Workin' on the quays

Kinsale is a destination for continental grain, milled locally into pig and chicken feed. It's common to find corn kernals on the roadsides around town, spilled from the trucks.















Kinsale's main pier.


Shane's boat, leaned against the quay wall so he can do some propeller shaft work.











Not a green roof in the permaculture sense, a result instead of the wet climate and plenty of grain dust in the wind.

Irish woodlands (the birch, oak, & beech)

Songbird sightings

Stonechat (saxicola torquata) down by the marsh. Our guide book says they, "perch prominently on tops of bushes."



Blue tit (Parus caeruleus)



A male chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs).


The great tit (Parus major) largest of all the tits has 57 distinct calls and songs.


Hmm. Sort of stumped on this one. Some of the colors of the goldfinch but the patterns are off.


An insect eating gray wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) is often found near water.


The European robin (Erithacus rubecula)

Walkin' home

This is our walk home from town. It would be illegal for me to work, but for some reason Jen and I end up making the walk most nights. The picture of the moon and Jupiter is from January when they and Venus were apparently traveling together.

Famine Village

These is the remains of a nearby settlement that was deserted due to The Famine. We don't have any other details than that. The trails to it are overgrown and fenced off.

A Fin Whale's ending

Two weeks everyone got news of a fin whale who swam into Courtmacsherry Bay. It was the talk of the town and within days it seemed that everyone had ventured on over to take a look. Those that waited saw more of it's inside than it's outside and we wonder what the kids thought of that. We made only one trek, about 24 hours after it died.





























The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group chronologed the stranding, biopsy, and removal process.
http://www.iwdg.ie/article.asp?id=2204

Something of a tussle broke out between the two nearest villages, each claiming that they were heirs to the skeleton. Courtmacsherry, situated in full view of the whale (see the second photo), seemed like an appropriate place to build a display...to outsiders like us. Residents of Kilbrittain felt otherwise. They argued that the whale perished on their side of the bay's centerline, and though their town center is a kilometer or so inland, it is there that a display should be built. Indeed it's residents were credited with most of the effort in trying to remove the carcass, with staging and access coming from their side. Undeterred, Courtmacsherry residents made a low-tide midnight attempt at the jawbone, but the sounds of wheeling chainsaws alerted Kilbritain's best who rushed across the mud flat to renew their claim, or so the rumor goes. They retrieved the jaw and hid it until the furor died down.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/villagers-in-row-over-ownership-of-whale-carcass-1607151.html?start=2

And finally, whale removal lessons from Florence, Oregon, 1970.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_t44siFyb4&eurl=http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/