2086 Field trip & picnic – what a day!

Meeting point at Nida carpark

After many weeks traipsing through the dunes, forest and beach of the Curonian Spit, collecting spruce shoots, nettles, raspberry leaves and mosquito bites, talking to local biologists and foragers, concocting jellies and pancakes and fermented sodas, we finally hosted this year’s annual field trip & picnic on 22 June 2086!

Thanks to everyone who came along – amateur lichenologists, artists, interpagans and everything in between. For those of you unfortunate enough to have missed out on this special bumper edition (back on Lithuanian soil for the first time in decades!), here’s a taste of what the Society got up to.

Follow the fish!

Toasting the locally extinct arctic raspberry, and the miraculously alive-and-well wild strawberry, with wild strawberry kvass (fermented soda).

UFO landing site: space lichen, astrobiology and Cold War luxuries.

Blinis with un-caviar. Each amateur lichenologist dollops a spoonful of un-caviar onto a neighbour’s blini while saying ‘kosmičeskije sso-sstanivlenija‘ (‘in cosmic co-becomings’).

Flummery! Made with agar and blueberries from the old forest. With a side of Permian mass extinction and microplastic futures.

The Great Tuning Fork

A full report from the Society will be published in the forthcoming Nida Art Colony Log: On Rites and Terrabytes, due for release later this year.

Big cheers to Sepideh Ardalani for helping with food wizardry, Diana Pusko for foraging advice, the interpagan intentional community for their extraordinary un-caviar, and Nida Art Colony for letting us crash their symposium! See you somewhere else next year!

Have you seen this fish?

This year the Amateur Lichenologists Society was invited to have a presence in Vilnius, with the opportunity to show some work alongside Žilvinas Landzbergas in the Vilnius Academy of Arts Glass Pavilion, as part of the exhibition Teleport to Nida.

That’s our life-size baltic sturgeon on the glass (long ago extinct in the wild), the exact length of the last one caught in the Baltic Sea. Here also is the text that went along with the display:

“Did you know that the iconic Baltic Sturgeon is considered a ‘living fossil’ that was for a short time extinct here in Lithuania? The Sturgeon’s ancestors survived ‘the Great Dying’ (the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event) some 200 million years ago, in which 96% of marine life disappeared. In 1996 the last wild specimen of this prehistoric fish to be found in the Baltic Sea was hauled out at a remote island in Estonia, 2.9 metres long and weighing 136 kg. In 2057, after decades of a committed reintroduction program, healthy adults born in captivity and released into the Neman River were once again observed at the Curonian Spit, leaping from the water in what some believe is a kind of communion with their oddly kindred space lichen.”

 

flummery

flummery is both a fluffy 17th-19th century dessert pudding, and a load of nonsense.

‘It’s not the age of reason … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach’ –Trouble with Lichen (1960)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flummery

some incredible specimens here
http://www.historicfood.com/Jellies.htm

& a little on isinglas (swim bladders of sturgeon) which were a common ingredient in flummery
https://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/news/weird-ingredient-wednesday-isinglass-or-why-your-guinness-has-fish-it-0161766/

Yellow Flummery

a pretty basic recipe here, using berries https://permaculture.com.au/davidson-plum-rainforest-flavours-in-the-kitchen/

https://1tess.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/blueberry-gems/ 
https://books.google.lt/books?id=uCRdqi4lvK8C&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=blueberry+flummery&source=bl&ots=edOyqufQi6&sig=PMLJOx7XcWqKqtV8xYPuiGvQRNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMx5Cfz9jbAhXBDywKHQ1lCmwQ6AEIazAO#v=onepage&q=blueberry%20flummery&f=false

http://www.cooks.com/recipe/2i8iz3ay/blueberry-flummery.html

Atlantic / Baltic Sturgeon

There’s a ton of information out there about the Baltic Sturgeon, one of the great success stories in this era of the sixth mass extinction event – here are a few historical places to start.

https://www.naturalsciences.be/en/news/item/6233

http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/230/0

http://www.helcom.fi/helcom-at-work/projects/completed-projects/sturgeon-rehabilitation-pg/baltic-sea-sturgeon

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1439-0426.1999.tb00221.x

Has some details on first eating of sturgeon/caviar
http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/Y5261E/y5261e06.htm

Article on leaping behaviour
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/sports/outdoors-the-lofty-mystery-of-why-sturgeon-leap.html

Sturgeon for tomorrow (fishermen + conservationsist)
https://www.sturgeonfortomorrow.org/resources-for-educators.php

Wiki in lithuanian
https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltijos_a%C5%A1tria%C5%A1nipis_er%C5%A1ketas