Tag: nature

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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.

 

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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.

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Bookmarked AudioMoth | Open Acoustic Devices.

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.

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Read Harrods Salmon at £245 a kilo
Wild salmon was on sale last week at the Harrods luxury  store in London for £245 a kilo, making the cost of the average salmon to be over £700, or around £60 for a single portion. Chips would prob…

The conditions that make this so are really depressing. I remember family holidays as a child in the 60s. We would buy a wild salmon for the freezer on the way home. This from netters on Galloway estuaries because the price was so good. I also recall seeing the nets in operation at the mouth of the Spey huge numbers of fish being caught.

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Liked Soft fascination (richardcoyne.com)
My ability to concentrate on any task is limited, no matter how much I enjoy that task. Eventually I reach a point where my performance is severely hampered, things take longer than usual, and I make mistakes, become inefficient, less creative, and easily distracted. Sound familiar? Tangle of bare b...

Fascinating post on fascination. It proposes that Soft Fascination will restore out concentration and that this is facilitated by being in nature. I certainly feel it can be easy to become absorbed in the natural world. I was also pleased to read

On the contrary, smartphones may help us get out more, adding to a sense of safety, GPS means you can explore more, there are countless information sources and apps about the outdoors, and there’s the full set of UK Ordnance Survey maps available for download on a GPS enabled app. Photography provides a means of exercising soft fascination and probing the world. There’s a sense in which the great outdoors and what we get out of it is already mediated by decades worth of technology, not to mention presentations via art and the mass media.

I’ve  found my phone a useful tool for navigating the natural world,  not only as a method of finding where I am but of recording that and identifying my surroundings and neighbours. Trails, PlantNet and PeakFinder Are some of my favourites along with the camera and an audio recorder.

hat tip @livedtime

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Read Novacene by James Lovelock review – a big welcome for the AI takeover
The Gaia theorist, at 100 years old, is infectiously optimistic about the prospect of humanity being overtaken by superintelligent robots

But for Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis will save us, because the machines will realise that they need organic life to keep the planet at a habitable temperature. (Even electronic life could not survive on an Earth that veered into runaway global warming.)

I read and enjoyed Gaia when it came out, Lovelock still sounds fascinating! I look forward to reading this.