The Dance Of Life

Hedgehog Bramble & the Big Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (TitusL) — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 08:15:00 +0000

The Freedom of the Hedgehog

The Hedgehog smells the shape of the wind and he laughs,

He listens to the stirring of the earth with bated breath and he gasps,

He dips nose into the dusk of the setting suns rays,

With a heart full of mirth in the twilight he plays..

Nightime is coming, hedgehog stretches and yawns,

A soul full of gladness as he scurries and scrawns -

He opens his throat to sing a happy hedgehog song,

Full of mystery and moonlight - here is where he belongs.

The hedgehog is free as he ever should be,

About his business unknown to most folk - you and me.

Betwixt hither and thither he may yet be found,

If you are careful and cautious and you do not make a sound.

Hedgehog is a friend that you mayhap will meet,

If ever you do so, please be kind and be sweet,

For his temper is gentle as at wonders he's guessing,

From old England he comes with many a blessing.

c.Titus.L 2016

Having been found near Lake Windemere in the Lake District and too small to survive the winter outside, Hedgehog Bramble was taken to the Animal Rescue Center in Kendal where he has overwintered and put on necessary weight.

Now that spring has come and he has grown, Bramble came into our care for 'soft - release' back into the wilds. This entails having him in an outside pen which also has a small run to allow him to reacclimatise to the night air, smells and sounds - to be released as weather allows.

Having seen night cam footage of how eager Bramble was to be free, he spent many hours Sunday night clinging to his enclosure and peering hopefully beyond, we decided to release him a soon as possible. We recently had a long rainy spell and as a few days of lighter weather were forecast, we removed the pen gateway and Bramble was released on the evening of Monday 4th of April.
We didnt get to see the night cam footage till next day and as you can see he was delighted to be free.
We were very anxious that he did not appear the next night on camera, nor was any food eaten - but to our delight last night not only did he find his way back to his soft release home and gobble a hearty dinner, but he also seems to have relocated his daylight sleeping quarters to occupy one of Hedgehog Noah's ocassionally used houses that we built.

If you find a hedgehog in need or other animal in distress please contact the RSPCA
tel 0300 123 4999
You can find information on domestic and wild animals as well as advice about general pet care, animal welfare law, animal rehoming and vet care. You can also find details of local vets, council and police for non-emergency situations.

Hedgehogs are a protected species in the Uk but we've lost a third of all our hedgehogs in the last ten years. There is a Petition to give the hedgehog better legal protection to reverse its decline. Please sign the petition ( sign the petition here )

The Whale's Song

noreply@blogger.com (TitusL) — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 17:50:00 +0000

Industrial whaling began in the 17th century, by the 20th factory ships & 'whale harvesting' developed. By the 1930s, more than 50,000 whales were killed annually. In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling.

Despite the ban some countries refused to stop whaling.
Pro-whaling countries, Japan-Norway-Iceland, want to hunt certain whale stocks. Anti-whaling countries & environmental groups oppose lifting the ban - unless whaling is stopped, whales could become extinct.

Now, whales are mysteriously dying - during January 2016, 29 sperm whales got stranded and died across Europe. It seems they became lost in shallow waters, but why? Were they affected by something humans did – busy shipping lanes, seismic testing, military noise or the ‘invisible’ threats of toxic chemicals in the seas...

The tails of two fin whales caught off the western coast of Iceland in 2009. (Photo: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images)

It is amazing that in the year 2016, with the diminishment of biodiversity and with species after species going extinct, that there are still people so alienated from reality that they continue to engage in contributing to the death of the ocean. We humans are literally killing the ocean by diminishment of the life within. Many Faroese overfish, they slaughter puffins and other seabirds and they murder whales and dolphins.

This is the lunacy of our times, whales are killed in order to secure whale meat that is inedible because of the toxic levels of mercury in the bodies of the whales.

Whale Song: A Culture All Of Its Own

'The first whale culture to be discovered was the ‘song’ of the humpback whale in the 1960s. At the time researchers did not know that what they were observing was cultural transmission between the whales, but they and the general public were so struck by the discovery that the whales were ‘singing’ that humpback whale song was even included in the Golden Record sent into outer space in the late 1970s on the Voyager spacecraft.

Since its first discovery humpback song has been studied in many parts of the world. Male humpbacks sing the longest, most complex songs in the animal kingdom. Songs consist of a complex series of whistles, squeals and deep calls. Their songs may last for as long as half an hour and are divided into 'verses' which are sung in a specific order.' Source = WDC here.

From the Greenpeace Article January 2016
''Shocking and sad images have been all over the media in the past few days as some massive sperm whales have washed up dead on British beaches. Normally humans and these deep water leviathans live far apart, so it’s understandable that we are surprised and distraught to encounter them like this.
But why does it happen? And what can you do?
Sperm whales are huge. They have the biggest animal brain on the planet, and make some of the deepest dives in the ocean, where their legendary battles with giant squid fuel our imagination. Immortalised by Moby Dick and Pinocchio, their fictitiously fearsome reputation sometimes overshadows the fact that these were the first whale to be decimated by industrial whaling to be turned into oil. They tend to live and travel in groups, and you don’t normally see them in shallow water like the North Sea.

Every year hundreds of dead whales, dolphins and porpoises wash up dead on British beaches. Amongst them there are usually a few sperm whales. Recently it seems that a whole pod of sperm whales has somehow got lost in the North Sea, stuck on beaches and tragically died.

That then begs a question as to how they got lost? Were they chasing prey? Was it freak weather? Were they affected by something humans did – busy shipping lanes, seismic testing, military noise or something else? There are also the ‘invisible’ threats that whales in our seas carry, most notably a heavy burden of toxic chemicals which could have played a part somehow.
Across the world, as whale populations recover from decades of commercial whaling, they increasingly face a range of new human-generated threats, which are much less visible, but just as deadly. That’s been shown in the pilot whales killed by underwater noise, and the killer whale that got caught up in fishing gear.

What should you do if you see whales or dolphins stranded on a beach or in shallow water?If they are alive – contact your local Wildlife Trust, or British Divers Marine Life Rescue.
If you find a dead whale, dolphin or porpoise on a beach, then get in touch with the UK strandings network. It’s also a good idea to keep a distance as there might be nasty infections around, and decomposing whales have a tendency to ‘explode’.

The WDC are running a campain to protect the Whales from Antarctic hunting

Don't let the EU sell out 4000 whales

The EU and Japan are looking to increase trade in goods and services with each other – in other words make loads and loads of money. They are close to signing a new trade agreement.

Great BUT…
A. Japan hunts and slaughters hundreds of whales each year. It wants to kill 4,000 in the Antarctic over the next 12 years!
B. The EU does not support whale hunting. Most of the people in the EU do not support whale hunting!
We can’t allow a trade agreement between the 'whale friendly' EU and a country like Japan - a country that has just announced that it will ignore an international court ban and kill 333 whales each year for the next 12 years in Antarctica.
Let’s stop the slaughter for good. Ask the EU to use its power and say ‘no new trade agreement until the whaling stops’.

Sign The Petiton here

Oh the whale is free, of the boundless sea
He lives for a thousand years;
He sinks to rest on the billow’s breast,
Nor the roughest tempest fears.
The howling blast, as it rushes past,
Is music to lull him to sleep:
And he scatters the spray in his boisterous play,
As he dashes – the King of the deep.

Whaling song, 1850s

The English Lake District - Virtually

noreply@blogger.com (TitusL) — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:04:00 +0000

The Lake District is intimately associated with English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries and WilliamWordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", inspired by the sight of daffodils on the shores of Ullswater, remains one of the most famous in the English language. Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes and mountains. Along with his companion Romantic writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey became known as the Lake Poets.

At Telrunya - Forest of Dreams

Romanticism, the leading literary movement in England for more than half a century, was caused by the unprecedented social and economic changes of the 18th century Industrial Revolution, which visited a cataclysmic change from simple home manufacturing and farming to enforced wage slavery on the people. The 'Enclosure' of common lands spread all over Britain in the 18th century and deprived the people of their subsistence, they were subsequently forced to work in the new factories.

However mechanization without a thought for peoples wellbeing, brought new social evils. The diseases of industrial towns flourished, along with the misery of child labour, underpaid workers and loss of freedom. Life for many became a hollow parody of its earlier pastoral peasantry as the people were imprisoned in the new industrial towns. Their suffering led to the first organised strikes. Inspired by the French Revolution, Irish peasants plotted a rebellion against English landlordism in 1798, which was cruelly downed in blood. The British government also took the lead in the counter-revolutionary wars against France.

At this time, the belief of progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the new economic system, was broken - people with a conscience for their fellow man looked about for solutions. A new humanist movement arose among artists, authors and musicians to voice this view.

As they saw it, the cold application of reason had led to the dehumanisation of man with its heartless persuit of profit for the wealthy by exploiting and disenfranchising the poor. The new humanist writers therefore made emotion the driving force of their works. Some among them, poets, seized with a panic to escape the modern world of an industrialised slavery, wanted a return to the bucolic earlier times when people lived on and by the land. These poets became known as the Romanticists. They spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life during the Middle Ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and peaceful. Their motto was "Close to Nature and from Nature to God", because they believed that nature put man at peace with the world and in communion with god. (source)

The poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) belonged to that group. They were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District where they lived and where they found inspiration to fuel their poetic calls for a more harmonious world in touch with nature and through nature with god.