Domas

Faltermatt and me used to have a blog at blog.botany.ch where we reported about our summer life at Tvärminne Zoological Station, Finland. Because I don't want to host that blog anymore but want to keep its entries accessible – for sentimental reasons –, I decided to import the entries into this blog. The old blog was powered by Blojsom, the new one by Apache Roller. I was looking for a tool that allows easy "migration" but was too stupid to find one. Therefore I decided to write a simple program that adds the old entries to my new blog via the XML-RPC based MetaWeblog API. Now the old entries are available under category "Tvärminne" (I merged the subcategories in there, too).

One annoyance was that Roller set the last update time to the current time, which resulted in a historically incorrect order of the old entries. I ended up editing the backend database by hand, setting the last update times back to the original publishing times. I'm sure there are better solutions, and I'd appreciate any recommendations.

Hmm, maybe it's true what some people - pretending to be joking - are telling about me and I should loose some kilograms.

Today, we sat on the patio and had breakfast when Jan (a co-dweller in Tvärminne) heard a bird's voice from within the wood covering of the building. Obviously, a young barn swallow from a nearby nest had somehow gotten lost and couldn't find a way out anymore.

So we decided to start a rescue manoeuvre. I fetched a ladder and climbed up. Unfortunately, Finnish construction work doesn't seem to be of the same quality I'm used to. That's why I almost crashed through the ceiling when stepping on the wooden boards, which - as we found out unvoluntarily - were only losely nailed up.

At least clumsy birds will now have an easy way out in case they should get lost.

For some reason I forgot to post this picture showing Annette on her maiden voyage. Maybe I unconsciously feared revenge. In the morning of 17 April 2007, she drove alone to Furuskär – without any guidance from Dieter's or my side. An historical event indeed.

The hares haven't shown up yet, so Howard didn't really miss anything. However, there's another cuddly animal around that would please Howard, namely a young, male moose that's strawling around on the station's grounds (click on the image to get a larger version which shows him in full size).

If Florian had anticipated this, he wouldn't have gone to Helsinki zoo to see a moose in captivity because he hadn't seen a single one in the wild (and returned totally frustrated since all mooses had left to Stockholm zoo for a vacation).

There are lots of stranded "goods" on the skerry islands. Unfortunately they don't always contribute to the beauty of the landscape, which is why we began to clean up a little bit.

This fridge has been out of duty for a long time and lying around on Granbusken. Now it will hopefully be recycled – metal prices are high.

More waste pics coming soon...

I just realised that we had stopped bloggin in May. To revitalise our diary, I'm going to post some pictures that we intended to upload months.

Here's the first. It's not a clochard but our commander-in-chief in spring on a birdwatching tour. For those of you who wonder why he's unshaved: That's how we all walk around here. Nowadays, razor blades are expensive, and furthermore, female beings complaining about scratching kisses are usually far, far away.

The island on the upper picture is not covered in fog, it's actually smoke. The smoke originates from large forest fires in Russia and Estonia and is carried over hundreds of kilometres into Finnish territory.

The situation hadn't been as bad as in Helsinki. You could sometimes smell that there's a little bit of smoke in the air, but the sun hadn't been dimmed out. But that changed when I got up yesterday morning. It stank like in a room with an open fireplace and a chimney that doesn't draw at all. Everywhere.

Update: Today at noon, there was the first significant rain since months. I hope that's going to clear the air. And of course, it's also good for the vegetation (brown meadows, half dead trees, dry swamps). Not to mention the rock pools, which are mostly empty, and the ones that still contain some water are so salinous that no Daphnia could survive. Hopefully it's going to rain enough so that I don't have to carry any more deionised water to Furuskär...

As you might know, FinnTurf makes us happy. But now it makes us even happier than ever before. We love FinnTurf. We've already paved one island with it. Soon there will be one, two, three more. And then we're going to pave all islands in Tvärminne. Next is the Finnish skerry coast, and finally, nothing can stop us anymore! Harharhar! World domination! Hard Rock Hallelujah, but our Hilti is much stronger than that!