Today was another day with lots of lock. We had planned on doing ten locks and stopping at Long Itchington, but we had another boat to share the work and it was still early, so we headed up another ten locks before stopping for the day.

I noticed a rare bird of prey overhead today. I haven’t seen many this year, though there have been lots of squirrels and pigeons around. It was, I think, the Hudson Bay Company that first noticed the cyclic relationship between predator and prey. The number of showshoe hare pelts their trappers brought in varied over a roughly ten year cycle, as did the number of lynx pelts, but the peaks in the lynx population were a little after the hare population.

It’s a feedback loop. As the food supply expands the predator population expands, which eventually reduces the food supply and causes the predator population to decline again. So, I’m going to predict that in a a couple of years, we’ll see fewer squirrels and more buzzards.

There seem to be a lot of swallows around this year as well. Perhaps the insect population boomed in last year’s warm summer?