Snippets

Today is cold, wet and windy. We have had a lot of rain recently and is certainly beginning to feel rather wintery. A couple of weeks ago we had some strong easterly gales (an unusual wind direction for here). During them a group of cattle egrets turned up on the grass near the harbour looking rather bedraggled. Looking them up in the bird book I found that some do turn up from time to time in the autumn, blown here from South America, but they don't usually survive the winter here. The puzzling thing is that they would need a westerly wind to get here, unless they had been blown from Africa but that seems unlikely. They stayed a couple of days and then disappeared. They were very shy so I couldn't get very close to take pictures.
At the weekend our clocks went back an hour so that has made it extra gloomy in the afternoons. Unfortunately I was working nights so Saturday night was extra long. We are now 5 hours behind UK. Time here is a bit unusual as there is Stanley time and Camp time! I think it is that people on the farms don't change to summer time so that for half the year they are an hour different to town.

I think the colder weather combined with my trapping efforts has reduced the earwig population in the polytunnel - too late to grow much though! However the number in the house has greatly increased. When I moved my boots in the utility room this afternooon there were at least a dozen hiding under them.

The upland geese have returned to the garden, mostly grazing the lawns. The wind netting fence has stopped them walking into my vegetable plot but 2 did fly in one day and were then trapped in there! I have several times seen them standing on top of my rockery looking over the fence at the vegetables rather longingly.

A couple of weeks ago I put a wanted ad in the penguin news for fruit and flower plants or cuttings. A lady at Fox Bay on West Falkland kindly sent me 4 young blackcurrant bushes on the plane. Someone in Stanley gave me a bag of strawberry runners which I have put in pots in the polytunnel for the winter. I have now been offered some raspberry canes and some rhubarb roots by different people and a retired couple who I met at the swimming pool gave me lots of cuttings of shrubs from their lovely garden and also quite a lot of plants. With all the rain it has been quite difficult getting them all planted. People are very kind.

I also advertised for a wheelbarrow but didn't get any offers so I bought a new one which is making moving all the rocks from the area I am digging much easier. The next time we went to the tip we saw one there but it was smaller than mine and I resisted the temptation to take that as well.

Tommorrow is a public holiday for the queens birthday and there will be a parade in town with representatives from all the forces, youth organisations, councillors and the governor. There is also a visiting military band. Most people here are very patriotic.

Stone runs

Stone runs are a fascinating feature of the Falklands landscape, occuring in areas of hard quartzite rock. Charles Darwin, after visiting in HMS Beagle in 1833-34, wrote in his journal "In many parts of the islands the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming 'streams of stones'...They are not thrown together into irregular piles, but are spread out into level sheets or great streams."
During the last ice age the islands were repeatedly deep frozen and battered by icy winds. Only a few small glaciers formed on the lee side of the highest mountains, but intense weathering of exposed rock on hilltops by repeated freezing and thawing left behind residual tors surrounded by frost shattered rock debris.The local term stone run is used both for the extensive boulder fields up to a kilometre wide and to remarkable stripes on the hillsides produced by linear, parallel alternations of boulders and vegetated ground. Scientifically these are periglacial blockfields and blockstreams.
Cycles of freezing and thawing first broke up the rocks and then heaved and sorted the resulting debris. As the seasonally thawing ground slowly crept downhill over the deeper layer of permafrost it flowed out onto the lower areas.
Excavation shows that the largest boulders form the top part of a stone run with the size of the blocks decreasing downwards. The uppermost boulders have been leached by rainwater to a pale grey colour and are usually covered by lichens. Lower down, where the boulders have been protected from the weather, they are invariably stained orange by iron oxides.

Mount Usborne

On Sunday we went with the ramblers to Mount Usborne, The Falkland's highest peak at 2312 feet. We drove for about 1 1/2 hours from Stanley, past Mount Pleasant towards San Carlos, then headed off road to Ceritos where there is an old stone corral. Some of the group stopped here to have a more leisurely walk whilst 8 of us drove a bit further up the hiilside before starting walking.
We have had lots of rain over the past couple of weeks so the ground was quite wet but we had sunshine for most of the day with only a few brief squalls.

We first walked round the hillside for a bit to see a memorial to the crew of a phantom plane that had crashed into the hillside in 1983 and then headed up, crossing numerous small stone runs. It was quite a hard uphill slog and I was glad to take frequent short breaks to admire the view behind us to Goose Green.As the slope levelled out towards the summit the wind increased so that at times it was hard to stand up and my eyes were watering so it was hard to see. A little shelter was provided by the summit cairn where we ate our lunch whilst flurries of snow swirled around us.
We then descended a little way down the north side of the mountain to get a view down the cliffs to Black Tarn. This is one of the few areas of glaciation on the islands with tarns in steep-sided cols. It is thought to have been largely too dry and/or windy for glaciers to form during the ice age.We then followed along the ridge, with the tarns below us, to Mount Usborne 2, a little lower than Usborne 1. From there we headed back downhill towards our vehicles, crossing a large stone run which makes quite challenging walking, especially as many of the stones are balanced and tip when you stand on them.
We passed the wreckage of the phantom plane, mostly in small pieces scattered over a large area. Presumably the 2 crew died quickly but I couldn't help thinking what it must have felt like to suddenly realise that you were about to fly into a mountainside.
After a welcome cup of tea at the car we drove back to Stanley seeing lots of rainbows on the way.

Memorial service

Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of a fire which destroyed the hospital here in Stanley on April 10th 1984. At the time it was a joint military and civilian hospital and the older parts of the building were of wooden construction. Fire doors which could have slowed the spread of the fire had never been ordered and due to problems with the towns water supply fire hoses could not function.
When fire broke out in the early hours of the morning 8 people lost their lives including a mother and newborn baby, 5 other patients and a British nurse who died whilst attempting to save those in her care.
Although a conviction was never made it appears this was not a tragic accident but the fire was deliberately started by a person in a position of trust.
A short memorial service was held in the hospital garden at 8.30am on Friday. There were lots of people there. In a small community like this I guess most people are in some way connected to at least one of the people who died.
It seemed fitting that this was also Good Friday when we remember Jesus giving up his life so that we could be saved. We had a service at the Tabernacle at 10am with hymns, readings, prayers and communion.

Ramble in March

The local ramblers group meet on the second Sunday of the month and we usually join them although we would prefer it if they met on Saturday as we like to get to church on Sunday. However it is a good opportunity to meet different people and to go to places it would otherwise be difficult to find or get permission to access.

During the summer we have mostly been to beach destinations so families can come along but in March we had a hill walk. It turned out to be a beautifully clear and sunny day. We drove westwards along the main road towards Mount Pleasant and then headed offroad through Riverside Farm towards the mountain range, skirting our way up beside a large stone run.

These are a very strange geological feature here formed in the ice ages and are like rivers of angular rocks. I will blog more about them another time when I can find some better photos.
We then walked up to a rocky outcrop called Church Rocks.
We scrambled up the boulders behind the outcrop to have our elevenses on the top.The small bushy plants at the front of this picture are diddle dee which is widespread here. It produces tiny red berries which are very sour and fiddly to pick, but can be used to make jam and jelly. The bright green mounds are balsam bog, a plant which has tightly packed branching stems which form such a tight mass you can stand on them and it makes no impression. From the top there were some great views of the mountains and the inlets to the north.
On our way down from Church Rocks I was shown my first snake plant although it was only a small example. This unusual plant only grows in the stone runs of the Falkland Islands, snaking its way up between the boulders with stems several feet in length.
We then followed the ridge around and crossed the boundary fence into Bluff Cove farm, heading up to another series of rocky outcrops called The Cliffs. We had been warned not to touch any strange objects we might find as there is still ordinance from the conflict in the area but we didn't see any.
Lunch was had on this peak although it was hard to find shelter from the wind which had picked up considerably by then. We then skirted our way back around the hillside to the cars, picking our way through the stone runs.