The annual coronation of a young girl symbolised a fishing community’s hopes. Now, as the industry declines, it has evolved to reflect the powerful role of women and the change they bring about
• Photographs by Christopher Thomond
The sun is battling the clouds, but the forecast rain holds off as the flotilla enters the harbour. Lining the quayside, hundreds of local people and tourists cheer each boat as it appears, and the sound of a pipe band skirls on the breeze as families crane their necks. They are looking for WaveDancer, the final, most important vessel. Today it is carrying an honoured passenger: the Eyemouth Herring Queen.
Fourteen-year-old Holly Blackie is the 80th Eyemouth Herring Queen (EHQ) and this year is particularly special as 50 former queens have travelled from all over the world to witness her coronation.
Holly Blackie is crowned by the outgoing Herring Queen, Sophie Crowe
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
08/01/2024 - 01:00
07/31/2024 - 23:00
Cornwall Wildlife Trust initiative aims to benefit creatures from upland marsh fritillaries to seahorses in St Austell Bay
A Cornish conservation charity has launched an ambitious rewilding project intended to benefit creatures from marsh fritillary butterflies living high on the moor to long-snouted seahorses in seagrass in a bay five miles away.
The Tor to Shore project will stretch from Helman Tor, a reserve topped with a granite boulder summit near Bodmin, to St Austell Bay via the tumbling River Par, its idea to improve a landscape at scale.
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07/31/2024 - 21:57
Japanese government confirms it will allow whalers to catch and kill up to 59 fin whales, a species conservationists consider vulnerable
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The Australian government is “deeply disappointed” by Japan’s decision to add the world’s second-largest whale species to the list of species its commercial whale hunters will target.
Tanya Plibersek, the environment minister, attacked Japan’s decision to hunt fin whales – the world’s second-longest whale and considered vulnerable.
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07/31/2024 - 19:00
Opposition leader’s argument is puzzling given Canadian provinces dominated by renewables pay less for electricity
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There’s a community in Ontario called Dutton which, right now, seems appropriate given the number of times Peter Dutton has name-checked the Canadian province over the last 12 months.
In dozens of media interviews and speeches, Dutton (the opposition leader, not the township) has said Ontarians are getting cheap electricity because of their 20 nuclear reactors.
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07/31/2024 - 13:12
New research led proposes a plan to safeguard Earth's imperiled biodiversity by cryogenically preserving biological material on the moon. The moon's permanently shadowed craters are cold enough for cryogenic preservation without the need for electricity or liquid nitrogen.
07/31/2024 - 13:04
Central General Staff militant group previously said Cop16 event scheduled for October in Cali ‘would fail’
A dissident rebel group has backed down from its threat to disrupt the UN biodiversity summit in Colombia later this year.
The Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, said on Wednesday it would order its militants not to target the Cop16 negotiations that are due to begin in Cali in October.
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07/31/2024 - 10:55
Nearly 100 wildfires are burning, including massive blaze in California that has become fifth-largest in state history
A person has been killed in one of several wildfires threatening heavily populated areas of the Colorado foothills, authorities said on Wednesday.
A body was discovered in a home about 1 mile (1.6km) north of Lyons, Colorado, according to Curtis Johnson, the Boulder county sheriff. He said that detectives were assisting the investigation into the death, but declined to provide further details.
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07/31/2024 - 10:00
Charity wants to know how climate crisis is affecting plants and what UK gardeners are doing to mitigate effects
Most gardeners love nothing more than the chance to chat about what has worked and what hasn’t in their flowerbeds this year.
So the latest callout from the Royal Horticultural Society will be music to their ears; the RHS is asking for information about what flowered for ages, what loved being waterlogged and how plants did on the occasional hot day, so that they can draw up a plan for how to keep gardening alive during the climate crisis.
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07/31/2024 - 09:40
Almost 200 people still missing after heavy rains and access problems hamper second day of rescue operation
The death toll from a series of landslides in Kerala has risen to 166 and almost 200 people are still missing as the southern Indian state reels from one of its worst disasters in years.
Hundreds of homes were swept away and crushed by two huge consecutive landslides in the hilly district of Wayanad in the middle of the night on Tuesday.
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07/31/2024 - 08:00
An extract from Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops on the Ground unpacks government cheese – from Steve Harvey jokes to Jay-Z lyrics and Wahlburgers
During the Depression, when milk supply exceeded demand, the US government bought milk to keep its price stable and support dairy farmers. Then, trying to find a way to store or get rid of the surplus, it started stockpiling cheese, which lasts longer than milk.
The government bought so much cheese that it eventually filled every cold storage in the country. But there was still more excess milk. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rented half an acre in a Kansas cave and filled it floor to ceiling with blocks of cheese. At its height, the US had 2lbs of stored cheese for every resident.
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