Flipper Pie. It seems that in Eastern Canada there is a traditional dish made out of the flippers of young Harp Seals. Luckily it is not a practice in my part of the world. I basically drew a blank and could not find any explanation for the missing flippers.


I got the answer on the next day, one of the first people I met was an expert in marine mammals and he suggested that the seal died at sea, probably of natural causes. While the fur seal was floating dead in the sea it probably attracted the attention of small sharks, smaller sharks would be unable to bite the seal in half (the Great White must have been away) and they would grab a flipper and try to wrench off the flippers. Eventually they succeeded in doing so. It sounded plausible to me and in a strange twist one of the next people I met was also a marine biologist whose field of expertise is sharks! He agreed with the theory and that it fitted well with the behaviour of small scavenging sharks. He also added that if humans had done it there would be visible knife cuts on the seal’s body. I went back to look at the pictures and there were no signs of knife cuts.


When I took the images I thought I was exposing some or other atrocity that people had carried out, as it turns out this was not the case and I learnt something about how sharks scavenge and feed.

Musing about Giraffes

I had a lovely morning at the Kragga Kama Game Park near Port Elizabeth in South Africa and spent some time with a group of Giraffes. They must be one of the strangest animals on the planet. This one had a fly that was irritating it around the eyes and what is an animal supposed to do when the face is some 16 feet away from your feet? It takes a lot of effort to reach the face with the feet and it probably cannot be done. The giraffe’s tail can be useful for a job like this (that is a reason why it is there) but unfortunately it is not 12 feet long and also cannot reach the face. In any case if you move your head to within reach of the tail the fly will probably take off and you won’t have the satisfaction of killing it. Well if your tongue is up to 18 inches long you whack the fly with that! (I know very little about giraffes, Google did not help and this is a pure guesswork!)

Wine Cultivation in Single Bushes

Wine cultivation doesn't have to be in row upon row of terraces that cover a hillside. On the volcanic island of Fogo in the Cape Verde Islands vines are grown individually as bushes in the lava soil mixed with animal dung. They produce a very good white and red too!

No chemicals or sprays here, just purely natural wine.

A Cultural Practice and Blue Flag Beaches

Cultural practices in Africa are often not understood and we often do not know what is going on. Sometimes though it all comes together and works. I often photograph things that don’t make me smile but these flying plastic water containers on a Blue Flag beach amused me. There is a tradition in Africa that sea water is drunk and it functions as a purgative. You often see people on the beach collecting sea water in plastic containers. It is particularly prevalent amongst those living inland and when they come to the sea collecting some sea water in a container, with a bit of sand thrown in, is important to them. They then transport it back to their homes in the hinterland and it is consumed when it is needed. South Africa is proud of its Blue Flag beaches and it is great swimming there because you know the water is clean and free from industrial and sewerage discharges that may affect the quality of water and that you won’t get sick if you accidentally swallow a mouthful of sea water. Blue Flag beaches are also great for those who use sea water for medicinal purposes as at least there is some guarantee that the water is free of pollutants. Blue Flag beaches also have lifesavers on duty and this is important for those who collect sea water as medicine as many of them cannot swim. A while ago I had to rinse out my sinuses with salt water and without thinking I obtained a pressurised container of seawater from a pharmacy. It was guaranteed to be pure seawater from the North Atlantic. Thinking about it I would rather have had a guarantee that it came from a Blue Flag beach as part of the criteria for Blue Flag status is of course regular water purity checks. Why did I buy sea water - it is stupid as I live 50 meters from the sea. I am not sure why but surely the Indian Ocean is cleaner than the North Atlantic Ocean? In any case it is ridiculous that North Atlantic seawater is available for sale in Africa. The one thing a Blue Flag Beach cannot guarantee of course is that there won’t be any wind on the day that you collect sea water – that is why these gentlemen are chasing empty containers along the Blue Flag Beach at Hobie Beach in Port Elizabeth South Africa.

The Problem with Rock and Surf Anglers

I have been walking along beaches most of my life and enjoy what I find and see. Last week I had to think for a while before I could work out what the dead thing was.

Fishing with bait on a line has several disadvantages. In the first place you don’t really know what you are going to catch. If you are an ethical angler and you catch something you do not want you simply unhook the fish or shark and release it back in the sea. If the creature was not too injured or stressed it should survive.

If you are an idiot angler and are scared of what you catch or just lazy you simply cut the line and leave the creature to its own devices and you do not care whether it lives or dies. It is difficult to work out what happened to this large stingray. The hook and bait were still down its throat but the wings were removed. I guess the lazy angler hacked off the wings and threw the body back into the sea. I hope the skate was dead as this is sounding more and more like shark finning where the fins are hacked off the shark and the shark is thrown overboard to drown slowly.

There are many aspects of this that irritate me but I always come back to the hazards of fishing line and fish hooks. If you look to the sides of the cadaver you will see many footprints of the seagulls that were scavenging off the skate. There is a good chance that one will reach the baited hook and impale itself trying to get at the bait. If it does not do that it can entangle itself in the fishing line – this also normally has fatal consequences.

Another possibility is that you come along the beach walking on your bare feet enjoying the texture of the sand when you suddenly encounter the sharpness of the hook in your foot. The consequences are painful and sometimes it is really difficult to remove the hook. Sometimes you have to draw the hook backwards to get it out. Trying to cut off the shank of a hook stuck in your foot with a pair of pliers (if you are luckily enough to have pliers with you) is very painful. Another exciting way for this to improve your day is that your dog will find the baited hook and swallow it. It is never easy to remove a hook from a dog’s mouth and if it goes any further into the dog’s digestive system you will have massive veterinarian bills to pay.

Perhaps the most disruptive way of finding a hook like this is if I child walks on it. Apart from the trauma, pain and possible infection you have to get the crying child to a general practitioner. There are many wonderful ways to ruin an outing to the beach and finding a discarded fish hook really irritates me. But the person who caught the skate has also allowed another painful end to a day at the beach come into play – by discarding the ray in this way you have to bonus of being able to step onto the venomous spines. While I have not experienced this myself I have seen what pain it causes. Interestingly the best way to alleviate the pain is by placing the wound in hot water as this breaks down the toxins.

Funny how fishing and its equipment remains primitive and that the behaviour of the fishermen with the disposal of fish hooks, fishing line and their catch has remained despicable.

Climate change affecting survival rate of Columbian ground squirrels

Columbian ground squirrels are now surfacing from their winter hibernation in the foothills of Canada’s Rocky Mountains 10 days later than they did 20 years ago. These findings by a group of international researchers were published in the online edition of the journal Nature earlier this month. The delay is considered significant and is having an impact on how many female squirrels and their babies survive to the next spring. In newspaper interviews this month, Jeffrey Lane, lead author of the new study, puts the squirrels’ delayed surfacing down to the increased frequency of late-spring snowstorms. Lane says that after studying a colony of Columbian ground squirrels for 20 years in Kananaskis Country’s Sheep River Park, the survival rate for female squirrels has dropped by one percent every year. Twenty years ago, 87 percent of the rodents survived the winter. Last spring, 67 percent survived. According to the study, Columbian ground squirrels spend as much as three-quarters of the year sleeping in their burrows. Their three to four months of activity is highly regimented. Waking up 10 days later means that much less time to fatten up before hibernating again. And if food is less than ideal because dumps of late-spring snowfall have affected the vegetation, survival is harder.

Burn Pollution?

Our village burn in Belford, Northumberland has turned a turquoise colour this afternoon. Some residents described it as the colour of Vosene shampoo. Our picture shows Eric Gassner our local trout fisherman testing the PH value of the water and you can clearly see the uncoloured natural water coming into the burn from the right.

The Ghost Forest

The Ghost Forest consists of 10 giant hardwood rainforest tree stumps from the Suhuma forest reserve in Ghana and is an environmental art installation by artist Angela Palmer highlighting deforestation & the depletion of natural resources. Artist Angela Palmer says that the trees are intended to represent rainforest trees worldwide:"Today, a tropical forest the size of a rugby pitch is destroyed every four seconds, impacting on climate, biodiversity and the livelihoods of indigenous people" and that the absence of the trees' trunks in the installation is "a metaphor for the removal of the world's 'lungs' through deforestation". Most of the trees in the Ghost Forest fell naturally in adverse weather conditions, those that didn't were part of a sustainable controlled logging programme.

After leaving Ghana, the Ghost Forest was installed in Trafalgar Square, London, then outside the Parliament Building in Copenhagen during the Cop15 UN Climate Change Conference and, most recently in Oxford. Now it has come to the National Botanic Garden of Wales at Llanarthne, Carmarthenshire, for its final, permanent resting place.

The installation has been jointly secured by the National Botanic Garden of Wales in partnership with the Wales-based rainforest charity, Size of Wales. The phrase  'an area the size of Wales’ is frequently used to measure the rate of forest destruction. Size of Wales is a unique Welsh initiative aiming to turn the negative use of Wales' size around by aiming to protect an area of rainforest the size of the Welsh nation - that is 2 million hectares of rainforest. Director of Size of Wales, Hannah Scrase, said: “Wales is stepping up to the challenge of stopping tropical forest destruction and having Ghost Forest here in Wales to remind us will really strengthen our resolve and will help us all to get closer to the issue of tropical deforestation."
Garden director Dr Rosie Plummer said: “No one can fail to be awed by the sight of these huge botanic leviathans and we are planning to inspire all our visitors, young and old, to create poetry, art, photography, music and theatre out of their experiences.”

On Sunday, the 29th of July, the Ghost Forest arrived at the National Botanic Garden in a major logistical operation, involving 6 huge low-loader lorries, a massive crane, a team of engineers, garden staff, charity representatives, volunteers and much tea, coffee, sandwiches and Welsh cakes.

Here are a few pictures of the day:

The 20-ton trunk of a Denya (Cylicodiscus gabunensis, naturally fallen) arrives on low-loader

Preparing the Denya and then hoisting it into position

Left to right: Rosie Plummer (Director of National Botanic Garden of Wales), Lowri Jenkins ('Size of Wales' charity), Angela Palmer (artist) posing with cut-out Wales shape

Hoisting another buttress-rooted trunk into position - it look so surreal against the backdrop of native British woodland

Beautiful shapes reminiscent of so many things

And even before the installation is officialy open, a Garden volunteer explores the inside of an 8.8 ton Dahoma (Piptadeniastrum africanum)

...and the view from the inside

Yes, no doubt, the Ghost Forest is going to be very popular

Go and visit !!


And if you want to know even more about this project, here are some links:

http://www.ghostforest.org
http://www.sizeofwales.org.uk
http://www.gardenofwales.org.uk
http://www.angelaspalmer.com

New Oil Boom Changing Canadian Landscape

Just when most of us thought the last drops of fossil fuel were being squeezed from Planet Earth, we learn that a new oil boom has just begun. In fact, George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian this week says there’s still enough oil around to fry us all! And much of that lies below ground in North America, mainly in the United States. That large deposits of oil and gas lie below North Dakota in the Bakken Formation has been known since the early 1950s. Estimates of recoverable oil there now range from 4 – 24 billion barrels. However, up to quite recently, it has been difficult and uneconomical to extract. What’s new is “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Fracking involves injecting vast quantities of water, sand and toxic chemicals down a well under great pressure. This fractures the shale rock and the grains of sand hold the cracks open so that the oil or gas can be extracted. Horizontal drilling means that much fewer wells need to be drilled and there is little chance of drilling a dry well. The drilling rig pictured above is in the hamlet of Del Bonita on the Alberta/Montana border close to the Rocky Mountains. The Bakken Formation, while centred below North Dakota and Montana, extends into the southern part of the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Although Alberta is notorious for the oil it produces from tar sands in the northern part of the province, southern Alberta has been a haven for conservationist ranchers and wildlife in and around Waterton-Glacier National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Last year drilling for oil and gas started in earnest in southern Alberta and the prairie landscapes is now dotted with drilling rigs and pump-jacks. Canada’s image as a land of great natural beauty and champion of the environment is changing. Economic considerations are now trumping environmental concerns in some parts of the country.