Listened Caught by the River Spoken Word & Nature Disco Volume 9 from mixcloud.com
Volume 9 in an irregular series of specially created mixtapes for readers of Caught by the River.

I have seen links to this on Caught By the river a few times now. First time I followed up by listening. Really enjoyed a pretty eclectic mix of poetry & music.

I’ll be listening to more. I was disappointed that mixcloud does not support RSS feeds, so I had to use Huffduffer-video to listen to this on my commute. The Tracklist is on the Caught by the River site: Spoken Word & Nature Disco Vol. 9.

A screenshot of Flickr thumbnails ordered by month, flora for May, June & July.

As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.

I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.

A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.

I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.

It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.

Illustration of Atlantic salmon

Despite mealy-mouthed words about sustainability and transparency the salmon industry is Scotland’s disgrace. The gap between the iconic identity of salmon as a wild symbol of natural Scotland, and the reality is massive. The potential to completely replace this industry with regenerative genuinely sustainable jobs is huge, but the Scottish Government seems to be missing a massive open goal here, instead propping up (and covering up) for short-term lucrative gain. A mass boycott of salmon should be the goal to exert pressure on government and industry.

Scotland’s Salmon Crisis

Also: island split over plans for salmon farm

I remember, as a wee boy, seeing the netting station at the mouth of the Spey, piles of fresh run wild salmon. I now avoid eating salmon.

Listened #2 Seawilding – Scotland

On the west coast of Scotland, by the shores of Loch Craignish, a community has come together to help restore their marine environment.
When deciding on how to put something back, they identified two priority marine features they could do something about.This is a story about carbon capturing seagrass, water filtering oysters & the passionate people tirelessly working to restore both.

Really interesting listen especially about the extent of oyster beds and sea grass around the Scottish coast in fairly recent history.

In the 1790s, as many as 30 million were harvested a year from the Firth of Forth, just outside of Edinburgh.

By 1882, the Edinburgh Oyster Hall was down to just 55,000.

 

3 screenshots of the merlin app, recording and identifying bird song.

Since dawn chorus day I’ve been noticing bird song more than ever. This has lead to wondering which birds are singing. A recognise a very small number. I’ve tried a couple of apps and my favourite so far is Merlin.

Merlin identifies bird sounds using breakthroughs in machine learning technology to recognize species based on spectrograms—visual representations of sounds

Sound ID.

Rather delightfully you see the names and thumbnails of bird the app recognises. This are hi-lighted each time the bird is heard. Even better you get the same effect playing back the audio. Hopefully this will lead to me being able to recognise a few more bird songs without the app.

How accurate the app is I do not know, but I have seen most of the ones it has identified nearby.

AudioMoth is a low-cost, full-spectrum acoustic logger, based on the Gecko processor range from Silicon Labs. Just like its namesake the moth, AudioMoth can listen at audible frequencies, well into ultrasonic frequencies. It is capable of recording uncompressed audio to microSD card at rates from 8,000 to 384,000 samples per second and can be converted into a full-spectrum USB microphone.

Looks a bit tricky to actually buy at the moment, but interesting device.