Saturday 21 December 2013

Love the Beautiful Landscape of Broads

The Broads is a member of the international family of National Parks, and unique landscape of shallow lakes and rivers is renowned for wildlife. In fact it is a rich mix of attractions are on offer on land and water all year round and the historic city of Norwich is right on the doorstep. The Broads are a network of mostly navigable lakes and rivers in the UK Counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The Surrounding land was constituted as a special area with a level of protection similar to a National Park by The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act of 1988, and main responsibility is to managing the area by The Broads Authority, a Special Statuory, which started the operation in 1989.  It is UK largest protected wetland and a sprawling inland waterway where 6 free-flowing rivers wander 200 KM through a landscape soaked with lakes, fens, and marshes. The fens boggy peat-land rich with reeds and rushes are home to over 250 plant species, including the odd fen orchid. The Broads’ grazing marshes are home to waterfowls and wading birds, while the Breydon Water estuary is a famous stop for important flocks of migratory birds. The total area is 117 sq mi, most of which is in Norfolk, with over 120 mi of navigable waterways, and seven rivers and 63 broads, mostly less than 13 ft deep. Thirteen broads are usually open to navigation, with a further three having navigable channels.

Some broads have navigation restrictions imposed on them in autumn and winter. Moreover; Man-Made The Broads’ landscape is in fact man-made in large part as a byproduct of some two centuries of excavation. In the 12th century, with most of east Norfolk’s woodlands cut, area inhabitants started to dig huge pits and extract peat as a major fuel source. Interestingly the diggings slowly filled with water and eventually became an enormous wetland. The Wide shallow waterways of Broads are best for boating for beginners, boaters from sailors to canoeists. The tour guided are easily available, as park is considered fine place for beginners to learn in a safe scenic environment, and also visitors can sail on one of the legendary Norfolk wherries, which once made commerce move in the region. For nature lovers, Mammals in the Broads include mice and water shrews as well as larger animals such as otters.

Several plants growing like stoneworts are exclusive to the Broads; others are all-encompassing species, like Himalayan balsam, which threaten to tip the local ecosystem off balance. The attractive Broads landscapes include extensive bike trails almost 300 KM of footpaths and villages. It is highly recommended to experience the Broads by boat, because water is the heart of this place. The real essence of Broad is always something happening here, wildlife watchers will find multiple verities and activities in both seasons (spring and summer). Transit time from London is two hours, buses and trains can catch bearby the city of Norwich, as well as smaller stations within the Broads proper. Moreover Norwich also has the international airport facility with global connection via Manchester, Amsterdam, and Paris. Whatever you want to do here, hire a boat for a day, visit a nature reserve, historic buildings, or shopping, birdwatching, walking, cycling, are famous things. To protect this beautiful landscape, everyone has to love the Broads is the visitor offering scheme for the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. The real purpose behind this scheme is to inspire people to care the environment via small donations by giving money directly. If every visitor to the Broads gave just £1 we could raise £7 million each year for projects to protect the Broads in the future.















Friday 20 December 2013

The Bracken Cave Texas United States

The Bracken Bat Cave situated in southern Comal County, Texas, outside the city of San Antonio, in the summer home to the largest colony of bats in the world. Every year in summer, approximately twenty million Mexican Free-tailed bats move around from Mexico to Texas to give birth and raise their pups. Whereas these bats take migrate all across the state, the largest congregation takes place at Bracken Cave. From March to October, every night, these miniature creatures fly out of the 100-foot-wide crescent-shaped opening to feed. The mass departure of bats is sluggish at first as they linger at the cave’s lip, circling round and round inside before emerging. But after 4 hours, countless millions of bats stream out of the cave in elegant swirls as they rise into the wide sky and dissipate in the distance. They spread out over a 60-mile radius from the cave at heights of up to 10,000 feet and over the next eight to twelve hours nosh on hundreds of tons of insects, like as moths and agricultural pests.  They’ve dense emergence that it shows up on Doppler radar, as per TexasCoopPower.com. Those who have seen the bats’ nightly emergence have described the sound they generate as that of steadily falling rainstorm.
Bat lovers and tourists, and host of other creatures expectantly wait for their exit. Great Horned Owl and Harris’s Hawks scope out potential dinners from nearby trees, while skunks, raccoons, opossums and rattlesnakes lurk on the ground to strike low-flying bats from the air. The Bracken bat colony eats plenty of insects every night and plays a vital role in pest control, helping farmers control moths, beetles and insects that destroy corn, cotton and other crops. The Bracken site has had an important role in Texas and US history. The cave was mined in the midst of 18the century (1860s) for guano (bat droppings) to manufacture black gunpowder, during the Civil War. The guano was afterward used as a rich fertilizer for croplands across the USA. The bat cave sits upon private land owned by Bat Conservation International that owns 697 acres of undeveloped land around it. Moreover; access to the cave is restricted to keep the habitat of the resident bats, but evening guided tours to the cave are offered to look at the bats emerge from the cave.




















Bird of Latrabjarg Cliffs, Iceland

The cliffs of Latrabjarg, in Iceland, are home of millions of birds, including puffins, northern gannets, guillemots, and razorbills. Noteworthy; some of 40% of world population for some species of birds like, Razorbill, live on these cliff. Its measurement is considered largest birds cliff of Europe’s at 14 Kilometer long and up to 440m high.  However the guillemot is the most widespread bird at Latrabjarg, and it’s the thousand of puffins that most people come here to see. Latrabjarg is well-known for how close one can get to watch the birds. Safe from foxes, the birds are fearless, and provide eye-catching pictorial opportunities from close range.
The puffins are mainly tame and are the ones frequenting the grassy, higher part of the cliffs where they build their burrows, often up to 2m in length. They return to the similar burrows they occupied the year before, more or less always during the third week of April, where they remain until August or September. Their major breeding period is from May to July. The cliffs are also home to the largest colony of razorbills in the world, as well as to thousands of other screeching breeds of sea bird as well as cormorants, fulmars and kittiwakes. The din here can be quite overpowering, as can the stench from the piles of guano on the cliff face. For centuries, the cliffs were a source of appetizing seabird eggs for the local people. Many farmers would like to catch birds and gather eggs, even risking their lives as they rappel down the unsafe cliff face. It’s projected that about 35,000 birds were caught here every year until the late 1950s. Even though eggs are still gathered from the cliff today, partly to keep alive this tradition that has been handed from one generation to the next for centuries.