The Last

On seeing our recent post on the tahr, Carol Halberstadt contacted us saying that she had written the following poem in 2000 after reading an article in the Boston Globe about hunters killing the last Arabian wolf and the last tahr. Unfortunately, I can’t find the article in question, but clearly the demise of the tahr was exaggerated.

Imagine the loneliness
of the last wolf, her howl
unheard in the wilderness,
his place unmade.
What small tear in time remains?
They are lost with the untamed sheep,
gone from the hills.
Horns that summoned
the birthday of the world
are still, the rock
their feet wore, emptied,
the paths unfilled.

The bison walk this way,
shaggy and gentle.

(©2/29/00 Carol Snyder Halberstadt – used by permission)

Competing for heirlooms

The Independent has launched the Great British Butterfly Hunt.

In the Great British Butterfly Hunt we will seek to find and report on each one of our 58 varieties (56 residents and two Continental migrants)… We will report from right across the country on every single species.

But most importantly we are inviting you, the readers, to join us, and to see how many you can observe for yourselves. As the different species emerge at different moments of the spring and summer, we will be offering extensive guidance on identification and on how to find them. Some may well be in your back garden or local park. Others, especially the rarities, may involve a journey – albeit to the most beautiful parts of Britain.

To give an edge to it all, we are introducing an element of competition, and an unusual prize.

The person or group (such as a school class) which records the most species will win a special safari in late August, conducted by The Independent in conjunction with the charity Butterfly Conservation, to find the last butterfly of the summer – the most elusive of all the British species: the brown hairstreak.

A nice idea. Would it work for heirloom fruits and vegetables, say? Or pollinator species for that matter. Jeremy says they tried it at the Henry Doubleday Research Association ten years ago without a great deal of success. Any other examples out there?

More distributed fun

Our loyal reader will know I have a weakness for applications which harness the power of hordes of distributed internet users, especially if they involve mapping. There was the thing about digitizing herbarium sheets. And the thing about mapping photos of tomatoes. ((LATER: This just in from New Scientist.)) And of course there’s the Degree Confluence Project, which I thought I had blogged about but can’t find in our archives, so perhaps I didn’t, but I should.

The latest such project to come to my attention is called ScenicOrNot. The website presents you with a photograph of a location in Britain and you give it marks out of 10 for scenic beauty. Eventually, I suppose, there will be a map of scenic hotspots — and, for that matter, coldspots — but the developers are cagey about exactly why they are doing this. All fun enough, and possibly even useful, though I’m struggling to think of the agrobiodiversity relevance.

The photographs used by ScenicOrNot come from Geograph, which is doing a similar thing to the Degree Confluence Project, but only for Britain rather than the whole world. The idea is to document with a photograph every 1x1km grid square in the country: “8,570 users have contributed 1,267,685 images covering 242,182 grid squares, or 73.0% of the total.” Exploring that incredible resource does turn up some things of agricultural biodiversity interest. Check out, for example, the oast houses of Britain. The Degree Confluence dataset has been used to ground-truth a Global Map of Rainfed Cropland Areas. Not sure if a similar fate awaits the much denser British dataset.