An ending...a continuation...a beginning

I've always hated when blogs I love just stop dead. I find myself wondering what happened to the blogger. Did they die suddenly? were they taken ill or heartbroken? Did they fall in love and drop everything? Who knows.

I always said therefore that wouldn't happen with Earth, Wind & Water. But it sort of did. A couple of years almost went by. Sorry about that. I'm still alive. Not ill nor heartbroken. I did fall in love. And then I got one of these.....




He's ten months old now and awesome fun. I also planted an orchard and got a load of these...



I don't have time to blog anymore as a result of all this grown up stuff but I still share pictures via instagram. You can find me there at https://www.instagram.com/drunken_bee/ if you want to stay in touch. E,W&W won't be updated anymore but at some point I will resurface with a website for the orchard and photos therefrom.

To close things out, here's some things we did that didn't involve nappies.

Brazil:
Jag


Giant Anteater




Giant Otter


GIANT ARMADILLO!!!!!!!!!

Why I otter.....

I'm guessing I'm the last person seriously interested in british mammals to get around to visiting the norfolk town with otters gambolling through the river in its town centre. But last month get there I did (about a year after everyone else). Still 10 minutes after parking up this happened.
 






Absolute magic. Details are around if you google. Don't miss out. Go.

White winged gulls

Been a good year here for white winged gulls, something I'm acquiring a taste for....

First up was this big glaucous gull in the town harbour


very relaxed bird....


then a Kumlien's


and lastly an Iceland...

Grazers

Breaking radio silence to show you some photos of british native grazers in action:

Highland cattle

and Konik ponies

across Wicken Fen nature reserve in cambridgeshire. The idea is these guys simulate the now lost aurochs cattle and tarpan horses which would previously have grazed this landscape keeping at least some of it as open fenland rather than forest.

This little blog post is really just an excuse to point  you to http://breedingback.blogspot.com/ for the Breeding Back blog where you can learn about efforts to provide more realistic aurochs and tarpan simulators still.

Before you go though here's some nice soothing highland close-ups....

Three sturgeons

Watching a show last night about one of my favourite animal groups, the sturgeon, giant prehistoric migrant fish of the northern hemisphere it occured to me I should show you some pet pictures.....

I recently went home and took my underwater housing to try and get some nice shots of my parent's pet sturgeon. We have three species:

This is an albino sterlet. Sterlets are among the smallest sturgeon reaching only 3 - 4 feet or so in length. It's vulnerable in the wild but widespread due to successful aquaculture projects breeding them for both food and ornamental purposes.


This is Acipenser gueldenstaedtii, the diamond or danube sturgeon. They can get up to 8 feet in length and are a pretty serious beastie. Found in the caspian sea and the various former soviet states like the stans, georgia and iran. Note the rounded nose to the extent you can see it in the shoddy photos.



The third species we keep is the Siberian sturgeon (Acipenser baerii) another large species wikipedia descrbes as present in all of the major Siberian river basins that drain northward into the Kara, Laptev and East Siberian seas, including the Ob, Yenisei (which drains Lake Baikal via the Angara River) the Lena and Kolyma rivers. It is also found in Kazakhstan and China in the Irtysh River, a major tributary of the Ob. This is probably the species first and most commonly bred by aquaculture and caviar farms. This is a dark species without the big scutes of the diamond so I resorted to setting the camera to video and using some squished up wet bread to lure them to the camera. You can see a close pass here.... and a full on "gimme the bread" attack here (that's the albino sterlet you can see cruising around at the bottom first up): Whilst having these guys cruising our pond gives me tremendous pleasure, the knowledge that we're able to enjoy them as a result of successful breeding programs providing wonderful foodstuffs whilst easing pressure on wild populations makes it all the better. I dream of a day when wild sturgeon are returned to the great rivers of western europe as a result of successful breeding (it's happening already: http://www.bfn.de/habitatmare/en/spezielle-projekte-wiederansiedlung-stoer.php but the relict population of European sturgeon seems to be restricted to the Gironde) and these dinosaurs once again dominate huge untamed(ish) european river systems - imagine these beasties running through a system of ecologically non-damaging hydropower lagoons and into the upper reaches of the severn or people sportfishing for these giant fish in the thames or seine.