Zhiqing experience 4
At that time, the high-level brigade in the remote mountainous areas of Changtai, although the conditions were difficult, could also enjoy close contact with the original ecological nature, and after 50 years, several animal wonders experienced by them were still vividly remembered.
Wait for the fish - fish basket fishing
An important tributary of the Jiulong River North Stream, The High-rise Creek meanders for nearly 100 kilometers from the Anxi Longjuan Inner Mountain through the high-rise village to join the nearby main stream of the Jiulong River, and there are many fish in the stream. Not only are there flocks of fish and shrimp in the high-rise streams under the mountain, but also ditch streams such as bamboo tsaiping, rough pits, and navelolio near Lunzaiwei Village, fish, shrimp, stone frogs (dried stone frogs, spiny-breasted frogs), and turtles can be seen everywhere. Farmers cut some "bamboo" from the creek side of the high-rise creek, weave them side by side into dense fish reeds, move the stones in the stream, and build fish reeds on the rapids to form a special waterway, so that the stream can be diverted into the reeds. The fish basket (hang), also written as the fish beam, is a simple fishing facility built by artificial barriers, similar to the rabbit-like fish picking, the fish will rush into the fish basket with the rapids and fall into the fish reed arranged by the "bamboo". At dawn, the owner of the fish basket should quickly carry the fish basket to clean up the fish, if you are lucky, there can be two or three pounds of harvest, large and small fish, otherwise, the person who sees it has a share, may be picked up, and will also be taken away by greedy birds and beasts. The high-rise creek has nearly ten kilometers of river channel in the territory of the high-level brigade, with a large drop, the stream is turbulent, and it is full of fish baskets, but when the water comes, the fish basket will be washed away, so the water has to retreat and rebuild, and the farmers are happy to do so. Chen Zhuming, a senior citizen working in the Zhangzhou Quality Inspection Bureau, has a comprehensive and vivid memory of this. I've also seen farmers sledgehammer strike large pebbles in the shallow water of the stream, causing the fish to float up in shock, which is a small way of catching fish. This advanced means of electric fish, at that time, has not yet been transmitted to remote mountainous areas, it is the use of direct current on the battery on the back, inverse into a hundred volts of high-voltage alternating current, transmitted to the electrodes on the fishing net pocket, call the fish and shrimp in the water. At that time, high-power transistors and thyristors were still very rare, and the price was expensive, only mechanical electromagnetic relays could be used to complete the current inverter, but also to wind a bulky transformer, the electrical conversion efficiency was low, it was not easy to achieve the effect, I was a radio enthusiast in the early years, I had done experiments, did not succeed. Now that high-power switching power supplies such as electric vehicle chargers have been widely used in life, I think they can definitely be made into high-efficiency inverters. I have also seen some farmers collect poisonous plants such as reed vines and hooked snouts (broken intestinal grass) on the mountain, boil them with water and pour them into the creek pool, which can poison the large and small fish and shrimp in the pond, which is a barbaric way that is unfavorable to ecology.
"Waiting for the Rabbit" upgrade version: Fish basket to pick up fish
Ayu jumping dragon gate
The most spectacular thing is that the fish swim upwards and jump desperately at the dragon gate. The high-rise creek at the foot of the mountain in Lunzaiwei Natural Village has abrupt stones, blocking the gushing stream from forming a rapid, called "Se", and the large drop point becomes a small waterfall, and the stream falls from a few meters tall stone called "漈", and the water under the river is deeper, called the pond. The upper stream flows through the bottom of the navelo mountain and there is a small waterfall. In the spring of 1971, I witnessed the spectacle of a small jumping fish in groups of locusts desperately jumping under a small waterfall, and witnessed the great nature of fish to spawn against the current. At its peak, the small jumping fish under the plunge pool are densely assembled, black pressed, and constantly rushed upwards, and people standing on the shore can fish out half a basin with a washbasin. Once a year, there are days of dense jumping of fish, when farmers take small nets to catch fish in this stream. The small jumping fish are rearranged in a large pot when they return home, and the dried fish grilled from the embers of the stove is a first-class delicacy that farmers use to entertain guests. Later, I learned that this small jumping fish is called ayu, commonly known as brook bream, is a precious fish, with a narrow body length of about 10 cm, is a returning fish that spawns from the sea and the river, and has different salty and light environments at different growth stages. In winter, it grows in the salty water at the mouth of the river, and when it matures, it lays eggs upstream of the stream, and previously it was visible every year in the small tributaries of the North Stream and the Upper West Stream of the Jiulong River. In the same season of the following year, everyone took fish to this stream every day to watch the fishing, hoping to reproduce the grand gathering of ayu in previous years, but they never saw it again, and they could only catch a few ayu fish. Later, a 4,000-kilowatt hydropower station was built in the 1990s in the section of the river where the fish were fished, and then many hydropower stations were built everywhere in the main stream of the Kowloon River and the tributaries of the stream, with countless large and small dams, cutting off the passage of fish back to swim, and it is even more difficult to see this spectacular scene, it is said that the ayu has disappeared in many places and has become an endangered animal.
Ayu, a migratory fish, is also called brook bream
Ayu can also be seen at the restaurants in Hua'an, Nanjing
I have a special relationship with high-rise landscapes and rivers, where I went to the countryside for six years, participated in the work for many years, and then participated in the audit of the high-rise Creek Hydropower Station in my second hometown, surveyed the project site, and once again set foot on this familiar land. High-rise creek is the second largest river in Changtai, rich in hydraulic resources, large runoff, a few kilometers of natural drop of 57 meters, suitable for building a dam, the height of the dam is 29 meters, the storage capacity is 1.75 million cubic meters, almost no submerged farmland, not to mention the need for migration, digging tunnel-type water diversion channels, hydraulic maintenance is easy, is a rare hydraulic resource. The Changtai County government did its best to build this power station (at that time the annual fiscal revenue), and several additional estimates, a total investment of nearly 40 million yuan, after going through hardships to finally build a hydropower station with an installed capacity of 4,000 kilowatts. Soon after the completion and operation of the hydropower station, the wind of state-owned enterprise restructuring blew up all over the country, called "grasping the big and letting go of the small, and revitalizing assets." Zhangzhou and various counties of state-owned small enterprises, including small hydropower plants have been restructured to sell or contract, high-rise hydropower stations are new enterprises, at that time normal production and operation, but also sold in the reform wind, the construction cost of water power plants 38 million yuan transferred to a private buyer. However, the price of hydropower stations obviously does not take into account the asset of water resources. Is not liquidation a kind of loss? After recovering the construction cost, revitalizing assets, increasing financial funds, and being the achievement of reform, why did it decide to build this power station in the first place? The power station has changed owners for 20 years, and has not lost money, the price of electricity and the network of the power grid, the enterprise benefit is even more prosperous. Why is it more short-sighted than private business owners?
High-rise Creek Hydroelectric Dam
The river was stopped to generate electricity, and the downstream of the dam exposed the riverbed
Eggs burst out of the suitcase
In the paddy fields of the countryside, there are field frogs (field chickens, frogs), eels and loaches everywhere. At night, when you shine a flashlight on the field, you can find that the frogs on the edge of the rice field stick out their heads, and it is easy to catch them with their hands under the strong light. In winter, the paddy fields dry up, and when ploughing the ground, the eel loach drills out by itself, grabs it by hand, and comes back to cook soy sauce is a good dish with rice. There are also stone frogs (spiny-breasted frogs, dry stones) in the streams and streams, and the stone frogs hide in the stone crevices of the clean running water, and it is necessary to have skills to catch it, and I heard that some people will accidentally pull out snakes from the holes. There are also turtles (turtles) in the stream, but they are not common.
One day, I was working in the sandbar citrus garden opposite the polder on the banks of the high-rise creek, hoeing the grass, the hoe turned over the sand, and 4 eggs appeared, the size of a pigeon egg, is it a bird egg, a snake egg, or a turtle egg? Everyone couldn't tell, I took these eggs home after work, and inadvertently put them into a wooden box modified with a soap box, which was the standard for every zhiqing, used to put daily clothing supplies, and spare change was also put in the box. After that, I forgot to check it out, and only after ten days did I open the box and found 4 small turtles with the size of coins lying in all corners of the box, but unfortunately they were all dead! Fortunately, there were no 4 small snakes crawling out. Legend has it that after the turtle lays its eggs, the female turtle will stare at the nest of eggs not far away before it will hatch, which does not seem to be necessarily true.
Newly shelled young turtles
Beasts haunt
The vegetation in the mountainous areas is good, there are forests everywhere, thatch, often see birds and animals haunting, peasants have gunpowder, birds, beasts, some farmers still carry it, it seems that they did not care about maintaining stability. This kind of gunpowder gun is a front boring gun, loaded with gunpowder from the muzzle, mixed with small steel balls, and after firing, the bullet point is scattered, and the lethality is small. Mountain roe deer and mountain pigs are more common on the mountain, and occasionally dogs, leopards and goats. Farmers caught the roe deer and slaughtered it for sale, I bought the mountain roe deer meat, and pork at a price, only 7 cents 5 per catty, the taste is great! It confirms the colloquial summary of the taste of the mountains and the sea: "Partridge on the mountain, mackerel in the sea". Mountain pigs are a scourge on crops, have strong fertility, and become a pest in mountainous areas. In addition to the mountain pigs eating sweet potatoes in the field, they are often sows with a group of piglets and arch everywhere, and the sweet potatoes in a large area of the field are wasted. In addition to killing the mountain pig scourge directly with a shotgun, there were two ways to eliminate the mountain pig scourge: road guns and mountain pig cannons. The road gun is actually a shotgun with a short barrel, and the road gun is placed on the way the mountain pig passes, and the mountain pig will touch the mechanism that is, the pull plate machine, and the mountain pig will struggle to run for a while after being hit, and it will be patrolled to find the blood. This method is easy to injure passers-by by mistake. Mountain pig cannon is a kind of homemade gunpowder, the ingredients are glauber's salt, potassium chlorate (also called chloroxide, I am often entrusted to buy at Zhangzhou Jining Pharmacy with a brigade certificate), charcoal powder, mixed with porcelain bowl fragments carefully kneaded into an earthen bomb, bandaged with plastic film, the outermost layer of bread delicious omelette skin, luring mountain pigs to bite. As soon as the mountain pig's mouth bit the small porcelain particles inside the friction, it detonated, and the mountain pig was killed on the spot. I have participated in the production of the product's arms by the landlord, Brother Chen.
Wild boar, southern Fujian is called mountain pig
There have been tiger infestations in the upper echelons before, and the landlord has been awarded a tiger hero award by Changtai County, but when we went to the countryside, we have long disappeared, and only the small wild leopard (dog leopard) still appears from time to time. Lunzaiwei Village and the brigade headquarters are 4 kilometers away, in the middle of a road, densely forested, on one side is a cliff, on the other side is an abyss, under the abyss is a high-rise stream, and the path is next to a large canal. In 1975 recruitment, the brigade informed me to go to pick up the form, excited I spent the night in the dark to catch the road, on the road saw the black shadow of a large animal, it is not clear whether it is a mountain roe deer or a dog leopard ferocious beast, the confrontation in a small moment, the guy slipped back, finally a false alarm.
Bees split up and make "bee independence"
Several clever farmers in the village have raised bees, and I have often seen bees split up. When the honey source is sufficient, the bees breed in large quantities, when there are too many bees in the bee colony, if the group is not divided in time, it will make a "bee alone", and the old queen bee will see the birth of the new queen bee, and will automatically take a small part of the bee colony to separate the family, do not love the power, and leave the home for the new king to operate. Before flying far, they tend to assemble in clusters on nearby branches or under the eaves, and the bee colonies are densely packed with bees inside and out. To recover the hive in time, or to go far away quickly, the beekeeper lost in vain. One of the methods, the beekeeper prepares an empty hive in advance, closes the nest door, and then attaches the nest spleen drizzled with honey to the end of the long bamboo pole, lifts the bamboo pole close to the bee colony, attracts the bees to climb to the empty nest spleen, reaches a certain amount, withdraws the nest spleen to see if there is a queen bee on it, if not, repeat the above steps until the queen bee is lured to the bee spleen. After finding the queen bee, use the bamboo wire woven king cage to buckle, do not let it fly away again, together with the bee spleen into the empty hive, cover the box lid, open the nest door, other bees will automatically fly to the hive, and then add a spleen, a honey powder spleen, placed in the right place, to form a new bee colony. A quicker way is to take a long ladder, close to the bee colony, people climb the ladder, use their hands directly in the bee colony to find the queen bee (longer than the worker bee, easy to identify), grab the empty matchbox, get off the ladder, just grab the key, put in the above empty hive with a nest spleen, you are done, in a moment, all the discrete bee colonies are all in the box! Bees do not have wireless mobile communication, can actually command remotely, wonderful!
Wild bees are also often seen in the wild, and wild bees nest in tree holes, earth holes or stone crevices. There is no big difference between domestic bees and wild bees, domestic bees are raised in live frames, and the nest pieces of wild bees are fixed in the hole. Experienced farmers often adopt wild bees in hives to increase their bee colonies.
After the bee colony splits up, it assembles in the trees
Perch and birds
There is also a large-tailed eel in the creek (the same name as the Taiwanese film starring Brother Pig Liang), which is said to have swam back from the sea, and everyone said that it was very complementary, and the big one weighed more than a dozen pounds. The perch will leave the water to climb ashore, and after the rain, the bamboo forest and bushes will eat mangosteen shoots and tender buds, and the eels are difficult to catch with mucus, just sprinkle coarse chaff on the path that the perch may pass, and the mucus meets the coarse chaff and increases the friction to catch it. There are also bamboo pig cages that are used to buy piglets in the polder and wait in the way of the perch eels, and ask another person to drive all the way and invite the king into the urn. I only heard that I have only seen the perch caught, and I have never seen the perch on the mountain, which is not a spectacle, but only a strange story. Nord Stream can also see a large fish known locally as the Soviet fish, which inhabits some of the deep pools of Nord Creek. In December 1975, a terrible cold snap struck, and Xiaoice grains (shotguns) fell, and a large piece of fish in The North Stream died, and some people said that they ate Xiaoice grains.
Perch
The mountainous area is full of woods and bamboo forests and reeds, which are very suitable for the life and reproduction of various birds, and farmers are often seen catching partridges, Guhuang (a small owl), spotted pigeons (spotted doves) flying in groups from the north for the winter, and during labor, they often encounter golden chickens (crying chickens) flying from the fieldside woods. In recent years, driving through the high-rise Tajiuchi Forest Road, almost every time you will encounter a beautiful golden chicken, and the driving recorder has also recorded precious videos.
Spotted pigeon (Spotted dove)
Chicken (Golden Chicken)
This article was written in March 2019 and revised in June 2021, and participated in the essay commemorating the 50th anniversary of going to the mountains and going to the countryside, which was compiled into the "Traces of Time - Documentary of the Movement of Zhangzhou to go to the Mountains and Go to the Countryside" compiled by Zheng Dehong.
"Traces of Time"