Sie whale on Carcass Island

Not sure what happened just now when I went to start this and a blank blog suddenly published itself!
A couple of weeks ago the body of an enormous sei whale was washed up on Carcass Island on a beach near the North West Point (fortunately well away from the settlement).
When it was found by the island's owner there were hundreds of giant petrels around it. They had gorged so much on the whale that they were too heavy to take off.
The whale was estimated to be between 56 and 58 feet long. It was lying with its head towards the sea and there were no obvious injury marks. Sei are the most common whales in these waters but are very shy.

Mount Harriet

On Sunday afternoon we took a short drive out of Stanley on the Mount Pleasant road and then walked up Mount Harriet. At 442 metres it is really only a hill, but that is its name, and it was an easy walk up to the ridge. The weather had been quite unsettled all day. We stopped to pick and eat a few tea berries on the way. These are small, sweet pink berries which grow at ground level on small shrubby plants.These are diddle dee berries which are edible but much more bitter. You can make jam and jelly from them but they are tiny to pick (much smaller than a pea). The upland geese feed on them in the winter and I am not sure why they had not tackled this particularly heavy fruiting plant.
Near the ridge is a cross commemorating 2 British soldiers who lost their lives there during the conflict. The peak was taken by the 42 Commando Royal Marines on 11th - 12th June 1982. They had been doing night reconnaisance for the previous 10 nights through the mine fields, and so managed to approach from behind within 150 metres at 2 am before they were spotted. Ultimately 2 of them were killed and 26 injured, whilst the Argentinians suffered 50 deaths and 300 captured.
All along the ridge are large rock slabs and pinnacles and piles of boulders. There is still some debris like batteries and radio wires lying around. We scrambled up some of the rocks but did not make it to the highest point as by that time a gale was blowing and a blizzard had arrived. The summit cairn is atop some particularly exposed and slightly overhanging rocks. At times it was almost impossible to stand up.
By the time I had realised my photographic errors it was getting rather dusky so some of the pictures are not too clear.
This is a view over Port Harriet (the inlet of the sea). You can just see the abbatoir and the wind farm with 3 turbines.

camera problems

Well actually the problems are with the operator not the camera! Firstly I thought I had moved some photos from one file on the computer to another but sadly I seem to have managed to cut them but not paste them and they have disappeared. Then when we went to Port Louis with the ramblers the Sunday before last I forgot to charge the battery so found the camera was dead when we got there, so no pictures. This Sunday afternoon we went for a walk up Mount Harriet and I was happily snapping away but thought something was not as usual. I tried to ask Simon about it but it was so windy that he couldn't hear me. It was only towards the end of our walk I found the camera was set to video and we had some very strange footage! I did manage to get a few photos before we came down though.

I have been very busy at work as the ward is quite short staffed at the moment. I did nearly 40 hours last week and have 4 shifts this week - hence little time for blogging or correspondence.
Simon enjoyed several hours windsurfing on Saturday, made more fun by the fact that our neighbour was out in his dinghy so he had someone to race around. It was a relatively mild and sunny day and I might have been tempted to go too but was waiting for a farmer to deliver 2 lambs, some diced and minced beef and some beef joints to go in the freezer. We had a shoulder of lamb for dinner last night and it was delicious. Unfortunately the freezer which we bought second hand a few weeks ago and which has been running very cold now seems to be struggling to freeze the meat.

After coming in from windsurfing Simon helped me finish putting up a fence to enclose my extended vegetable plot which I am gradually digging. I still need to make a gate and I suspect a second rockery is going to be required soon.

Just to prove to myself, if not to anyone else,that I can do this photo thing here are a couple of pictures of the sky yesterday evening, taken from just outside our front door.

The Falklands have some stunning sunrises and sunsets but we don't see much of them from our house.

Winter on its way

After a nice sunny start today has turned cold wet and windy. The weekend was very calm - much to Simon's disappointment as he had hoped to get out windsurfing. He did however service our bicycles.
Saturday afternoon we went out to Gypsy Cove and had a walk. It is strange being there with no penguins about. Having bred and moulted the magellanics have now all gone back to sea until next spring. We noticed a large flock of birds on the sea in Port William. They were mostly kelp gulls and rock shags but we did spot 2 penguins at the front of the group. The penguins and shags kept diving and the whole group were very active and moving along quite quickly. We presumed there must be a shoal of fish swimming along that they were feeding on.
Last Tuesday we had some hail storms and snow showers so it really felt winter was on its way, although we have had some sunny days since.
I have just looked out of the window and seen a gull flying backwards at some speed, presumably unable to cope with the wind up there!
The upland geese continue to regularly graze the lawns and 2 cattle egrets sometimes come in the garden but are extremely shy.
The previous weekend we went for a walk from Surf Bay. The easterly gales we had a few weeks ago washed away large ammounts of sand from the beach and the bottom of the dunes at the end of the beach, exposing previously hidden rocks. Huge piles of kelp were deposited on the remaining sand. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all the pictures I took of this.
Heading up towards Cape Pembroke we passed some small cliffs where lots of rock shags nest and perch.As it was fairly windy the waves were breaking and sending spray high into the air. We found some pieces of aircraft wreckage amongst the rocks, presumably from the conflict.

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.