Wild food from the Park: May

Just catching up with posts about our wild food project, in which we are trying to generate food and drink every month from wild ingredients collected in our local park, King's Park in Stirling. Having had something of a culinary success in April with my first ever souffle, a wild Spring greens souffle, I thought I'd try it again, but using the wider range of plants available in May.

And it got a bit out of hand...

In a 30 minute foraging session in the park, I picked twelve wild plants: young nettles and white dead nettles, young, tender ground elder leaves and stems, comfrey, yarrow and dandelion leaves, chickweed, young plants of cleavers ('sticky willy'), the softer, youngest leaves of hawthorn, wild sorrel, the slenderest, most tender of common hogweed stems and wild garlic leaves. Back at home, we realised that our garden's herb bed was quite well advanced, so we added in little pinches or a few leaves of 18 different herbs: wild rocket, sorrell and red sorrell, four different varieties of thyme, sage, woodruffe, garden mace, tarragon (very sparingly - it has a very powerful taste!), chives, lavender, chervil, curry plant, savory winter, carroway and curly-leaf parsley.

So, a 30 plant souffle - a bit over the top, but it serves to demonstrate quite well the wide range of edible species that are out there. The preparation was otherwise as described for the April dish and, again, it turned out both well and delicious:

The final dish, garnished with fresh parsley from the garden

And we enjoyed some ancillary wild food action in May with ingredients collected elsewhere - namely the leaves of a succulent coastal plant, one of the Atriplex or goosefoot family, which is widespread around our coasts and a close relative of the edible garden weeds and wild food staples, Fat Hen and Good King Hal, effectively inland versions of the same family. Very nutritious and quite tasty. We harvested ours at the top of the sandy shore down at Tyninghame in East Lothian:

We added the leaves to a bean and vegetable soup, made with some home-made chicken stock. No photo I'm afraid but, needless to say, it was delicious... Looking forward to telling you shortly about June, when some of our favourite local wild food ingredients become available.

Nature wins again... Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0

Occasionally, just occasionally, this nature boy blog has the chance to be reasonably topical.  I have a blog post in preparation about a wonderful coastal walk we did last week in East Lothian, from which I have extracted one small element to post early. One thing we noticed was that the high tide line of every sandy beach along which we walked was thick with stranded dead or dying jellyfish. They were mostly moon jellies, the very common jellyfish Aurelia aurita. It typically looks like this when stranded:

Stranded Aurelia aurita (moon jellyfish), Gullane beach, 26 June2011

Huge shoals or swarms of these jellyfish are very common in our coastal waters in some summers and mass strandings of this species or other jellyfish species are not uncommon.

Here are a couple of photos of stranded jellyfish en masse at Gullane beach in East Lothian last Sunday (26th June):

Like other jellyfish, this species does have a fringe of stinging tentacles but, in this species, they are not capable of delivering a sting to humans. When the wind is blowing onshore for long enough, these moon jellies, which are very poor swimmers in a current and are thus effectively a part of the zooplankton (albeit very large zooplankton), are forced into the shore and dropped by the falling tide. So what, I hear you ask?

Well, you might have picked up the news today (BBC, Reuters, all the main newspaper websites) that Torness Nuclear Power Station, about 15 miles along the coast from where we were walking, had to shut down both of its Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors on Tuesday afternoon as a swarm of moon jellyfish was clogging the filters of the cooling system's seawater intakes.

According to the BBC's website coverage, the filters: "are designed to prevent seaweed and marine animals entering the cooling system. If these screens become clogged, the reactors are shut down to comply with safety procedures." The Beeb also reported that the "East Lothian plant's operator, EDF Energy, said the shutdown was a precautionary measure and there was never any danger to the public."

It was not a radiological incident... Phew - no need for "Marine Plankton generated this generation-spanning nuclear contamination says nuclear generator" headlines...

But this mass plankton invasion has probably closed one of Scotland's few remaining operational nuclear power stations for a week! Like I said, Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0...

Incidentally, the BBC coverage also reported, somewhat stupidly, "It is not known why there are so many jellyfish in the area". Duh, it's summer (recent weather notwithstanding) and jellyfish swarms often happen on the East Lothian coast in summer. My Dad recorded numerous incidents over more than 20 years of working on that coastline. And I have no doubt that EDF know that it is a likely occurrence in summer and hence have their contingency shutdown plans. Best not let the obvious facts get in the way of a good mystery for the news though...

Incidentally, my wee brother also picked up on the mass strandings during one of his coast rides on his fabulous Pugsley sand/snow bike, and posted about them here on his Coastkid blog.

The whole incident put me in mind of a wonderful character, Plankton Boy, created for a one-off cartoon strip in an issue of Chris Donald's Viz comic back in 1990 (lovely Google identified it as Viz Comic No: 40 Dated February / March 1990, but sadly no picture was available online). Plankton Boy was "raised by innumerable tiny sea creatures" and had special superhero powers based around plankton. Maybe one was corralling jellyfish towards cooling water intakes... as my brother said earlier "Nature wins again!"

Great gannet grandstanding...

More dodging of my "timetabled" Ladybird book "seasons"  blog posts to tell you about a spectacular nature experience I had today, one described by no lesser personage than one of my own nature heroes, Sir David Attenborough, as “one of the Twelve Wildlife Wonders of the World”.

The Bass Rock is the largest single island gannet colony in the world, with over 150,000 gannets. The island effectively turns white between February and October once the gannets return from offshore where they over-winter. The latin name of the gannet, Britain's largest resident seabird, was formerly Sula bassana, now changed by bird taxonomists to Morrone bassana, and comes from the Bass Rock - the species was named after its most impressive population centre!

The Bass Rock from the west - the white colour is a mixture of thousands upon thousands of gannets and their droppings - guano!

I grew up in East Lothian and went to secondary school in North Berwick, the nearby harbour town and so probably saw the Bass rock nearly every week day of the year, barring holidays. But you know how it is, when you never actually manage to get around to visiting the local sights that all the tourists and all your visitors want to go to. So it was with me and the Bass rock. I lived in East Lothian until I went away to University and I have never moved back. Every summer for the last few (20?) years, I've said I must get out to the Bass. But I never managed to take the boat trip round the island to see the gannets, the seals and the coastal scenery. Until today, that is.

Now you have to understand that most of that time, there was only one boat trip around the Bass, on the Sula II, originally run by Fred Marr, and now by his son Chris and daughter Pat. You can find out more about this here, along with information on their excellent and valuable gannet rescue work here. There are more boat trips around now, and also the Scottish Seabird Centre near the harbour which allows a different perspective on the Bass Rock, with remote cameras, etc., but it seemed to me that the best way to visit the Bass Rock would be with the Marrs on Sula II, with their fantastic local knowledge - eleven generations of the Marr family have worked out of North Berwick harbour. I don't think you can substitute for that kind of experience and inheritance. So when I heard earlier this year that this might be the last season that the Sula II would be running (Chris is retiring), I was determined to make a trip after all these years.

And so I took the day off work, in anticipation of the current high pressure lasting another day or two, and went, via breakfast at my parents along the coast, to North Berwick. As a hopeless nostalgic sentimentalist, I always find it quite emotional when I manage to spend a day around North Berwick, which due to schooling, is probably in third place in the list of places in which I have spent the most days of my life. It is such a beautiful little coastal town and, to my eyes, seems even more bustling and well-to-do than it ever did. No gap sites on the high street here, despite the credit crunch and global financial meltdown, though no doubt a few former Edinburgh bankers live there - NB is a very "des-res" place for people looking to move out of Edinburgh (it probably always was). Many of the shops I knew as a school child have gone, replaced by cafes and pretty little boutiques selling nice things and coastal lifestyle stuff!

 Anyway, I joined the mid-day sailing of the Sula II today (times vary daily due to tides and weather conditions), skippered by Chris Marr, with other family members helping with the crewing.

Sailing conditions and weather were perfect. I couldn't have asked for (or expected) better.

We motored out to the Bass Rock where it looked a bit like this on the way out...

The sky around the Bass rock is a seething mass of tens of thousands of gannets, gulls and occasional shags or cormorants. And it is noisy!

And every available square inch of space on land seems to be occupied or fought over:

At one point, we went in close enough to take these:

Here's the old foghorn I remember hearing as a child when the typical Scottish East Coast summer "haar" (sea fog) rolled in (to spoil our precious school summer holidays) - now decommissioned as a foghorn (it is all electronics and satnav systems now) but still obviously popular with the birds!

A final image from the Bass, to show the steeps cliffs that are the result of the weathering and glacial scraping away of the softer rocks around this plug of basalt, the origin of the Bass Rock being a former volcanic eruption:

We sailed back via another smaller island, Craigleith, which has its own seabird and conservation story to tell, but that's for another day. I'm immensely happy after all this time to have made that trip, in that boat, with those people, on this fabulous day, to have seen these sights, those birds and views. If you want to do it, then go and do it before the end of September. The contact details are on the Sula II website.  I took my darling O home a wee box of "Berwick Cockles" ("A crumbly soft red striped traditional boiled sweet") as a "Gift from North Berwick", but I can't help but feel that I was given the greater gift today!

Some of Pat Macaulay's rescued gannet chicks, being fed and strengthened before being returned to sea.