This blog post has now moved to my Marine Biology website, Marine-bio-images.com. It can be read at:
Lyme Bay, Lane’s Ground Reef: sponge species recovery and opportunities lost
New gallery uploaded – Lyme Bay Seabed Images and Lyme Bay Reefs
A rich epifaunal turf forms on the tide-swept edge of a rocky reef, Saw-tooth ledges Reef, Lyme bay, Southwest England. Image No. MBI001163
I’ve started creating a dedicated gallery of stock images documenting the seabed habitats and species of Lyme Bay. This gallery will include Lyme bay Reefs, for which the Lyme Bay Closed Area was set up to protect, and will catalogue the diversity of these reefs, but will also document some of the interesting sedimentary habitats which usually fail to receive the attention they merit. These and more Lyme Bay images can be seen here.
A sediment covered limestone boulder reef in Lyme Bay, Southwest England. The bright yellow tassled sponge Iophon hyndmani or Iophonopsis nigricans (the two species cannot be positively differentiated underwater) can be seen in the centre of the image. Image No. MBI001162
Along the tide-swept crest of a low limestone ledge larger filter-feeding organisms flourish. Lyme Bay Reefs, Southwest England. Image No. MBI001156
A scallop, Pecten maximus, swim away from a perceived threat. Gravel waves, Lyme Bay, Southwest England. Image No. MBI001173
All the images in this blog are available to license. To view a gallery (license images or purchase prints of) these, and more of my Lyme Bay seabed images go here. Alternatively you can search all my online stock images at my www.colinmunro.photoshelter.com site through the search box (top right) here or on my main website here. Lyme Bay Reefs images, Lyme Bay seabed images, stock images.
All the images in this blog are available to license. To view a gallery (license images or purchase prints of) these, and more of my North east Atlantic marine invertebrate images go here. Alternatively you can search all my online stock images at my www.colinmunro.photoshelter.com site through the search box (top right) here or on my main website here. swimming crab images, Liocarcinus depurator images, necora puber images, stock images.
Flying crabs
A crab is neither the most graceful nor aerodynamic creature in the sea. Okay you probably knew that already. At first glance it does not appear to be designed for flight, its squat, angular body, entirely encased in a thick, heavy shell. A crab attempting to fly would seem as sensible as attempting to run a marathon wearing a suit of armour. But then, as anyone who has watched the London marathon will know, people do attempt – and succeeded – in running marathons in suits of armour. So why shouldn’t crabs fly?
I have been a little loose with the term ‘fly’; okay, they fly underwater. They are collectively known as swimming crabs. This group includes such species as the blue crab (Callinnectes sapidus) which is found around the coasts of North and South America, the red-eyed and fearless velvet swimming crab (Necora puber) that is common on shallow rocky reefs around the coast of UK and much of Europe, and the blue-legged swimming crab (Liocarcinus depurator) also common in shallow waters around UK and Europe but preferring sandier areas.
the distinctive wild red eyes and aggressive posture of a velver swimming crab (Necora puber). Note the broad swimmerets. Image No. MBI001256
A common feature of all these crabs is the adaptation of the fifth walking leg for propulsion through the water. Crab legs are mostly fairly spindly affairs, ending in points on which they tippy-toe across the sea bed. The final articulated segment of swimming crab legs is flattened and splayed into a paddle shape. Additionally they are edged with long thick hairs, effectively widening the paddle blade. These swimming legs are known as pleopods (from the Greek plein, to sail or to swim, and pods – legs) or swimmerets.
Swimming crab, Liocarcinus depurator, swimming in mid-water. Image No. MBI001254.
I started this by stating that crabs were not really designed to fly (or swim for that matter). This is true. Swimming marine creatures conjures up images of graceful fluid movements. That is not swimming crabs. Generally swimming crabs swim when disturbed, as a means of escaping real or perceived danger. They launch themselves off the seabed, flailing wildly as if convulsing through being wired up to high voltage electricity. For seconds, or at most a few minutes, the crab will move erratically through the water. As it tires its legs will slow; the crab will drift back down to the seabed, to scuttle away hopefully haven shaken off its pursuer.
Close up of a swimming crab, Liocarcinus depurator, swimming in mid-water. Image No. MBI001254CP2
Watching a crab frantically waving its legs in an attempt to defy gravity, as it descends inexorably back to solid seabed I am always struck by the uncanny resemblance to another quirky British tradition (apart from wearing ridiculous costumes for marathons) that of the birdman competition. This is an annual event held in several seaside towns, most notably Bognor Regis, where the great British eccentric emerges to don one-piece stripey swimsuits, circa 1900, batman masks, vinyl capes and wings that appear to be constructed from broom handles and ostrich feathers. Suitably attired they launch themselves off the end of the town jetty. Arms flaying wildly in an attempt to defy gravity (now you see where I’m coming from) they perform a graceless parabola and they too, descend inexorably to the sea below.
The first birdman competition (according to Wikipedia) occurred in Selsey, West Sussex, in 1971. How long have crabs been launching themselves off the seabed, attempting to escape the limitations imposed by a million years of evolution, no-one knows. Perhaps they have been sitting, half-buried, on the seabed, watching and pondering on ill-designed creatures in strange garb plunge in to the sea as they attempt to escape their own limitations. Perhaps flying crabs are a recent phenomenon, the dreamers inspired by eccentrics in sleepy seaside towns.
All the images in this blog are available to license. To view a gallery (license images or purchase prints of) these, and more of my North east Atlantic marine invertebrate images go here. Alternatively you can search all my online stock images at my www.colinmunro.photoshelter.com site through the search box (top right) here or on my main website here. Edible crab images, Cancer pagurus images, stock images.
Edible crabs
The pie-crust edged shell of the European edible crab, Cancer pagurus, is one of the most familiar sights in fishmongers windows and supermarket fish counters. Known by British fishermen as the brown crab, due to the deep reddish-brown colouration of its shell. This is the crab we normally eat as ‘dressed crab’, with the crab meat served arranged in the open crab shell. Juvenile edible crabs are often found under boulders by children rock pooling on the shore, their reddish-brown colour and much more chunky claws (chelipeds) easily distinuishing them from the more common shore crab (Carcinus maenus).
Edible crab or brown crab, Cancer pagurus, close up, showing eyes. MBI000266
Adults generally live further offshore, down to about 200 metres depth. Away from rocky areas edible crabs tend to bury themselves in ther sediment. They’re pretty well camouflaged when they do this, one has to look pretty hard to make out the outline of their shell or see the two beady little eyes watching to see if you’ve spotted them.
An edible crab, Cancer pagurus, lying hidden in a shallow depression it has dug in the sediment. Image No. MBI001178
Edible crabs are prodigious excavators of sandy or muddy seabeds. During the course of a dive one can often observe numerous large shallow ‘craters’ created by edible crabs.
An edible crab, Cancer pagurus, digs in to algae covered sediment to create a depression in which to hide. Image No. MBI001171
Migrations
Within the English Channel edible crabs undertake interesting migrations. Females tend to move west or southwest; they can travel 2-3 kilometers a day, with some travelling up to 200 miles. They larvae, which are planktonic for 60-90 days, tend to drift east, thus restocking the areas from which the adults migrated (Pawson, 1995). Mating occurs in spring, shortly after the females have moulted, but the sperm is stored by the females and eggs are fertilised once they move offshore the following winter.
Lifespan and minimum landing sizes
Edible crabs generally live for 25-30 years. There are various reports of them living up to 100 years but it’s hard to assess how reliable these reports are. The minum landing size various regionally in UK waters between 130 and 140mm across the carapace. In Devon, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles this is increased (for male crabs only) to 160mm.
Fun facts
The largest edible crab ever caught in British waters is believed to be one landed, not by a commercial fisherman, but by an amatuer diver. Paul Worsley landed a 17lb crab with a 12 inch wide shell in July 2008. This monster was caught on the wreck of the Empress of India, a British battleship dating from the 1890s that lies in deep water in Lyme Bay, Southwest England.
An edible crab, Cancer pagurus, raises its large heavy claws (chelipeds) adopting a defensive posture. Image No. MBI001249
An edible crab, Cancer pagurus, attempting to hide in maerl gravel. Image No. MBI001250
All images copyright Colin Munro
www.colinmunrophotography.com
www.colinmunro.photoshelter.com
All the images in this blog are available to license. To view a gallery (license images or purchase prints of) these, and more of my North east Atlantic marine invertebrate images go here. Alternatively you can search all my online stock images at my www.colinmunro.photoshelter.com site through the search box (top right) here or on my main website here.
References
Pawson, M., G. 1995. Biogeographical identification of English Channel fish and shellfish stocks. Fisheries Research Technical Report (number 99), MAFF Direct Fisheries Research Lowestoft, England. Available from: http://www.cefas.co.uk/Publications/techrep/tech99.pdf
Feeling very motivated. Making coffee still in my sleeping bag, about and hour before dawn, Dartmoor, mid-winter.
I thought it about time I put a bit about me on my website, who I am, what I do, what I’ve done that’s fit to print and what motivates me…why I do it. So here goes.
My twin passions are the marine environment and photography. I’ve been a diver for a long time. I started out a thousand years or so back as an army diver in the British army, however after far too long grovelling around in freezing cold black water in the middle of the night I finally accepted that this wasn’t going to bring me the lifestyle that watching every episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau had led me to expect. So at 19 I ended up in Africa, Mombasa to be precise, more by accident than design. I spent a couple of seasons there working on the wreck of the Santo Antonio de Tanna a 17th Century Portuguese shipwreck, then a short spell as a ship’s diver on an ocean going salvage tug, but what Kenya did mostly was rekindle my passion for wildlife and wild places.
I’ve always loved wild places. Spitzbergen, Svalbard. Wonder why I’ve a bad back now?
Returning to the UK and to university I eventually ended up with a masters degree – they were obviously keen to get rid of me – and so began a 20-odd year career participating in and running biological diving surveys. My photography career has grown in parallel to my marine biological work. Initially because pictures were required to illustrate reports and well…someone had to take them. My first camera was not a land camera but an underwater one, an ancient Nikonos III. Almost completely mechanical and fully manual, I spent many hours lost in concentration under an old wooden pier, gradually improving my skills through trial and error. Mostly error actually. The skills learned there did serve me well though. With no automation, no light meter and no automatic flash control you were forced to learn the fundamental laws of light and optics and the interaction with water. The turbid waters of the Clyde Estuary were not very forgiving, so one had to pay attention to these laws if you wanted to get any usable images at all out of a 36 exposure film roll.
Currently I am based in Exeter, south Devon, England, living on a rather old wooden trawler converted to sail (a ‘work in progress’). I split my time between photography, running workshops and lecturing and marine environmental survey. That is when not head down in the bilges of my boat cursing, effecting some repair, or escaping on to Dartmoor.
An old wooden boat is rather like the Forth Road Bridge. Painting and repairs never end.
Nowadays, where Photoshop is not just a software package but a verb, ‘he/she’s been Photoshopped‘, the concept that ‘the camera never lies‘ is one few of us still believe. But images are still powerful, and they still have the ability to change things. In a World now flooded with images it is unlikely a single image will ever have the same power to change the course of events as Nick Ut’s picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Nevertheless we live in a image-based World and images can still change public perception and attitude to social and environmental issues in a way that dry, dusty reports never will. So for me taking pictures is, of course, about creating beautiful images, and it’s about the satisfaction of creating technically difficult or hard to get images; but the greatest satisfaction comes from creating images that inform or change peoples attitudes however slightly.
You can find me on Google+ , Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of my stock photography images are available at http://colinmunro.photoshelter.com. This can also be searched directly from my main website www.colinmunrophotography.com where you will also be able to buy fine art prints of my work and find information on photography training courses I run.
Back to my main website
Dense beds of mature pink seafans (Eunicella verrucosa), some almost a metre across, growing on pristine reef in Lyme Bay.
In 2008, the UK Government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) closed an area of Lyme Bay, some 60 square miles in extent, roughly 10 per cent of the bay, to mobile benthic fishing gear. By mobile benthic fishing gear I mean gear that is towed across the seabed, i.e. bottom fishing trawl nets and scallop dredges. This closure was brought in to protect fragile seabed habitats and the associated marine life, in particular the subtidal rocky reefs and boulder and cobble reefs, known to occur in the central and eastern part of the bay. We’ve known for a long time, at least the late 1980s, that such heavy gear could be highly destructive to some reef species, especially fragile or soft tissued attached species such as sponges and soft corals. Of greatest concern was the increase in scallop dredging. Changes in the quota system, markets and fish prices had lead to the number of boats working with scallop dredges increasing dramatically in the late 1980s. The number of boats operating solely as scallop dredgers had also increased (vessels will often switch gear thoughout the year as fish species migrate and quotas change); thus the overall intensity of scalloping had rocketed. As far back as 1991, I conducted dive surveys for the Devon Wildlife Trust; we had heard reports from recreational divers of swathes of destruction on previously pristine reef areas. What we found was even more disturbing, not only were areas of reef being scraped clean of attached life, the very stucture of the reef was changing.
Scallop dredger in Lyme Bay. A scallop dredger hauling dredges (4 each side) to emtpy catch.
Amongst the more interesting reef areas in Lyme Bay are the boulder and cobble reefs and the mudstone ledge reefs. Boulder and cobble reefs are basically level boulder fields, most of the boulders are small, roughly football-sized and so the heavy scallop dredges can bounce and rattle across these boulders without getting damaged themselves, picking up the occasional scallop as they go. What also happens though is that the boulders are lifted out of the sediment, rolled along and banged together. As this happens the sponges and soft corals growing on the boulders are ripped off or ground to shreds. The steel teeth of the dredges rake into the sediment as the dredge travels, stirring up clouds of sediment which then subsequently settles on top of the boulders. The attached species that managed to survive intact are then smothered in a layer of sediment, blocking their delicate filter-feeding organs.
Mudstone reefs are composed of blue lias clay. This is the same hard, slate-like clay that can be seen in the fossil-rich cliffs that line much of the coast of Lyme Bay. As this clay can easily be shattered by a fossil hunters hammer, the effects of half a ton of toothed dredges being hauled across such ledges by a powerful fishing boat are quite devastating. The ledges simply crumble. Now as any good marine biologist knows, most of the larger attached fauna on reefs are filter feeding organisms – sponges, hydroids, soft corals, bryozoans etc., and as every hydrographer (and diver) knows, currents accelerate around the edges of ledges and promentories due to entrainment. So of course all the life clusters around the edges of ledges where the rich feeding currents are. Grind away the edges and you remove maybe 80% of the attached fauna and – most importantly – virtually all the large colonies. The large colonies are the structure-forming ones that provide new niches for other species, they are often the slow-growing species that can take years to re-establish (where possible), and they are also the ones with the largest reproductive potential: for example, a big seafan colony that’s maybe 15 or 20 years old is going to release many time more eggs or larvae than a little one about 5 years old thats only just reached reporductive maturity. So when the big colonies are removed this alone may drastically affect the ability of a species to maintain or re-establish its population in an area.
Reef badly damaged by scallop dredgers
So to put it mildly, the situation was not good, and was rapidly deteriorating. It only took one boat working across a reef to remove so much life that it would take years for recovery to occur. Six months of boats intensively working an area could (and did) irreversably change the structure of some reefs. As scallop stocks declined on the so-called ‘clean ground’ (areas of sandy seabed) boast began to work closer to the edges of reefs, nibbling away at the edges. Fish finders and echo sounders improved in quality, so skippers could see exactly which way ledges rose up, enabling them to work close around the most rugged ledges and pinnacles. DECCA became standard for position fixing, then was replaced by GPS, allowing every more accurate positioning of where the roughest points to be avoided were, so boats could work into reefs where previously they dare not enter. The power of vessels also increased, so when dredges did become stuck fast on a rocky ledge or large boulder the solution was often to turn on the power and pull free, often with devastating consequences for the reef. I personally witnessed this many times over the years. Boats would dredge right up the the edge of a reef, gradually extending further and further in to it through the day as the edges were ground down or boulders rolled away. Occasionally a dredger would come fast. You could see it stop dead in the water and list over to one side where the dredges on that side were caught. Watching from a couple of hundred metres away you would hear the engine rev, see the vessel sink deeper on the caught side, then suddenly lurch free to carry on around again.
Scallop dredger heeling over as the dredges on one side catch fast on the seabed.
On one occasion (whilst conducting dive surveys on a reef composed of large limestone boulders) we watched twelve dredgers work around in tight circles clipping in to the reef again and again for over six hours. We took position fixes and returned at dusk with stills and video cameras. It was about forty minutes steaming time to reach this offshore reef and the sun was disappearing as we descended to the reef and swum on a bearing towards where we had seen the boats working. It was quite black without lights when we hit the bottom at around 28 metres, visibility was very poor as the water was still full of suspended sediment from the dredgers working earlier. Even so the transition from pristine to ‘worked’ reef was clear cut and the devastating effects of that one day’s dredging were unmistakable. The entire seabed was carpeted in a layer of fine sediment, detached soft corals drifted loosely across the reef, detached seafans lay flat partially buried in sediment, fragments of the plates of ross coral (a bryozoan) littered the reef. Large boulders lay overturned with still attached seafans protruding from underneath. Only isolated patched of undisturbed reef remained where the dredgers had been working. Video footage taken during this dive, showing pristine reef from the start of the dive and damaged reef encountered later in the dive, can be downloaded from the link below (48Mb, plays in Windows Media Player or Quicktime Player).
East Tennants Reef following scallop dredging 2002
Thus began a long road to the establishment of protection for the reefs. An 18 year long campaign driven by the Devon Wildlife Trust finally lead to stautory protection for the reefs in 2008. So what has this acheived? I’ll address this in Part 2 of this blog.
Update 10th July 2012, New blog: Lyme Bay, what makes it special?
All images and text (C) Colin Munro Photography.
A clear but unobtrusive logo helps identify the image as yours.
Why add a copyright logo?
Posting images online is a great way to get your images seen but (there’s always a but) it does leave you open to image theft and unauthorised use. While there are various tricks around – disabling right-clicking, placing images in Flash displays etc., if someone knows what they are doing and are prepared to put a tiny bit of effort ito it they can lift your image. For a photographer it is not always desirable anyway to prevent people doing this; potential buyers may want to store a copy of some images to browse later or as a reminder. In this way photographs can be like business cards, and we don’t ask for those back as we leave the conference hall do we? But like any form of advertising we want the (potential) client to remember where the image came and, most importantly, who it belongs to. Now this can (and should) be done adding to the image metadata, however this is not immediately obvious and must be actively searched for (it can also be stripped out, unintentionally or otherwise, by some programmes). A simply logo has the advantage that it is immediately obvious so is like branding – the more your image is shared around the more people associate it with your name and or website.
What should it include?
There is more than one way to do so, this just happens to be my preferred way. Thekey information I want included are 1. my name; 2. clear identification of my copyright 3. a quickway the viewer can locate me, and 4. a quick way for the viewer to find more of my images. This obviously has to be done as succinctly as possible, no-one wants to look at an image covered in screeds of text. 1 and 2 are easy to combine as (C) Colin Munro Photography; it helps in my case that my business name includes my own name so there is no confusion as to exactly where the copyright lies and no need to repeat both seperately. With 3 and 4 I could include both my email and website, but as my email is very clearly displayed on my website I chose to keep things compact and just go with my website.
Ok, so to creating a logo.
These instructions apply to Photoshop, however the workflow is similar in other editing packages. You have you final image, resized for the web and suitably sharpened. Decide on the colour you want the text to be (generally white or black) and set this as the foreground colour using the set foreground and background colours icon in the toolbar. Click on the Horizontal Type Tool. The icon is a capital T, located in the toolbar. This will change the horizontal toolbar at the top of the window to change and display font, font size, formattint etc. Select the approximate font size you’d like (you may have to experiment here). Clicking on the type tool will also create a new layer (visible in the layers sidebar) which will be the active layer in which text will be created. Then simply position the cursor approximately where you’d like the text to start and begin typing. Once your text is all typed out it may not be ideally positioned, or it may appear slightly too large or too small. To rectify this click on the ‘move’ tool (the cross with arrowheads at all four compass points). This will make the text a selection which can be be moved, shrunk or expanded using the cursor. However if you do re-size you will need to apply the transformation (by clicking again on the move tool and then selecting ‘apply transformation’ in the pop-up box) before you can complete other tasks. Sometimes you may not want your copyright logo too prominent; one way to change this is to reduce the opacity, making is partially transparent. This can be done using the opacity slider in the layers dialogue sidebar. Once your text is suitably sized, positioned and has the right level of opacity, your final task is to flatten the image, merging your text with the underlying picture. Simply click on the layers tab; right at the bottom of the drop-down menu you will see ‘flatten image’. Select this, save and your image is ready to upload. Of course we can automate this process by creating batch processing actions in Photoshop, but that’s for another blog. For those based in Exeter, Devon, I am currently running Digital Photography classes later this month and will also be running Photoshop classes subject to demand.
A friend of mine recently complained that she wished winter would hurry up and end so she could get out and start taking photographs again. No, no! I contradicted, winter is a fantastic time for taking photographs; all those heavy, brooding skies, the low sun, those stormy seas and frost-coated landscapes. It’s true I’ve never been a fan bright sunny scenes; give me grey, moody, atmospheric vistas any day. A sun high in the sky rarely makes for great photographs, even in summer landscapes generally appear more interesting shortly after dawn or close to sunset when the sun is low.
Dawn over Cockwood Harbour on a frosty December morning.
In winter the sun follows a lower arc across the sky, thus a greater proportion of the available daylight produces what is, in my view, a more interesting light. A corollary of this is that the sun rises later and sets earlier, thus one does not have to drag oneself out of bed at five in the morning, or hang around until almost 10pm, to get those sunrise and sunset shots. It is true that some wildlife shots become trickier when one has to work with slower shutter speeds and wider apertures, and sometimes one has to rely on a tripod, not exactly condusive to high mobility for stalking some flighty subject. However, on the flip side, many animals become markedly less wary in winter, when hunger overrides normal timidity.
A long exposure shot of Teignmouth Pier on a winter’s afternoon. Teignmouth, Devon.
I have always been fond of long exposure shots of moving water, producing beautiful soft, fluid and slightly surreal effects on waterfalls or waves on the beach. This does require low light levels entering the camera though, and in summer (even at minimum apertures) one must either stack neutral density filters in front of the lens, or get up really early or wait really late to get those shots around dawn or dusk. In winter it is so much easier, light levels are much lower anyway and as the sun rises and sets at a more acute angle to the horizon so the period of gloomy light lasts that much longer. This can be crucial if you are rushing between spots to try and find the best angle for you ‘money shot’. So dig out the winter boots and woolly hat and make the most of these chilly and gloomy landscapes. If nothing else it’s such a great excuse to eat lots of chocolate and warm up in a pub afterwards.
A small stream Dunsford Wood, Teign Valley, Devon, England.
Like all photographers I am sometimes asked how I created certain images, and how difficult getting certain pictures were. The answer in most cases is ‘not that difficult provided you’ve planned it and are well prepared’. But sometimes I just make things difficult for myself.
The above picture is a long exposure, 30 seconds in this case, used to blur movement (in the above picture the flowing water) producing a milky, fluid and slightly surreal look to the flowing stream. Obviously the amount of light hitting the camera sensor has to be limited to compensate for such a long exposure. Stopping down to a very small aperture helps but will only get you so far, rarely all the way to 30 seconds exposure. Stacking neutral density filters in front of the lens is one way, but a simpler way (especially this time of year when days are short) is to shoot at dusk, when light levels are naturally low and long shutter speeds are not merely desirable but also necessary.
Late Christmas Day I made a snap decision to get out on to Dartmoor, go for a walk and get some nice images. I left in a rush, trying to multi-task ineffectively as usual. The moor was not inspiring – low grey cloud and steady drizzle do not make for great pictures, so I turned around and reluctantly headed home. Light was fading fast when I found this little stream in the steep, wooded valley of the River Teign. I pulled over and decided to try and get some shots. This was where my rushing and lack of preparation came home to roost. I realised I had left my walking boots by the entrance to my boat and had only the city shoes I was wearing with me. Worse still, upon opening my tripod case (not checked before I left) I discovered that somehow the tripod head had snapped in two (I’ll be writing to Manfrotto shortly). Luckily I also had a small, six inch, tabletop tripod with me, but that meant actually getting in to the stream and perching it on top of boulders if I were obtain any useable shots. By the time I found a suitable spot along the stream it was about 4:15pm and getting gloomier by the minute. A quick scan around confirmed that there were no suitable boulders at the edge of the stream on which to mount the tripod; there was no alternative, shoes and socks had to come off and I had to wade out in to the middle of the stream. Thirty minutes later I stumbled to the side. The light had well and truly gone, so it was time to pack up. I had by then also lost all feeling below the ankles. It was not until i started driving home again that feeling began to return to my feet, doing so in painful waves as flow returned to constricted blood vessels. I had ample time to reflect on the stupidity of my lack of planning. My first actions the following day were to buy a spare tripod and place wellingtons and thick socks on the boot of my car in readiness. Hopefully that is at least one mistake I won’t repeat. Meanwhile I have now place some of these images in my art images of Devon Landscapes Gallery. This can be viewed (and prints purchased) here. Hopefully it was worth the effort. Colin
I last visited Garissa more than 30 years ago. It was a fairly wild journey to get there; three days waiting in Isiolo for an armed convoy to pass through, clambering on top of a load of grain sacks in the pitch dark early hours to join twenty-odd displaced Ethiopians, Kenyans and Somalis crouching precariously on an overloaded and ancient truck; hours spent standing alone in searing heat before being picked up by a passing Norwegian family working for VSO, then 90 long minutes hanging on the the cab rail on the back of a pickup driven by two crazy young Indian traders driving as if Somali shifta were on there tail (who knows maybe they were, few risked driving in this region without military escort at that time). I arrived in Garissa late afternoon, with still a couple of hours daylight remaining. I was young and brash then, I knew little of the politics of the region or the hardships of the local people; I was pissed because there was no beer in the town to be bought. I was coated in a layer of red desert dust and, after 10 hours on the back of open vehicles felt as dessicated as if I’d been in a drying oven. As far as I was concerned Garissa was just a transit point for me, one I hoped I wouldn’t be spending too much time in. I wandered past the truck stop, chatted to a few drivers and quickly ascertained that no-one was going anywhere soon, so I wandered to the end of town to pitch my tent. I was quickly disabused of this idea when a military truck pulled up and several soldiers informed me that it was too dangerous to camp out here. A little over an hour later I was sipping coffee sitting in my tent inside the military compound, surrounded by ten foot barb wire fences, surveying my supplies: coffee, margarine and some rather old bread. Jeez, this is going to be along night, I can’t even wander in to the local chai shops and chat to the truck drivers. As it happened I was quite wrong. I had barely finished my coffee when a young soldier walked up and announced that the camp commander wished to see me. This are going from bad to worse I thought; now I was about the get a dressing down for my stupidity and probably have my papers scrutinised in minute detail for errors. Not so! The commander was a young guy, no more than ten years older than me, from Nairobi; he appeared to feel as out of place here as I did and had seized upon the opportunity to discuss things other than the price of cattle or the latest incursions of shifta with someone from outside this dry and dusty world. I had a most entertaining evening learning about George Adamson’s encampment nearby (Kora, where George released lions was just a few miles away); Joy Adamson’s temper and temperatment and the problems cre3ated by lack of security in the region. A quite surreal touch was added when I first arrived at the commander’s lodge by a young Somali prisoner who was also in the building being questioned. He immediately began protesting that his handcuffs should be removed, as it was embarressing to be so shackled when a foreigner (especially a white person) was present.
I have always retained fond memories of Garissa, despite seeing little of the town. Garissa appears to have expanded enormously in that time; tarmac road have appeared and multi-storey buildings. But life is now probably harder than ever. Security is still a problem, twin grenade attacks on a local restuarant and the local prison occured in the town just four days ago, but that is not the main problem. Northern Kenya is in the grip of the worst drought in half a century. Displaced pastoralist tribespeople live in makeshift huts around the periphery of the town. Cattle, the sole income for many, are dying in their hundreds, thousands of families are now dependant on food aid, children no longer go to school as families move in search of water. In the attention-deficit disorded media world, such slow grinding misery rarely makes the news, yet the drought goes on. There are however, projects working to change this situation. One of the best seems to be the Tana River Drought Recovery Project, managed by Kenya’s Red Cross (Facebook album)
More information at dowser.org
Colin
