Summer 2011 part 4: A
second display of Noctilucent Clouds, first Chanterelles and aerobatic
Choughs.
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It's
July
25th
and the slow change of seasons is underway, that transitional
time from Summer towards Autumn - the time of harvest and gathering, of
making store and preserving
- all extremely satisfying things. Until recently, the unsettled
weather has persisted, with sea-temperatures well down in the Bay as a
consequence and the mackerel are scarce this year - so far. Sometimes
the early Autumn months can be the best for these delicious fish - it
depends entirely on the conditions and is increasingly becoming
dependent too on the EU getting their act together and addressing the
issue of overfishing of mackerel on an industrial scale around the
Faroes and Iceland.
On wet days I completed a long-needed upgrade of my commercial arm -
the image-library linked-to at the top of this page. With much larger
800-pixel width enlargements to look at, more detailed captions and a
very self-critical image selection process, the result is far more
focused, relevant to the area and - I hope - a pleasanter experience
for the user.
The clouded-up nights have given few opportunities to look for
noctilucent clouds since the stunning early-morning display of July
3rd. Some areas saw a great display on the night of July 9-10, but here
the first opportunity to lose most of a night's sleep was on the night
of the 13th-14th. I headed down to Borth at 10pm for the post-sunset
slot but nothing was doing - the twilight was beautiful, though:
Looking south, a couple of hours later, the near-full Thunder Moon was
lighting-up the wet sand and surf alike, so I ended up concentrating on
that:
From the top of the beach, the moonlight was casting shadows from the
groynes, an amazing sight:
Around 0030 I got my head down for an hour and a bit, then headed back
up the valley, continuing up to the top of the mountain road where I
had seen the amazing display 10 days previously.
Sure enough - there seem to have been better pre-sunrise than
post-sunset showings this year - the northern horizon was delicately
picked-out by those electric blue to white tendrils. Although this
display was
much lower on the horizon and less bright than the previous one, with
noctilucent clouds, any sighting is a result!
The
display
intensified
in brightness a little with an interesting ribbed
structure to its LHS:
Here it is in close-up:
Here are the Arans, faintly
silhouetted
and
no contest with July 3rd's surreal view:
In this image, Snowdon is just visible on the horizon in the centre....
As dawn approached, the mostly faint display faded out quickly and I
headed home, quite satisfied with being permitted another glimpse of
these mysterious clouds. They do not appear every night and despite
some clear conditions in recent days the early-morning alarms (i.e. get
up at 0200, look outside & check online for reports) have drawn
blanks - however, reporting no-shows is a scientifically-important part
of the observation-process as knowing when they do or do not appear, in
conjunction with other atmospheric observations, helps to build a
better picture of what makes these strange things tick.
Commonest around the solstice, the chances of seeing another display
this year are now diminishing, though sightings have been recorded in
August in previous years, so I won't give up just yet!
On the 21st I had to go to Newtown and on the return journey I headed
up to the top of the mountain-road again - this time to see if any
decent convective storms might develop. The lower atmosphere was
clearly very unstable, with strong convective towers shooting up all
over the place:
However, a mid-level temperature-inversion was present at about 10,000
feet, forming a cap beneath which the cloud was spreading out
sideways....
....forming mini-anvils, just like the process by which thunderstorm
anvils form at the huge inversion that marks the top of the Troposphere
- the Tropopause - but lower down. Thunderstorm anvils are made up of
cirrus-cloud - ice particles in other words. They are much higher-up
than the structures shown in these images - on the day in question the
Tropopause was at about 30,000 feet above surface. In this case, the
convective cloud is spreading out beneath the mid-level inversion to
form decks of stratocumulus, composed mostly of water droplets.
Heavy showers finally broke out to the north but were a rain-veiled
mess: the only thing of note was this intense rain-shaft - such things
are occasionally mistaken for tornadoes especially when seen in poor
visibility like this:
More summerlike conditions took over from the showery regime by the
23rd, so a trip to NW Wales was jumped at - every opportunity in a
mixed summer like this one deserves to be grabbed. En-route I stopped
at a spot I know well to see if the chanterelles were up - and they
were!
With a reasonable haul of these delicious mushrooms the trip was
already a success. Carrying on I arrived at Uwchmynydd, SW of
Aberdaron, early in the afternoon and walked out over the clifftops
towards my intended ledge. At the start of the descent, I looked north
to see a lone angler, dwarfed by the majesty and immensity of his
surroundings:
For four hours I fished hard, casting and retrieving the lures,
changing to different-coloured lures, using different lead weights to
vary the depth, for just 6 mackerel and 2 pollack! A little
disappointing, but the consolation was not having to carry a heavy
rucksack of fish back up "Cardiac Hill", as we call it. This shot is
taken halfway back up.....
Just after taking that, a gang of Choughs showed up. These birds, rare
in much of the UK, are a common sight here, but wary and - with a
maximum zoom of 200mm - hard to photograph. But on this occasion they
were doing fly-bys above and below me and close enough to get some
decent results, with the early evening sun illuminating their feathers:
I liked the simplicity of this shot, with the distinctive red-orange
bill open as the bird was calling to the others with that distinctive
sound from which their name stems:
An excellent end to a great day out.
Over at the garden, nasturtiums and marigolds are providing a big
splash of colour and keeping the bees happy:
Determined to
make the most of my catch, I got some charcoal going and set up the
smoker: first place oak-dust in the recess:
Add smoking-racks with boned mackerel - they have first been marinaded
in a sugary brine flavoured with lemon juice, garlic and pepper, then
rinsed and left to dry for an hour:
Put lid on smoker and give them about 20 minutes from when the smoke
first appears. Simple and very tasty - as the image shows I was too
keen to scoff some before taking a photo!
I keep meaning
to experiment with the smoker, hot-smoking some other fish-species that
are common locally but
not having spectacular culinary qualities - such as dogfish which we
catch all year round. If any readers have a good dogfish-marinading
recipe please get in touch! If I make one up that actually works I'll
post it on here.
Here's a visitor to the garden that I've not seen before - a Blackcap.
The main event in terms of wildlife is currently the cabbage-whites
that demand an inspection of my broccoli plants every 48 hours, if I
don't want to find they have been eaten into skeletons!
August will see a lot more gathering and a bit of hunting too, later in
the month - or perhaps earlier if sea-temperatures pick up and the
mackerel show in better numbers. It's been a strange year for sure -
the chilly unsettled early Summer has really slowed things up and the
buffeting the shallots had from a late-May gale seemed to slow their
development badly - plenty of them but many are small. Guess a big
pickling-session is called-for shortly....
More soon!
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