Category: Tourism

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Cows manicure Burren

The limestone outcrop of the Burren is one of the natural wonders of Ireland — if not Europe — it’s criss-crossing grikes supporting a unique microenvironment and a similarly unique and varied flora. Not to mention generations of botanists. It is also, incidentally, “rich in historical and archaeological sites,” and a great tourist attraction for all these reasons. Now, cows are to play a part in maintaining the landscape.

Or rather, they are to continue playing such a role:

BurrenLife has provided the evidence that the role of cattle is the key factor in conserving the Burren: in controlling the spread of scrub; in ensuring increased biodiversity and in improving water quality.

I ran the article past the only Irishman to hand, and Danny said that
he thought the Burren is one of the only places in the temperate regions of the world where cattle are housed outside throughout the winter. Something to do with heat retention by limestone, or some aspect of the geology. Can anyone expand on this?

No word on whether the eco-friendly Burren cows are a local breed, though.

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Mini-cows a hit in the recession

I just can’t resist stories about miniature livestock. Despite the fact that we’re still getting 250 hits a week from people looking for the pocket pigs we mentioned in a one-line throwaway post two years ago. Or maybe because of that. But it is a serious thing:

…miniature Herefords consume about half that of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers.

Which all reminds me of the dwarf cattle I saw on Socotra some years back. I wonder if anything is being done with them. And with what I suppose must be their relatives in the Dhofar region of southern Oman. I can’t imagine they’ll long survive the rapid development that seems to be going on in both places.

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The symbolism of plants

With the forthcoming 12 monthly articles we want to give a certain insight into how former generations and cultures, having far less access to rational and experimental scientific knowledge than modern scientists, tried to explain and interpret their observations in the plant kingdom.

That’s from Riklef Kandeler and Wolfram Ullrich’s introduction to their series on “Symbolism of plants: examples of European-Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art” in the Journal of Experimental Botany. ((This seems to be something of a tradition. There was a similar monthly series on plant culture in 2002 by Nicholas H. Battey.)) It started last January, and each month brings a new plant. June’s installment has just come out. It’s on lilies. No crops, really, though some of the plants treated are used as food (e.g. Crocus). The focus is on plants which carry with them the heaviest symbolic baggage. You can set up an alert with the journal to tell you when the next in the series will come out.

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Prizes for stunning garden photographs

The UK’s International Garden Photographer of the Year award have just been announced. The New Scientist has a nice selection. The competition’s website has all the category winners and finalists. There are some really great photos, including of crop plants. But I was disappointed that few of the photographs celebrated diversity per se, but rather took a somewhat reductionist, or perhaps minimalist, view. Having said that, there were exceptions.

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Visualizing agrobiodiversity in markets

I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.