This is a picture of Brixham harbour, which is only a few miles from where I live. It made the national news last week as the epicentre of an outbreak of cryptosporidium, but is normally thought of as a picturesque fishing port.
It's a popular tourist destination and, to the left of the shot, you can see its well-known replica of Sir Francis Drake's 'Golden Hind', in which he circumnavigated the globe. It's a disturbingly small vessel.
@Paulos_the_fog@TimWardCam@vandyke4ad
Fungus is a real problem with slide film. I've lost hundreds of shots to it as well. On the whole, I'm glad to have gone digital. It's so much easier to store, file and index photos than it was in the old days.
There are only about 80,000 old giant sequoias left in California. After years of drought, roughly 10% of these enormous trees died in a massive fire in 2020. The future for them does not look good.
But I just learned that there are about 500,000 younger giant sequoias and closely related coastal redwoods in the UK!
They were first introduced in 1853 by the Scottish grain merchant Patrick Matthew. Later that year, the famous plant collector William Lobb brought over many more. Because of their rarity and novelty, these trees were very expensive. But that worked in their favor: they became a symbol of wealth in Victorian Britain. People planted them at the entrances of grand houses and estates, along avenues, and in churchyards and parks.
The map shows just 4949 of the giant sequoias in the UK. Surprisingly, they thrive there, despite the climate being very different from that in their native range - the Sierra Nevada mountains, dry in the summer and snowy in the winter.
They are now the largest trees in the UK! A new study shows each tree sequesters carbon at the rate of 85 kilograms per year, on average. This is very high for trees, and sequoias keep growing for centuries. People are wanting to plant more.
Invasive species - or wonderful rescue of a species that might otherwise go extinct? Evolution does its thing regardless of our value judgements, but what we do affects it. Long ago, giant sequoias were common in North American and Eurasian coniferous forests. By the last ice age, their range had shrunk to a small area in California. Now, thanks to humans, they are spreading again.
Just up the road from us is a deer park. The Medieval stone walls have been restored, and a herd of fallow deer have been released into it.
These deer are non-native in the UK, but are considered 'naturalised'. They were first introduced by the Romans, but died out, and were then re-introduced in the C11th.
I feel ambivalent about deer - I don't like ticks, and I dont like all the tree damage they cause. They are rather beautiful creatures though...
"The most widespread and abundant species in Britain and northwest Europe is Ixodes ricinus, sometimes known as the sheep tick, deer tick or castor bean tick. It is one of 11 UK species known to bite people and the main transmitter, or vector, of bacteria that cause Lyme disease here... This species needs humidity to thrive. It is typically found in rough grassland, moorland and woodland areas among plants with a moisture-retaining ground layer, such as long grass and bracken." 😱
I've been seeing daffodils in bloom since the beginning of the week. This one was just opening up. It's unusual, where I live, to see daffodils quite this early in the year.
It should gladden my heart to be able to welcome the spring, but they're just making me feel uneasy about climate change...
@NatureMC@Judeet88
What a fascinating conversation. Ironically, I've just come in from our community orchard wassail/imbolc event. I don't think it's so much a case of nature striving for balance as of nature being part of a dynamic system. All systems tend towards balance - that is in the nature of systems - but there are many possible points of balance, and the world as we have known it is but one of these points. Unbalance the system far enough, and it will cascade into a new modality.
I endorse this graphic.
Edit: I have to say the response to this post has been eye-opening (in an excellent way) and hilarioius. Special shout out to the lady from Texas - welcome!
This is a common seal, which I met near Blakeney, in Norfolk. It's a great place to go for a boat trip and do some seal watching. The grey seals pup in the winter and the common seals in the summer, so there are seals to be seen practically all year round.
They always remind me of dogs, with their ears folded back. I think it's the mournful eyes, long snout, and whiskers that do it.
About fifty metres from our house there is woodland, and in the woodland there are several stands of coast redwoods, which were planted in the 1930s as a forestry experiment. The growing conditions here really seem to suit them, and today, these exotic introductions are getting quite tall. This picture was taken only last week.
@simon_brooke
I guess you've seen Guy Shrubsole's stuff, with his maps of rainforest remnants?
I've been worried about tree diseases ever since we lost all the elms when I was a kid. In recent years, it's been a great sadness to see all the larches, and now many of the ash, go too.
There are still young elms around but the disease seems to kick in when they reach a certain size.
I met this one a few years back, in Australia. It really took me by surprise - had to do a double take before I was sure. Apparently the ones there were all planted in parks, as ornamentals, so there was never enough density for the dutch elm disease to attack them.