Lille Vildmose in Himmerland, Northeast Jutland.

It was magnificent summer weather in late May and start June - and one of our first summer trips went to the Lille Vildmose in  Himmerland (Northeast Jutland). Lille Vildmose is a raised bog, it is an endangered habitat, not just in Denmark but also in Europe. A project LIFE+ focuses on securing the raised bog and to create conditions for the decomposed part of the raised bog to re-emerge in the long run. This area is the largest left raised bog of the lowlands in northern Europe, and it includes more than half the total raised bog in Denmark. Lille Vildmose is appointed as a Natura2000 area (7824 ha) and a Natura2000 plan has been prepared with a focus in keeping and extending the raised bog area.

From the reed beds sounds the voice of the bittern.

Eurasian Bittern 


When this is said the large moor in Himmerland is a wonderful place to visit, also because of the boardwalks across a big part of the area. It would be impossible to cross the moor without these boardwalks and bridges. The animal and plant life is very rich and you'll never know how much or what you'll see on such a tour. Birds of prey, like the golden eagle, the whitetailed eagle, the marsh harrier or the Eurasian hobby. We did not see the large birds of prey this time, but we heard the rare golden oriole. We did not see this beautiful yellow bird, but we later came to a place where we heard another rare bird. The strange voice of the Eurasian bittern sounded from the reed beds -  and a few moments later an Eurasian bittern flew above our heads and disappeared in the reeds. A rare sight. There are approximately about 22 Eurasian bitterns in Lille Vildmose right now. We heard its strange voice calling out like an angry  bull every five minutes.

                                                                  
Legend
No other bird in Denmark is surrounded by so much mystery. Both the hidden ways of its living, the owl-like flight and the strange voice have contributed to this. People were scared of this strange bird with a voice as strong as any mammal - and when it was strutting around in the night hours people thought they met a ghost. The voice of the bittern created legends about the Merman's cows, roaring and  longing for coming ashore. In the old days lived a landlord, named Mads Spejser, at Aggersborggård at Limfjorden opposite the town Løgstør. He was a brutal master and a nasty neighbour and very much disliked. His spirit is said to hazard like a dark bird across the landscape at night, flying with silent wing beats, uttering hoarse cries like the  bittern. 

New Observation Tower

A new observation tower has been raised in 2014,  called Brandtaarnet (the fire tower). Until the 1980s was here a fire watch tower, where a guard supervised the moor to observe if  there was fire or smoke. The new tower is a part of an ongoing and very comprehensive EU-LIFE nature-restoration project  Brandtårnet is the sixth observation tower in Lille Vildmose. It is 6-7 meter tall, and half as tall as the tower at the Vildmose Center at Vildmosevej. But it is tall enough since the moor is as flat as a panncake -  and there is a fine view across the earlier peat-extraction area, which during WWII gave work to 1200 men. Today it is a bird-rich restoration area, and from the new yellow tower it is possible to follow the rapid change of the nature area in these years.

The moor was earlier overgrown with birch which has now been removed. Only a few birches are allowed to stay in the landscape.

cloudberry, no flowers yet.

cranberry flowers

Plants

The plant life is special in a moor, there are tufts of spaghnum moss, cranberry, rosemary heather, bell heather, cloudberry, sundew, cotton grass, white-beak-sedge etc.

bell heather

cotton grass

Kærguldsmed / Leucorrhinia pectoralis

A Dragonfly...........


In Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. Some English names, such as "devil's darning needle"  and "ear cutter", link them with evil or  injury.  A Romanian folk tale says that the dragonfly was once a horse possessed by the devil. Swedish  folklore holds that the devil uses dragonflies to weigh people's souls. The Norwegian name for dragonflies is Øyenstikker ("eye-poker"), and in Portugal they are sometimes called tira-olhos ("eye-snatcher"). They are often associated with snakes, as in the Welsh name gwas-y-neidr, "adder's servant". The Southern United States term "snake doctor" refers to a folk belief that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured.
For some Native American tribes they represent swiftness and activity, and for the Navajo they symbolize pure water. Dragonflies are a common motif in  Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblo necklaces. They have also been used in traditional medicine in Japan and China. In some parts of the world they are a food source, eaten either as adults or larvae; in Indonesia, for example, they are caught on poles made sticky with birdlime, then fried in oil as a delicacy.

And two Butterflies

Moserandøje /Large heath.

Bølleblåfugl / Cranberry Blue

in Portland Mose

some restoration work in the moor.

a view from Portland Mose out to the coast (to Mulbjerge)

A poppy field near the Vildmose.

the limestone quarry near Lille Vildmose.

It was a lovely summer's day in Lille Vildmose.

photo: grethe bachmann, June 2014.

Month of May - Sweet and Mild

The month of May is sweet and mild with soft green hills and light green leaves,
sparkling yellow in the sunlight.

"Bright coinage by the generous sun
Down flung and scattered one by one..."

says a poem by Andrew Downing.¨¨

Horse and cattle are out in the fields again, enjoying the good weather I suppose. They almost alway join each other in a flock -  they are social  animals. I feel so sorry for a lonely horse in a field.

These horses are grazing in a beautiful place. I wonder if they do observe that?

Three photos from Nationalpark Mols Bjerge

Just take a look at this lovely thick wool of the Galloway cow.


The Galloway cattle is grazing the area of the Molslaboratoriet, owned by Naturhistorisk Museum in Aarhus and a part of the Nationalpark Mols Bjerge.

A sweet little Galloway calf. The Galloway cattle is very peaceful and calm, in fact reserved, they are not interested in us humans, no matter how much we want to "talk with them" - which might be a good thing! They are not curious, they keep away from us, which might prevent some bad experiences,  when we are walking in their fields.

So sweet. What fine eyelashes!

Den italienske sti (The Italian path). Each year I long for a walk along this path, it's a place with lots of plants and animal life, especially many butterflies in summer, but today is still too early. BUT it is a lovely spring day, and the sun is warming my old wintercold bones!

A brimstone in a dandelion

Have you walked beneath the blossoms in the spring?
In the spring
Beneath the apple blossoms in the spring
When the pink cascades are falling
And the silver brooklets brawling
And the cuckoo bird is calling
In the spring

from poem by William Wilsey Martin.

Walking along the Italian Path gives me the feeling that I want this moment to last.....

.....but we drive on and down to the beach  - and we pass one of the pretty buildings, belonging to the Mols Laboratory.

Down by the beach and the clouds and the blue, blue sea........

This cloud is either a duck or a dachshound being chased by a big fish!

A white wagtail playing by the beach...

Genista anglica ( Engelsk Visse) here growing by the coast of East Jutland, common in Mid- and West Jutland (in Denmark).

English names are petty whin, needle furze, needle whin. It is a shrubby flowering plant of the family Fabacea, which can be found growing in Cornwall, Wales and eastern Scotland.





























Goodbye to Mols Bjerge and The Italian Path and the Galloway calf for this time..............



photo Mols/Strandkær 10 May 2014: grethe bachmann 

The Silhouette came from France........

Just one camera-snap today -  and you've got a lifelike portrait of a person. It is difficult to understand how complicated and costy it was to be portrayed just 300 years ago. When people died, their looks lived on only in the memory of family and friends.


In the middle of the 1700s a cheap and easy way to portray people was invented. It actually started in France as a social game. People were asked to stand with their side to a wall - and the light of an oil lamp cast a shadow of the profile upon a piece of paper upon the wall. The shadow was sketched quickly, and the paper was cut by the line. Now they had a lifelike portrait in profile of the person. It was common to colour the paper with black printing ink, so it looked like a shadow. The method never became popular in France however. It was considered as something for poor people only,  but a Frenchman did manage to give it a name.

France was on the edge of ruin from wars and extravagant consumption at the royal court. The Minister of Finance, Etienne de Silhouette had to put the State salaries heavily down,  which made him rather unpopular. He had many shadow-portraits in his home; people could see them through his windows from outside in the street - and everything trashy and poor were - because of his reductions -  by people designated  "a la Silhouette". The shadow portraits were called  "a la Silhouette" = poor man's pictures. And by the way these pictures were only known as silhouettes.

The silhouette came to honor and dignity in Germany, but people were admittedly a little tired of those large black shadow portraits, which might look a little brooding, filling an entire wall - and a method was invented to put them down in size. The large shadow portraits could be minimized by using a pantograf, a very simple drawing device. But to use a pantograf required some skill, and gradually arose some professional silhouette-makers who earned their living by travelling the country to do portraits of people.

But it was not just to get your portrait. A new dimension came - the silhouette became science. The Swiss priest Johan Caspar Lavater had discovered that you from the human profile could read his qualities, and he published a large four-volume work with engravings of silhouettes, where he made a diagnosis from each silhouette. He measured the height and the slope of the forehead , the lenght of the nose and the receding or protruding of the chin.  He was of the opinion that the forehead was the mirror of the sense, the nose expressed the moral value of the person, while the chin and the mouth showed the animal qualities.

Goethe

People from far and away joined his ideas. Kings, princes, scientists and artists sent silhouettes to him to get them deciphered, and the poet Goethe was one of his greatest admirers. He travelled with Lavater for several years, sketching and minimizing silhouettes and translating his works into English and French. He even took part in constructing a special suitable chair, where a silhouette had to be drawn. Goethe's own love of youth began with a silhouette, and this later became "The Sorrows of Young Werther".

After an embarassing detection of Lavater the great interest and the belief in his ideas declined. But the silhouette itself had become a precise portrait for little money.

Jane Austen

a young Beethoven

The silhouette-portraits came to Denmark. In the beginning some German silhouette-makers went north, but gradually Danish silhouette makers could do the silhouettes just as well, and about the year 1800 this way of making a picture was spread all over the country. Commonly the silhouette maker offered a large number, like 10 silhouettes, at a discounted price. When people wrote a letter, they could put a portrait of themselves in it - and in this way the silhouettes were spread all over the country and across the borders. In family books from that time are portraits of the great personalities of Europe. Many collected them, especially silhouettes of Goethe and his circle were popular.

The travelling silhouette-makers were creative when they came to a manor. They proposed to cut not only the family members, but also put all the silhouettes together in one big composition for a family portrait in natural environment. It might be the manor garden with a famous building from the area in the background - or a family pose in the finest room.  The silhouette maker took his time while he resided at the manor - his work on the family picture might go on for weeks.

There was a certain prestige in owning one of those big family portraits. Both the rich bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and even the royal family had those shadow portraits on their walls.

A special artistic and costy kind of silhouette developed gradually: the hinter-glass paintings, where the picture was painted on the back of the glass. The silhouette maker first painted the black silhouettes - and then he added the background.

In the late 1830s this all ended, when the photography arrived. The silhouette turned hopelessly oldfashinoned. This lasted for 40 years, but then some very good silhouette makers cut free hand silhouettes without drawing the shadow picture -  and people saw that the silhouette was not just a primitive form of portraying but an independent art form. The history of the silhouette had more nuances than expected.

H.C. Andersen The shepherdess and the chimney sweeper. 

 

 

Source: archaeological magazine SKALK 3/2007, Jørgen Duus
silhouette-copies from wikipedia.