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Connie Fowler

Youth is counted sweetest by those who are no longer young

22/05/2024

To truly thrive, bears and other wild animals need to roam widely between habitats. Wildlife tunnels, trails and bridges can help – but are they enough?
In the North West of the US, a rocky green and grey landscape juts and curves its way north to Canada, and south to Mexico. These are the Rocky Mountains, home to roving wolverine, majestic elk – and several hundred grizzly bears, whose population has been recovering thanks to efforts to reconnect their habitat so they can roam more freely.
Though huge – the tallest mountain is over 4,000m (13,123ft) high, and the range stretches a full 4,800km (2,983 miles) – the Rocky Mountains are not the wild expanse of land they once were. Towns and cities have formed in valleys, and roads have cut across the land to connect them. For wildlife, and especially the bears, this creates a problem.
Bears need space to thrive – lots of it. A typical grizzly bear needs 80 to 965 sq km (50 to 600 sq miles) to find appropriate food and meet new mates. They look for deer by the river, catch fish in mountain creeks, and forage grasses, bulbs and berries in forests and on mountain sides. A 2014 study followed a grizzly bear called Ethyl as she wound her way 2,800 miles (4,506 km) through Montana, into Idaho, and up to the border with British Columbia. But safe, connected stretches of wilderness have become hard to find, says Mark Hebblewhite, professor of Ungulate Habitat Ecology at the University of Montana, who has spent his career studying the animal inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains' peaks and valleys.
"I'm here walking above the city of Missoula, a little city of 50,000 people," he says, speaking on his mobile while out on a hike. "And I see a new development going in that's going to carve up another 600 acres (2.43 sq km) with 200 homes". These homes are needed – but they are an example of how the world's biggest, most expansive ecosystems become fragmented as humans move in.

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13/05/2024

The deep ocean photographer that captured a 'living fossil'

Scientists are racing to trace deep ocean species before they are lost, with the help of photographers who have a taste for danger.
In 2010 four friends, carrying 32kg (71lb) worth of camera equipment, sunk beneath the waves of Sodwana Bay, off the east coast of South Africa. It was then that photographer, Laurent Ballesta stared directly into the eyes of a creature once thought to have died out with the dinosaurs – making him the first diver to photograph a living coelacanth.
"It's not just a fish we thought was extinct," says Ballesta. "It's a masterpiece in the history of evolution."
Venture back to the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs, and you'd find coelacanths in abundance, on every continent, living in the steamy marshes of the Triassic Period. Dating back 410 million years, the coelacanth belongs to the group of "lobe-finned" fish that left the ocean between about 390 and 360 million years ago. Its strong, fleshy fins were a precursor to the paired limbs of tetrapods, which include all land-living vertebrates – amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals and, yes, humans too. In fact, coelacanths are more closely related to tetrapods than to any other known fish species.

The youngest known fossil coelacanth is 66 million years old, leading to the assumption that these animals were long extinct. Then, in 1938, a fish with iridescent blue-green scales and four limb-like fins, was caught in a trawl net off the coast of South Africa. Further invetisgations followed and, in 1987, ethologist Hans Fricke lead a submersible expedition off the coast of Grande Comore, where he managed to capture living coelacanths on film for the first time.
This coelacanth has been dubbed a living fossil. Although, experts say this nickname is not accurate and the coelacanth has, in fact, evolved, albeit extremely slowly. For one thing, this elusive fish no longer dwells on the periphery of the land, but deep in the ocean.

"Every time they were caught, it was very deep, too deep for normal scuba diving techniques at the time," says Ballesta. "So, it was just a fantasy in my mind." But, in 2000, Ballesta heard about a diver named Peter Timm. "During a deep dive, Timm found a coelacanth in a cave at only 120m (393ft) [depth]." So, in 2010, after intensive deep-dive training, and with the help of newly available rebreather diving technology – which would allow him to remain underwater for longer than previously possible – Ballesta enlisted Timm to be his guide.

Coelacanths live in the benthic zone – on the sea floor – as deep as 300m (984ft) along steep underwater slopes and shelves. During the day, they gather in submarine caves, only emerging to feed during the night. It was in such caves, that Ballesta met his first coelacanth.

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06/05/2024

Why you should let insects eat your plants

Renegade gardeners across the world are embracing a new philosophy: gardening that prioritises insects, not plants.
The marauders appeared out of nowhere. Looking through my window, I saw them – dozens of what looked like tiny grey caterpillars crawling all over a lovely green plant in my garden. I watched, with some horror, as over a matter of days, these insects chewed the plant to bits.
Countless leaves were munched to nothing, with only sad, spindly stems remaining. Finally, jet-black flies – the grey gobblers transformed – went buzzing off into the world beyond. Presumably, to wreak havoc elsewhere. Initially, I felt like a farmer whose field of maize had just been ravaged by locusts.
However, a little Googling set me straight. It turned out that the plant in question, the name of which was previously unknown to me, was Solomon's seal or Polygonatum – a classic cottage garden plant that, each summer, becomes locked in a tussle with the very insect invader I had witnessed: Solomon’s seal sawfly. A female sawfly had laid her eggs on my plant. Out of those eggs had hatched the grey larvae that ended up devouring it. And all of this was actually fine.
According to the UK's Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), Solomon's seal is relatively unbothered by this extreme defoliation. "This insect can be tolerated and the plants will survive," the RHS writes on its information page for the insect. What initially seemed like a macabre assault on a perfectly blameless plant was revealed to be just one of those many trade-offs that occur in nature all the time. Solomon's seal had evolved to simply shrug its shoulders and move on.

All over the world, there are insects that depend on plants for food. They munch at stems, and strip leaves to pieces. They make cuts and holes in otherwise pristine vegetation. To some gardeners, this is anathema. But others recognise that it's all a natural part of how ecosystems work – and without an insect-rich ecosystem, there would be no gardens at all.
Over the last few decades, a massive global crisis has affected insect populations, which are declining at a rate of between 1% and 2% every year. This means that practically any intervention that could help these creatures is valuable. More people are "planting for pollinators", with one 2022 survey finding one in three US adults purchase plants to help wildlife, an increase of 26% from 2020. This helps ensure there are lots of native wildflowers to supply bees, hoverflies and butterflies with nectar. But should we also try horticulture for herbivores, too? Should we plant things in the hope they will get gobbled up? To find out, I turned to the experts.

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02/05/2024

These tricks make wind farms more bird-friendly

Wind turbines can pose a deadly risk to migrating birds, but there are ways to dramatically reduce crashes.
Across Europe's rugged mountains, a hopeful change is underway: vultures are back. Almost driven into extinction by hunting, poisoning and habitat loss, the huge scavengers are being reintroduced by conservation teams that painstakingly hand-rear birds, supported by pairs of adoptive vulture parents, before releasing them into the wild.
The projects have successfully returned several vulture species to the Alps and the mountains of Andalucia in Spain, and is also restoring populations in other areas of Europe. "Globally, vultures are not doing well," says José Tavares, director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation (VCF). "Europe is the only bright spot. Here, we have been able to revert the trend. Vulture populations have been growing, increasing in distribution, and reoccupying their former range." They have even revived their ancient, seasonal migratory routes, flying from Europe to Africa via the Strait of Gibraltar to overwinter as far south as Mali.
But as the birds take to the skies, a modern threat is endangering their travels: the giant, spinning blades of wind turbines.
Wind farms are expanding in Europe and around the world, as part of the renewable energy revolution – and they are competing with birds for the best winds. Migratory birds, which account for almost 20% of all bird species, are especially at risk. Collisions are particularly high during their seasonal migration, when billions of them are in the sky, and in areas of migratory bottlenecks, such as narrow sea crossings or mountain passes, where winds are funnelled at high speeds. Building wind farms in those windy sites makes sense from an energy-production point of view, but it gets in the way of those travelling birds. (Oil and gas drilling, however, has a worse impact on bird numbers than wind farms, according to a 2024 study).

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29/04/2024

The bluebell woodland turned 'desolate wasteland'

Campaigners and community members living near an ancient bluebell woodland in Kent say it has been turned into a "desolate wasteland", buried under uncleared, "illegally" dumped waste.
A petition signed by more than 6,500 people is calling for an "immediate clean-up" of Hoads Wood near Ashford.
In January, the Environment Agency (EA) closed down the site to try and prevent further waste tipping.
Ashford Borough Council also said it was also investigating reports of an "odour nuisance".
Hoads Wood is a protected Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and an area of outstanding natural beauty, which ought to be carpeted in bluebells at this time of year but instead huge swathes of the woodland is buried in waste tens of feet deep.
The petition follows an open letter written earlier this month to the Environment Secretary Steve Barclay by six organisations calling for support and funding to clear the site, which began seeing issues with waste being dumped there in 2020.
The Rescue Hoads Wood campaign group said community members would see as many as 20-30 trucks per day dumping waste at the woods at the height of the problem in July 2023.

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17/04/2024

Few travellers venture to Cuba's south-eastern corner, but a little-known road offers a fascinating – and stunning – glimpse of the nation's revolutionary past.

"We're going the back way to Santiago," I told the man at the car hire office in Bayamo, Cuba.

The manager looked at me and warned that this remote road lacks cell signal, and that if the car were to break down, it could be a long time before anyone arrived to rescue us.

Tracing the edge of eastern Cuba's foot-shaped Granma province, this back road, which Cubans call the Carretera Granma (or the southern coastal road), is so isolated that Fidel Castro, who launched his grass-roots revolution against the nation's US-backed president Fulgencio Batista here in 1956, only returned to the area once in his lifetime. The province is named after the 18m motor yacht Castro sailed from his exiled home in Mexico back to Cuba to overthrow the government. After crash-landing almost 100m offshore and thrashing their way through more than 1km of thick mangroves near this very road, Castro, Che Guevara and 80 other revolutionaries set about making modern-day Cuba.

27/03/2024

One of the most iconic pieces on permanent display at the Savitsky Museum is a sculpture by renowned local artist J Kuttimuratov, which depicts Karakalpakstan's so-called mother river, the Amu Darya, a tributary of the Aral Sea, which was known to the ancient Greeks as the Oxus.

"It's the first in a series of three artworks," said museum guide Sarbinaz Majitova. "Each one decreases in size; they represent the fast-disappearing waters and the diminishing power of this great symbol of life and fertility."

14/03/2024

Kenyes Ilyasov has been the imam at Mizdakhan for more than 20 years and often receives the faithful in the crypt of Shamun Nabi, an early follower of the Prophet Mohammed whose 33m-long sarcophagus is said to grow by an extra inch each year.

All Muslim visitors to Mizdakhan's necropolis are expected to pass by a crumbling mausoleum that loses a brick every year and is known as "the apocalypse clock". "When the last brick falls it will signify the end of the world," said Ilyasov. "So all good Muslims should return a brick to the structure just in case."

12/02/2024

Karakalpakstan was once part of a historic region known as Khorezm, whose people built great mud-brick fortresses along their frontiers as protection from nomadic raiders. More than 50 of their desert castles have survived, including Ayaz Kala, which dates to the 4th Century BCE and consists of two hilltop forts and a lower garrison. One notable discovery here was the remains of an ancient fire temple, believed to have been the altar of fire-worshipping Zoroastrians. (Zoroastrianism was practiced in Karakalpakstan before Islam arrived in the 8th Century.)

16/01/2024

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Located in the heart of Central Asia, Karakalpakstan is the "stan within a stan", an autonomous state of the landlocked Republic of Uzbekistan that borders Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Home to the Indigenous Karakalpak people, the desert province was, until recently, dominated by the Aral Sea – a vast inland lake that has since shrunk to a fraction of its original size.

Considered one of the most serious environmental disasters of modern times, the Aral Sea's fast-disappearing waters have spurred on conservation efforts here, leading to a growing interest in Karakalpakstan as a destination for eco-tourism.

Those visitors have, in turn, started to seek out the region's cultural treasures, too. "The Khorezm desert fortresses and the Mizdarkhan necropolis here are amongst the most-impressive archaeological sites anywhere in Central Asia," said Sophie Ibbotson, co-author of the Bradt Guide to Karakalpakstan, the first-ever travel guide to the region. "Elsewhere, the Savitsky Museum in the capital Nukus is justifiably known as the 'Louvre of the Steppe'." (The museum contains the world's second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art alongside Karakalpak archaeological and ethnographic galleries.) "For the intrepid traveller, this is a land of extraordinary variety, both in terms of landscapes and experiences."

09/08/2023

Салат из трески

✏️ Необходимы:

➡️ Рыба 200 г
➡️ Зелень сельдерея 50 г
➡️ Яблоко 1 штука
➡️ Морковь 1 штука
➡️ Зеленый салат 100 г
➡️ Помидоры 2 штуки
➡️ Огурцы 1 штука
➡️ Молотый душистый перец щепотка

1 Морковь и яблоки нарезать соломкой длиной 3-4 см, огурцы и помидоры - полукруглыми дольками, сложить в миску и поставить в холодное место.
2 Сваренную охлажденную треску без кожи и костей нарезать на куски по числу порций, сложить в тарелку, облить уксусом и также поставить в холодное место.
3 Перед тем как подать к столу, овощи слегка посолить, смешать с 2-3 ст. ложками соевого соуса и уложить на листики салата, обсушенного на салфетке; поверх овощей положить куски рыбы и посыпать зеленью сельдерея или перцем. Можно разнообразить вкус салата, изменив набор овощей.

#Салаты #Испанскаякухня

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