The secret life of the black crappie

It was a fine spring day and the boat was still attached to the tow vehicle, so I started it and drove to Opinicon Lake for a bit of crappie fishing.

I couldn’t find the fish in their usual haunts. Flowing water and schools of minnows weren’t attracting them today. I picked my way around Deadlock Bay, unwilling to give up. Eventually I found a few scattered fish around submerged stumps. Usually once you have found the first fish, the next dozen come quite easily. I have caught as many as 76 under a single stump. But not today. Two strikes on each stump, and that was it.

Eventually fatigue and a threatening storm drove me off the lake, but not before I spotted a group of people on the dock at the Queen’s Biology Station, so I swung by to say hello. These three were from Carleton University and didn’t know anybody I knew. I mentioned my few crappies. The alpha-male student told me that there are lots of crappies around. They’ve been netting them. Perhaps they’re not biting today.

That’s when it got interesting. I told him that I could only find them on stumps. He said that’s because they spawn on stumps, sticking the egg masses to the top of a horizontal root. Then the male guards the egg mass, though he takes off when the eggs hatch, rather than guarding the fry the way bass do.

It immediately became apparent to me that I had sinned, taking spawning fish off their nests. Oops. Sorry, fish. I didn’t know. He also said that, “They’ll be all fryed out in another week. Then they’ll school up and start feeding.”

So I left the QUBS dock a wiser man. I’d better stay away from the stumps for a week or so, but then I should be able to find some crappies in their usual haunts.

(When I cleaned up the fish they were all males, and none had anything in his stomach. Seems the guy knew his stuff.)

C-38 and your new dock

Keith Ashfield in a speech in the House of Commons on May 3, 2012 made the following comments:

We would clarify situations where development poses the highest risk to fish and fish habitat and those areas of limited risk. We would establish a new framework, in conjunction with stakeholders, to make it easier for people to comply with the Fisheries Act while working in or near water. This would include identifying classes of low-risk work, such as installing a cottage dock, and classes of water where project reviews would not be required. For medium-risk projects, standards would be established allowing Canadians much-needed clarity while they carry out those projects.

Ashfield’s comments sound reasonable as such comments often do. What worries me is not the shift of focus toward allowing cottagers to put their docks in with less restriction, but the apparent removal of regulation from ditches and flood plains, the source of the majority of pollution to enter the fisheries system. From a cursory reading of the debate it looks to me as though farmers will no longer be held accountable for runoff from their fields (fertilizer, pesticides) unless there are actually fish in the ditch.

Pesticides are the major pollutant in fish in the Rideau Waterway. Allowing the market to decide whether a farmer cleans his sprayer in a puddle next to a ditch (Roundup is expensive, eh?) doesn’t seem o.k. to me.

More research is needed here. Please feel free to offer clarifications as comments.

Morels, 2012

My latest theory involving the morel hunt: you don’t find them. They find you. These were around the roots of a couple of young elms which were cut out of the flower beds last year after they subsided to blight.

If some brilliant biologist or organic chemist would isolate the chemical released by dying elms which triggers morel growth, I would like a litre of it.

Late-season shallow water largemouths

Last week on an evening fishing trip I was skunked for the first time this season, so I concluded that the bass must have moved to deep water and that would be it for fishing with heavy tackle and artificial worms for this year.  But after catching nothing on Sunday, Tony limited out on Monday afternoon in shallow water.

He sent me specific directions to a spot with bass, so I ventured out at noon today, and surely enough, he had left me a fine three-pounder under a clump of weeds fifty yards from shore, just as he had said.  I worked around that area and picked up ten fish, of which I kept another four.

But then when I tried to top up my limit at a couple of other spots, I discovered that there weren’t any more fish to be had, anywhere.  All of the likely-looking weed patches were empty.  Not even a bluegill would bite at my bait.

This was an expedition for the table, so I kept the five largemouth and cleaned them up.  Then came the big surprise.  They were all empty.  The only stomach contents I could find were a parcel of leg bones from a bullfrog in one bass’s gut.

I have always thought bass went deep to avoid the cold.  Maybe it’s to find food.  These stragglers hadn’t done very well in the last week.  Of course they might have just gone off their feed because of the full moon.  Must study this further.

The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz

It’s hard to believe as one drives through the lush Ontario landscape that it was not always this way.  That’s why the photos in John Bacher’s Two Billion Trees and Counting:  The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz  (Dundurn, 2011) come as such a shock to the reader.

I looked in amazement at pine stumps standing on skeletal roots high above the drifting sand below.  In another photo a sand bank gradually engulfs an apple tree.  In 1885 a main road near Picton was buried under 30 metres of sand.  A brick factory had to be abandoned due to the sand invasion.

In other photos the Oak Ridges Moraine appears as a vast, sand wasteland, fissured with deeply eroded gullies.  The photos show the gritty reality of what happens to a rich landscape when it is plundered without care.

At the turn of the twentieth century, unfettered logging driven by the railroad led to the destruction of much of the forest which covered Ontario.  Slash from the timber cutters was left where it fell, turning to tinder in hot weather.  Sparks from steam locomotives caused fires of such frequency that the topsoil burned or blew away along the railway lines.  In the Canadian Shield the land was burned right down to the rock.  In Southern Ontario the underlying sand became a desert over large tracts.

But the loggers and the locomotives were not entirely to blame.  The myth of the Ontario pioneer shows the immigrant struggling with his axe to fell the tall trees, then burn them for potash to provide income prior to planting a first crop of wheat in the few acres of the homestead tract the family was able to clear each year.  According to Dr. Bacher, over vast tracts of Southern Ontario and on into the Canadian shield, the reality was one of reckless burns of the forest for the ashes left in the wake of the fires.  There was more money in supplying the soap factories with potash than in subsistence farming on marginal land, so the squatters would often move on to another patch of virgin forest and try again.

It was a war against the landscape.  Railroads, logging companies, prospectors and squatters raced to gobble it up.  Politicians looked upon the receding forest as an impediment to progress, and the market in its products as a patronage opportunity.

Catastrophic floods, droughts and fires followed.  The history of pre-1925 Ontario is one of devastation.

In his book Bacher traces how a single man, Professor Edmund Zavitz, convinced Ontario that there was a better way.  Zavitz was a bureaucrat who used the technology of the time to convince landowners and legislators alike that the future lay in controlling the waste caused by degradation of the environment.

His friend J.H. White’s photographs documented the “railside burning of forests down to bare rock (108)” which led to federal regulations on railways in 1912.  “In 1915 Zavitz’s inspectors found 36 fires which were caused by settlers starting fires in dangerous seasons and not controlling them… Such dangers, they believed, had to be accepted as the price for living in Northern Ontario (109).”

The Matheson Fire on 1916 burned twenty townships across Northern Ontario with 243 deaths.  Cochrane burned out for the third time.  89 died in a sudden firestorm in Matheson.  In all, 6% of Ontario burned. The Haileybury fire of October 4, 1922 caused 40 deaths and destroyed 6000 homes.

Through the use of air power, tougher laws, and changed public attitudes, Edmund Zavitz pioneered the control of loss from forest fire in the Canadian north.  Working with Premier Drury and later Premier Ferguson, he ended the threat of uncontrolled forest fires in the north.

Zavitz brought similar stability to Southern Ontario with reforestation programs which eventually ended the threats of drought, flooding and spreading deserts as the consequence of deforestation (144).

Fire protection and reforestation programs pioneered by Edmund Zavitz over his life have largely shaped Ontario’s landscape and climate.  Bacher’s book details the stages by which this Ontario Agricultural College professor and visionary public servant created and preserved this rich legacy of tree planting on private lands.

After it had been severed by the lack of understanding and subsequent cutbacks of the Rae and Harris governments, the link to Zavitz’s tradition was reestablished in 2007 by the McGuinty government.  With minimal funding and support from a wide variety of organizations and individuals, the 50 Million Trees Program has quietly restored the link to this proud tradition in Ontario.  This successful and ongoing program lies at the base of the McGuinty Government’s green credentials.

UPDATE: October 29, 2011, The Globe and Mail offered the following concise review by William Bryant Logan:

Two Billion Trees and Counting:  The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz

By John Bacher

Dundurn, 274 pages, $26.99

John Bacher, an environmentalist and historian living in St. Catharines, Ont., has rescued Edmund Zavitz (1875-1968) from undeserved obscurity. Zavitz was appointed Ontario’s chief forester in 1905, when vast stretches of Ontario were deforested to the point of desertification. Beginning with the Oak Ridges Moraine, which was rapidly becoming a dust bowl, he instituted reforestation projects all across to province, establishing tree nurseries and bylaws and educating politicians and the public about the dire consequences – flooding, erosion, sandstorms – of over-cutting. He went on to become Ontario’s deputy minister of forests and director of reforestation. One month before Zavitz’s death, Ontario premier John Robarts planted the billionth tree on Zavitz’s watch, and more than a billion have been planted since.

A profoundly humbling moment

The tsunami which swept over coastal areas of Japan this week will rank in our memories as the defining moment of many lives. All over the world humans recoiled in shock, then oozed forward in fascination at this enormous, uncaring power before which we were powerless.

On video we watched the best of buildings — designed and built to protect their occupants through massive shocks – perform their roles well, only then to be swept away by the wave of black water and debris.

We saw the most common symbols of Japan in Canada, small gray and white automobiles, tossed around like marshmallows in the dark chocolate torrent which swept ashore.

Our hearts went out to the people in the vehicles in the path of that tidal wave, people very much like us, whose fear and will to survive we could well understand. In the face of devastation that massive, and the cold, hungry nights of the multitude of survivors unprepared for such hardships, it’s hard even to think of what to hope for them.

It is in the aftermath of the disaster that the grim reality of life and death on this planet unmasks itself. When thousands of bodies drift ashore at the same time, crematoria cannot accommodate them, and cherished notions of order break down. Nuclear generating stations don’t stop producing energy when damaged. Demons unleashed, they continue to erupt radiation and explosive hydrogen, tormenting survivors for the foreseeable future.

Damian Grammaticas of the BBC wrote of the devastation of a small town in Japan: “As you gaze over the wrecked landscape, it feels as if the natural order of things has been shaken, and nobody knows when it will settle down again.”

But we must not make this more than what it is. This is not the end of the world. It’s a routine adjustment of its skin by the planet we inhabit. Earth’s a rough place to live at times, and human intervention had absolutely nothing to do with the initial disaster. That’s a humbling thought.

But it may well lie in the recovery efforts from the flood and the nuclear demons which man has unleashed where we humans distinguish ourselves, and show that we may indeed have some claim to our self-proclaimed title of stewards of the earth.

No good energy choices?

There is a list of Ontario generating stations online, categorized by type. The hydro-electric stations between Westport and Kingston produce a total of 5.2 megawatts, according to the chart. A seventy-acre solar farm is rated at 10.0 megawatts.

So which costs more? Forty million dollars for panels is a steep price against an expected 20-year lifespan. But how much for a series of hydro-electric plants with indefinite lifespans?

The opportunity costs figure prominently in the balance, as well. Dams and non-seasonal drawdowns to feed the generators have the potential to disrupt the ecosystem of the entire area, not to mention the lives of many waterway users, in return for a piddling amount of electricity. On the other hand I doubt if anyone will miss seventy acres out of the Eastern Ontario landscape in the short term, especially when the solar fields can only be installed on class 4 or worse land.

But there’s no way a solar panel can produce at anywhere near its rated level. The sun goes down. Clouds interfere. Snow sits for long periods on even steeply-sloping panels. But hydro stations on the Rideau quickly run out of water after going full-bore during spring runoff, so they can’t produce their rated power, either.

Dwarfing both sources a thousandfold are nuclear generating stations. These things are serious producers, 24/7, virtually forever. Of course there are some high costs per megawatt there, and the doomsday threat. After the huge earthquake and resulting tsunami tore Japan apart and damaged at least six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, controllers have been forced to flood three of them with sea water to save lives, thereby destroying an enormous investment in the economy of the country. Will Japan ever recover from the damage it has undergone this week?

Our memories immediately flip back to Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), tales of human error and bad engineering. In the case of the Japanese reactors, they were apparently engineered to handle a massive earthquake, shutting down automatically, and things were going fine until the flooding from the tsunami killed the emergency diesel generators which provided cooling water to the fuel rods. Even with the best of engineering, nuclear devices can fail, and when they do they endanger entire populations and landscapes. That’s the problem with large-scale projects.

Coal power is likely the cheapest souce of electrical energy. All you have to do is build the plant, fire it up, and keep the legislators paid off. I wonder how the dirt factor per unit of energy stacks up between coal and oil sands bitumen?

In the context of this enormously complex power market, solar farms may not be so crazy. They can’t be accused of polluting the air above them in the manner of a coal-fired plant, and they aren’t likely to blow us to kingdom come in a meltdown. Sunlight is a year-round resource, unlike the annual spring runoff for hydro.

Rated at 197.8 megawatts, the Wolfe Island Wind Project with eighty-six wind turbines is the second-largest wind project in Canada. Toronto papers are full of dark grumblings about wind power, but when asked last month, Wolfe Island residents seemed generally positive about the project.

On February 22nd Patrick Meagher and Jessica Simms of Farmer’s Forum handed out surveys of attitudes toward wind turbines to the occupants of cars waiting for their morning ferry off the island. Of the two hundred adults asked, only two declined.

“79% of respondents say they either approve (53%) of the wind turbines or that they don’t affect them or aren’t sure (26%). At the same time 21% said they were opposed to the wind turbines. That’s 42 of 200 people polled, not a number easily dismissed (Farmer’s Forum, March 2011).”

You can find the well-written report of the survey on farmersforum.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electrical_generating_stations_in_Ontario

The Asian Carp Menace

The Detroit Free Press had the following on March 5th:

Feng Yang, the Markham, Ontario, man who pleaded guilty to possession of more than 4,000 pounds of prohibited live carp this week in Windsor, was also convicted in 2006.

Ed Posliff, a Windsor attorney who prosecuted the more recent incident, said Yang had run afoul of invasive species regulations on another earlier occasion as well, but was not convicted.

He is the owner of a fish importation business that supplies restaurants and markets in Ontario, including Toronto. The plea deal prohibits him from possessing invasive species, alive or dead, for three years.

Posliff said provincial authorities have prosecuted about a half dozen violations of the ban since it was imposed in 2005.

Feng Yang’s $50,000 fine and the previous $40,000 fine for the same offence in 2006 are apparently the cost of doing business in the hot live-fish market serving the Asian community.

When I wrote Flying Carp, and the Fun of a Sensational News Story in 2008, I felt it safe to assume that these invaders would be kept out of Ontario lakes by legislation, common sense, and an electric gate in Chicago to prevent the passage of fish up the canal from the Illinois River into Lake Michigan.

Unfortunately it appears as though common sense is non-existent in the urban marketplace. Disturbing rumours refer to the Asian tradition of buying a live fish and letting it go on special occasions to bring good luck. These rumours become more than urban legends when supported by a handful of newspaper reports from Ottawa, Sarnia, and Montreal of exotic and destructive fish caught by fishermen in city waterways. One even ended up in a Toronto fountain.

Bigheaded carp is the generic term for silver and bighead carp, imported to the United States from Asia in the 1970′s to clear catfish ponds and sewage lagoons of algae. Since then the two species have overrun the Mississippi River and spread north up the Illinois River as far as Chicago.

The spectacular jumping habits of nervous silver carp are the stuff of YouTube legend. When disturbed by the sound of an outboard motor, the fish leap wildly into the air, often landing in the boat or striking passengers. This makes for hilarious video footage, but water skiing and even small boat operation are seriously hampered by their presence. One observer likened a boat ride in an infested area to “getting hit by flying bowling balls at random intervals.”

Even more devastating, though, are the exotic carps’ enthusiastic feeding and breeding habits.

Duane C. Chapman, USGS Fisheries Biologist, saw my 2008 article and sent along a number of clarifications based upon his own research with bigheaded carp.

First, Chapman pointed out that there is no such thing as a triploid (genetically sterile) silver or bighead carp. Only for the very different grass carp have scientists developed a sterile variant.

The reason for the alarm is that these carp have a reputation for eating their way through the entire ecosystem of a lake or river. The only disagreement has to do with how quickly they can do it. Recent studies have claimed that a female silver or bighead can lay one or two million eggs at a hatch. The fish reach spawning maturity early, and they compete relentlessly with native species. Chapman’s current research concerns the analysis of how much damage the silver and bighead carp have done to the areas they have invaded.

“I have data … that shows that zooplankton populations in the low velocity habitats used by bighead and silver carps (together, known as the “bigheaded carps”) are MUCH lower than prior to the invasion. These things do not bode well for native fishes, especially fishes that require the same habitats as bigheaded carps and that are planktivorous throughout their life (like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo, and the important preyfish gizzard shad)….Time will tell what we see in the future. Predictions are tough, although risk assessments on these fish are uniform in the opinion that it would be risky to have these fish invade.”

Chapman did specify, however, that Illinois catfish fishing is still world-class, so the invaders haven’t completely devastated the river ecology.

But we don’t want them here.  Ontario’s waterways are the heart of our tourism industry. We can’t allow them to be destroyed because some stubborn individual insists upon smuggling in destructive fish to make a buck – or other, equally stubborn individuals let fish go out of carelessness or nostalgia.

A few minutes on YouTube will produce a nauseating explanation for the live-fish market.  There is plenty of footage there of partially-cooked bighead carp eaten alive by enthusiastic diners.  It’s bad enough to ship these fish for days in tanks with no water; to my mind it’s even worse to deep fry all but the head and then pick the flesh away from its bones while the victim looks at you from the platter.

Eating partially-cooked fish alive is cruel and barbaric.  Canadian voters have the clout to insist upon enforcement of the ban on the sale of live food fish.

Legislators have become remarkably draconian in their rules for the seizure of assets of accused drug traffickers.  To put an end to this despicable live-carp market, we need a law which ensures similar asset seizure for those caught trafficking in live fish.

http://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/flying-carp/

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/article/949029–man-fined-50-000-for-importing-asian-carp

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/Importer-Fined-for-Asian-Carp-

http://www.freep.com/article/20110305/NEWS06/103050427/Man-hook-again-trying-smuggle-illegal-carp-across-border

http://www.freep.com/article/20110305/NEWS06/103050345

Back to school

Last summer Roz suggested that the course of Dr. William Newcomb, known as “Dino Bill” to his students, would be a good fit for me. Trees of Canada, Biology 529, is a seminar offered to fourth year Queen’s undergraduate students.

During the introductions I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that this was my first university course since 1980. The comment led to the first of a series of blank looks from the seven women and three men in the class. They appeared to have no way to comprehend a creature from this era.

What’s more, this artifact insisted upon making comments in class. Perhaps no one in the room was more discomfited than Dino Bill. When my prof told me he had his own portable saw mill, I reasonably asked him for the make and model. His mouth dropped. I don’t think one of his students had ever asked him that. Same thing happened when he mentioned his skidder. I had seen one of that model for sale on Kijiji that morning.

Dino Bill assigned a short seminar on tree-cutting rules in their home municipalites, so the students reported from Montreal, Winnipeg, the Ottawa Valley, Ottawa, Bermuda, England, Australia, and three boroughs of Toronto.

Unlike graduate students who seem to have quite a bit of flexibility in their schedules, these undergrads seemed very pressed for time. When I invited the class to the woodlot for an afternoon walkabout, a couple of members of the class did the math and came up with a total time commitment of five hours. They reluctantly concluded that it couldn’t work this semester. There just wasn’t enough time.

The 8:30 class had perfect attendance. The only slightly-late arrivals were those who had seminars that day, who often came in showing the effects of very little sleep. But the handouts, graphics and oral presentations were of the first order.

After three decades of trying with limited success to teach students how to write good point-form outlines, I was delighted to see the quality of the outlines these guys produced. I asked Eric how he learned to write this way. “Uh, I sorta watch what the other students do, and then try really hard to match it.” Well try they do, and they succeed. Over the course of a full semester of written materials, I did not notice a single error of spelling or grammar.

I told Eric and anyone within earshot that in the outside world their writing and presentation skills alone are a very marketable skill, regardless of their scientific knowledge.

As Roz anticipated, the content of the course proved highly interesting to this veteran tree-hugger. The chemistry was way beyond me, but the rest was just fine. The big surprise was the lack of a textbook for the course. Most of the seminar material came from Internet websites devoted to tree cultivation and biology.

For the most part this worked well. The only weak spot in the data seemed to be the trap of a popular map marking the range of each tree species: it must have been designed by a politics major, for it painted the whole province or state green if that particular tree was found in it.

At 8:30 on a Tuesday morning it is hard to look at an illustration of the entire province of Ontario painted green to describe the range of the sugar maple. This error made its way through most of the seminars, which illustrated that while these are bright young people, they have little real-world experience yet. The image of maples growing on permafrost along the shore of Hudson’s Bay — I just can’t get it out of my head.

But the students were in their element on the biochemistry of cancer-fighting compounds extracted from British Columbia yew and red cedar. The history of the willow tree parallels the evolution of modern medicine.

Bill assigned me a seminar on the managed forest, a program for privately-owned woodlots in Ontario. I showed up with a 16-page handout of our management plan and a reprint of a Review-Mirror column on the subject. I started off by asking the students the following question:

“Assume you have been put in charge of a substantial woodlot. Please list in order of preference the following benefits you would like to receive from the property:

ecological benefits, recreation, wildlife habitat, money, wood products, aesthetics.”

A glance at their papers showed money at the top of almost every list!

Another surprise came when I finally realized that these were not English literature students. For years I have observed print-fixated English majors in meetings latching onto the first available thing to read and rudely ignoring the speaker. I thought my current classmates were extremely polite to resist the temptation of the printed page in favour of the talking head, but I gradually realized that reading is work, not fun, for biology students.

The best thing about the course, undoubtedly, was the young people in it. Dino Bill said they are an uncommonly good lot, and I would have to agree. If they are Canada’s future, we’re in pretty good hands.

A visit from Joe and Christian

My grandfather loved his axe, and throughout his long life he wielded it with skill and pride. He heated his home with wood he split himself until it made sense to put in an oil furnace. Then he retired his axe and adjusted the thermostat.

My father never thought much of oil heat because it relied upon too many outside factors and might someday let his family down in a crisis. From the time I was big enough to lift a chainsaw I worked with my dad cutting firewood for heat. Much of the time we spent together over the year was devoted to this vital task. By the seventies it made sense to switch to oil heat, but he still insisted upon having a wood stove in his living room.

But during the ice storm it wasn’t the stove that allowed Mom and Dad to stay in their home, it was the generator that electrician Les Parrott bestowed upon them on the first day of the storm. From that time on my dad cherished his 5 kw Honda and the stove sat unused.

It turns out in the last year my sister and I have separately looked into the feasibility of buying solar equipment. As peak oil approaches it just makes sense to have an alternative energy source lined up.

Then realtor Allan Earle sent me an email this week asking me to meet with his clients who would be in the area for a day, so we set up an interview. I wanted to hear what they had to say and possibly get a column out of it.

I had done some reading about Northland Energy, a solar company developing three projects in the Newboro area, and I just assumed these guys would be representatives of this company. No. Joe’s from Tenedos Energy, of Toronto and London. Christian represents JCM Capital of Toronto, which provides funding for Tenedos.

They haven’t bought any farms in the area. That’s another company again. By now I had figured out that they have nothing to do with Renewable Energy, the developer of several projects just outside Smiths Falls.

So my first question was, “Why are you interested in this area, and this property specifically?”

Joe Lasko responded, “Tenedos Energy goes out and locks down sites. JCM provides the money to do that. We identify areas which are the most suitable. This location is of interest because it offers Class 4 land, and a spot close to a transmission station with capacity available.”

Rightly or wrongly, eligibility for Feed In Tarrif funding under the Green Energy Act is contingent upon locating the solar fields on land which is not classified as Class 1, 2, or 3.

The first thing I had done after Alan Earle visited the farm a couple of weeks ago was locate a soil map. Surely enough, on the Canada Land Inventory Agricultural Capability Map (31C9) the area around Young’s Hill is coloured white, indicating Class 1, 2, or 3 land, but Young’s Hill itself is brown on the map, and thus is eligible for FIT funding, regardless of the soil’s fertility. You can find this map quite easily on the Internet.

The Green Energy Act has produced a gold rush in Ontario. The Feed In Tarrif Program has succeeded in attracting world attention and companies such as Tenedos have sprung up to take advantage of the development opportunity. Tenedos personnel branched off from Greta Energy where they had specialized in wind power installations over the last five years in Bosnia, Estonia, Russia, Germany and Vietnam.

The rush is to secure access to class 4 land and a dwindling supply of unused capacity on transmission lines.

I asked Christian Wray what his firm brings to the table. “JCM Capital helps to fill a funding gap in Canada. European capital is cheaper for us because solar has a track record in Europe and there’s just more money available. Germany and Spain have had FIT programs for a decade now. They’re familiar with solar energy and not afraid to invest in it. There are solar farms in Germany that have been operating since the sixties.

“At JCM we have deep finance experience and are able to raise financing in the international markets through a deep network of relationships in this region. We understand what makes renewable projects bankable and can help smaller developers get to this quality threshold.

“Tenedos uses polycrystalline panels, not the new thin-film panels that use less silicon. These have various environmental issues. They’re not as green as the polycrystalline panels which are a proven technology, around since the 1960’s.

“Each developer has its own philosophy: we are focused on using green, proven, financeable products in our projects.”

I fired off a much less theoretical question: “A home generator usually produces about five kilowatts of power per hour. Assuming an hour at mid-day on a sunny day in July, how many sections of solar panel would it take to match that output? How many of these would be mounted on a single pole? Per acre?”

Christian responded, “Canadian Solar on the Internet will give the specs. We use a 230 watt panel, so that would be 21 panels. Various combinations of them get put together, depending upon the engineering of the site. We work with the engineer to determine the best solution for the site.”

Joe and I branched off into an animated discussion of Hunter Thompson’s writing. He did his master’s thesis at Brock on the guy. Allan grew quite restless at this, pointing out that they had other meetings scheduled, and they’d better get under way.

So away they went. Joe and Christian, two bright young guys. Smooth salesmen or business leaders of the future? We’ll have to see.