h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Winter Birds of the Niagara Gorge - A16254254
Author: langsandy - U4056622

Written a while back and looked at now
retrospectively, I realize how it fits a
fairly narrow category that is not most
people's cup of tea - but nature is like that - you stare at it blankly and it stares right back - non?

Langsandy

It's my cup of tea, or if I drank tea it would be. I love this stuff and the way you write it is spellbinding - if I ever go to Niagra, it'll be in winter.

Late this afternoon I watched a handful of Canada Geese land on the Moss nearby as it got dark. That was momentarily spellbinding. Your Niagra in Winter is even more so.

Oh, and I'm going to have to pay more attention to gulls in future. They've been in the too hard to identify basket because of the wide variety of immature versions.

Thanks for this,
Waz

dr Wuz

I'd say the sea driven by a Nor'easter, and
falling upon Aberdeen's South breakwater, gives
a fair approximation of the power displayed by
Niagara - who in their right mind would contend
with those green contemptuous surges - well,
that's another story for Niagara Falls brings
out the most hair-brained schemes in people, and
despite its record, still proves a fatal attrac-
tion to those who would mess with it - not too
long ago, an American kayaking champion, appar-
ently sane, thought he could make it safely
over the brink - indeed, film footage showed that
he did - but I'm not too sure that his body was
recovered as the river runs over two bundred feet
deep - the miscellany of tales surrounding the
Falls are legion and well worth an article in
The Guide but 5 to 6 million tourists in season
cloy the works and I have to step out of that
box and view it out of time - like staring at
the Norh sea on a winter's day when a nor'easter
rages and nobody's there - I've seen a dense mat
of Purple sandpipers feeding between the rocks
below Girdleness on such a day - the same species
found at Niagara in winter, thanks for the encour-
aging words - time you conspired to write another
in the style of "Forvie" - you certainly have
enough ammunition to 'shock and awe' - cheers -
Langsandy

I'll stick with a winter Niagara. Didn't someone go over Niagara in a barrell? Or was that a film? I haven't seen a storm at Aberdeen, but I've seen the results. Great concrete blocks (the anti-invasion ones) thrown around the beach, the Don mouth completely shifted. When you think of the quantity of sand moved to do that, that's awesome.

And of course the great dune at Forvie. An even more enormous quantity of sand.

Conspiring over Forvie - you mean the three sisters' story? Pinniped has the shock and awe ammunition. He wrote the story part of that. I asked him to, because I couldn't have.

I want to get to one of the big estuaries this Autumn/Winter - see the flocks of geese and waders. There's a book called 'Time to Fly' I've been reading, on migration. What they do really is quite extraordinary. I was going to write something on Swifts, but it's not got started as yet.

dr LLLwuz

y' know they nest in chimneys and church towers
- as a boy I'd watch them screaming around the great
grey steeple of Ferryhill at the top of Polmuir Road
at midsummer when it was still light after 11pm - they
can oar their wings alternately which is unusual among
birds - the nests of those that build in caves in China
are famous as the ingredient for bird's nest soup - all
I know about swifts - and silkie, I seem to have upset
him, unintentionally of course - trouble with writing
objectively these days is that the internet can provide
all there is to know on any given subject which allows
easy extrapolation - however, the subjective end of the
scale, knowing no bounds, will always be open to the
creative process - see it at work in the underguide - I
love what I found in "Forvie" - its really about man in
nature - the interplay of the human and the natural
world told by the interplay of two minds - great stuff
- yes, the estuaries of the world during Spring and Fall
are prime places to see migrating birds - the Ythan for
instance - the synergy exhibited by large flocks of
shorebirds remain a mystery - starlings too engage in
these maneuvres - I watched a flock the other day hedge
about a Red-tailed hawk - practically imobilizing it - so
I hope you make it - ever read Annie Dillard - I'll keep
a look out for Time to Fly - haverin, that's my specialty
- cheers - langsandy

Knew about the nesting - not about the oars! The fascination of swifts is their almost living on air, only needing to come down to earth to have somewhere to put eggs. That and the distances they fly, even just for food. There used to be a nest in nextdoor-but-one's attic until she drove them away to save them from her cats. I'd have rehomed the cats.

Glad you liked Forvie. Really. And that you see it that way. I doubt very much that you upset silkie. Particularly if it was to do with the fact/fiction of Elspeth. He'd agree with you about the trouble of writing objectively - h2g2's fundamental problem. So do I. Agree that is. But ... where you add a different slant, show something a new way, put enthusiasm into it, then I think there's still a purpose. And the internet sometimes fails - MacGilvray for instance. There seems very little about him out there. It would be something to write him up, with word pictures of some of his paintings. Maybe.

Annie Dillard - sorry, that's a no again. I shall have to google her.

PS Starlings - I last saw big flocks of them coming in to roost on the pier at Blackpool. Out of season in winter. (Like your Niagara.) It was quite a performance.

Yeah, you didn't upset silkie. He's been out at sea a lot, that's all.

Soon, then, langsandy<ok

"Didn't someone go over Niagara in a barrell?"

A schoolmistress. Anne something-or-other. Thought it would bring her fame and fortune. It didn't. She was buried in a pauper's grave.

You know, it's too long since I've read the Daredevils of Niagra book. I'm not even certain of the title.

But I do remember another chap who went over in a barrel, later than the schoolmistress. He put an anvil in the bottom to keep it upright. He tied his feet to the anvil to keep himself steady. He also tied his arms to the top of the barrel.

The barrel hit the water at the base of the falls with quite some impact.

I think they recovered the top part of the barrel, and his hands, of course.

TRiG.

Google finds this: http://www.niagarafallslive.com/daredevils_of_niagara_falls.htm

It doesn't mention the great Blondin (who died in bed, at a ripe old age) or any of the other tightrope walkers.

It doesn't mention Red Hill, who risked his life to save others on many occasions. (He helped to save the men who were stuck in the skiff on the top of the falls.)

And it doesn't mention the incredible tale of Roger and Diane Woodward.

I must try to find that book. It's bugging me now.

TRiG.

dr people of the ethernet - thanks for the circumnavigation
- not quite the view from the top of Blackpool tower - but a
view nevertheless - here's a short note or two outside the
province of the daredevil's :

about 80 years ago a barge at a worksite above the Falls broke
loose with two men aboard - it careened downriver, the men
trying to remain cool but without any seeming solution until
one thought to open the bilge cocks at which the barge slowly
sank until it grounded on a ledge not 100 yards from the lip -
they were rescued and the rusting hulk still sits there - mute
testimony to their adventure

the river runs north and at its south end, a stout boom is
strung across it in winter, this to prevent ice being swept in
from Lake Erie - donkey's years ago, at the time when the first
bridge spanned the river just below the Falls, so much ice was
blown in from Erie that thousands of tons filled the plunge
pool overnight - the ice took the whole bridge out and then in
the course of a few weeks carried it downstream and dumped it
in two hundred feet of water - it still lies there

back then too, when the first Maid of the Mist had had its day
one of its skippers said he'd con it downriver to Queenston as
there was no other way of salvaging it whole - he and his fire-
man set off down through the rapids, successfully negotiating
the chute at the whirlpool with only the loss of its funnel -
lots of schemes, using all manner of powerful boats to take
tourists joyriding in the gorge have met with disaster, some of
them quite recent and last weekend I saw one, loaded with
tourists, flirting with the big chute that feeds the whirlpool -
he dared not try it and if his motor conked out he would be just
another statistic - the flow being so strong and so deep makes
the river susceptible to violent upsurges, these being the cause
of all major losses of life - I can't imagine how it was when
in full flow - though still majestic, what the tourist sees of
it is a fraction of what it could be as most of its water is
diverted into canals and power plants

only during the severest winters can you walk solitary along
its parapets and get some semblance of how it is in the raw for
when 5 & 6 million tourists per year swarm across the scene, its
pretty hard to see past them - nuff said - langsandy

Hard to get the atmosphere of a place when it's full of sight-see'ers and while being a sight see'er yourself. You have to see a place in all weathers to know it. No, not see, be in. You have to be in a place. And know its history - things like those wrecks. I like going back to places I've already been to and getting to know them properly.

It was the North Yorkshire east coast this weekend - no purple sandpipers or estuary, but we shared jurassic mudstone rock pools with ammonites, crabs and red shank. This was a third visit there. Last time the waves were crashing up the high street and there was no beach at all.

i'd like to hit Key West again at Christmas and
walk about its outback - watch the Magnificent
frigate birds master a gale with hardly a wingbeat
find coconuts on the beaches and see Portugese
man-o-war being driven in by the waves - sail out
a few miles and gasp as over the clifftop of the
continental shelf you go with the deep indigo
suddenly under your keel - where Leatherbacks and
Green turtles loom of a triple size - what a place
to get to know - where one can sit on a veranda
and watch the lightning storms over the Everglades
rum in hand mangoes overhead - there in a nicotine
trance in the lap of the gods a big stinking cigar
in your fist its scent vying with the bougainvilla
that spills over the walls - nirvahna

[am i full of it or not, now Foggy Loan . .]