Dem Bones Dem Bones

Everybody loves a murmuration of starlings!

2012-01-25T17:54:00.000Z

I am soooooo jealous! Those girls were right in there with the birds. What an amazing experience! One for the grandchildren, I think! Not struck by the soundtrack, mind you. I'd have gone with natural sound. But then, I am an old curmudgeon!

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Woodpecker drumming

2012-01-23T13:58:00.000Z

I missed the Springwatch that featured this innovative great spotted woodpecker, but decided I had to share it when I came across it today. Magic!

BalletBoyz

2012-01-23T12:45:00.001Z

On Saturday we went to Cambridge Arts Theatre to see another new and stunning contemporary dance group called BalletBoyz. They're touring the country, and if you get a chance, go and see them. They're brilliant, and the choreography is quite different from any other group we've seen. I won't say any more, because the link takes you to a short video which will show you all you need to know.

Initially I was disappointed with the seats we were allocated. The theatre's ticketing system was down when I booked the seats, and they took all the details manually, then issued the tickets when the sytem came back up. I'd asked for seats in the middle of the row, as close to the front of the stalls as we could get, but when I collected them, we were on the far right of row D in the circle, which is quite a bit different.

However, we did have a good, if rather more distant, view, and we saw the stage from a completely different angle to what we're used to. We lost the right-hand edge of the stage, being so far to the right. In some ways we had a much better view than we'd have had where we normally sit, but we missed the immediacy of being really close. So overall, not as disappointing as we'd thought to start with, and we'll consider central seats in the circle in future.

Disproportionately pleased

2012-01-14T19:45:00.001Z

Before we went to the Galapagos, in December 2009, we decided it was essential we have a camera each, so we went to John Lewis in Cambridge and bought a nice Panasonic Lumix, and I've been completely delighted with it ever since. The image stablisation has meant that I've taken far fewer rubbish blurry shots than before, though I still take quite a few rubbish sharp shots, of course! The star Galapagos photo is this one, in which the dragonfly was a good 5 metres away. The 18X optical zoom is also pretty good, though rather upstaged by the modern versions of the same camera, of course.

However, one thing has been bugging me, just a bit, every time I used the camera. The lens cap was a very sloppy fit, so it would constantly fall off. Not enough to make me cross, but certainly enough to generate a quiet GRRR! each time.

Today we went into Cambridge for completely different reasons, but I thought in time, to take the camera. We passed through Jessops, where a nice man sold me a lens cap THAT FITS!!!!!! Hoorah! So I'm completely delighted, yet it's such a small thing. How silly is that?!!

Goldfinches in the garden

2012-01-13T15:33:00.002Z

I love it when we get anything slightly unusual in the garden, and although there are loads of goldfinches around right now, we get hordes at Fowlmere, for instance, we don't often see them in our garden. So it was a particular pleasure today to see six feeding high up in the paper birch tree, then later, two at the bird feeders. This photo isn't pin-sharp, partly because I took it through the window. I've found, with goldfinches, that opening the window, however slowly and quietly you do it, is enough to frighten them away, so today I didn't even try.

New books

2012-01-11T13:56:00.000Z

I've added a couple of new books to my list of recent good reads on the panel on the right. I suppose I should really knock some of the older ones off, as it's really some time since I read them. However, they're too good to dismiss, so I'm considering changing the title of that little section to suit what I want to leave there.

Brian Switek's Written in Stone is a great book about fossils, evolution and where we fit in. It's exactly the sort of book you'd expect me to enjoy and I have no hesitation recommending it. I can't remember how I came to read it, whether it was one that Jenny picked up or whether it came as part of the small library that she had to read in preparation for the Royal Society Winton Prize of which I've blogged before.

Sam Kean's Disappearing Spoon was definitely part of that batch of books, and in fact, was my favourite of all the books I read. Personally, I'd have awarded the Winton Prize to this book, but I wasn't on the jury. This is a collection of short tales about the elements that make up the Periodic Table. There's one short piece about each element, and it's a lovely read.

The Disappearing Spoon of the title comes about like this. Gallium is soft and easily moulded, with a very low melting point and looks like aluminium, so the trick was to make a realistic looking teaspoon and have your friend stir his tea with it. The temperature of the tea would be enough to melt the teaspoon while the tea was being stirred. The book doesn't say whether or not the victims of this prank ever drank the tea, but looking at the elements that surround it in the Periodic Table, I'd hazard a guess that you'd get away with it. Cadmium is pretty close, and that's quite a nasty poison, but everything else within a spit is mostly harmless. Of course, the tea would probably taste revolting and he'd discover molten gallium sloshing around the bottom if he got that far.

Jawfish mimics Mimic Octopus

2012-01-09T13:21:00.004Z

Judging by the number of hits you get when you type "mimic octopus jawfish" into Google, this is old news, but I think it's so cool I'm going to post about it anyway. Take a look at these two photographs.

The mimic octopus hit the headlines a year or two back because of it's impressive ability to mimic lion fish or flat fish and so on,(see here for a YouTube video) but this latest twist is even better.

The octopus only lives around Indonesia, and the black-marble jawfish has a much bigger range, but where the two overlap, the fish has been spotted pretending to be part of the octopus, thereby avoiding becoming someone's lunch.

In both photo's, the red arrow is pointing at the fish's head, but it's such a good disguise, it's still hard to see, even knowing that!

You can read the full details about it here.

Fowlmere

2012-01-06T14:17:00.000Z

Yesterday, being maintenance day and quite windy, we were mostly clearing fallen trees, and cutting and burning reeds. It was a great day as the weather steadily improved through the day, and we got masses done. Finally left the site at about 4.30, completely knackered!

Getting home, I realised I didn't know when the new term starts, ie, when my next Spanish class is, so phoned the school and picked up the recorded message stating that it's next week. That gave me an unexpected spare morning and it being a most beautiful, if chilly, day, I slid rapidly off to Fowlmere.

I saw more or less nothing as I walked around the reserve, though there were several tempting calls coming from the bushes, but nothing I recognised. Well, apart from various sorts of tits, robins, wrens, blackbirds, of course.

At Reedbed Hide I saw nothing much for quite a while. A grey heron, half a dozen greylag geese, a couple of mallard and a lone female teal. But hey, the sun was shining and I was quite content to sit and watch the world pass by.

A couple of folks came in and as they were setting up, a raptor flew down from behind us and landed on the other side of the mere. It was the size of a buzzard, but I thought that was unusual behaviour for a buzzard, since it didn't have any prey. It spent several minutes on the ground, drinking, amongst other things, but possibly bathing, too. We'd just about decided it was the female hen harrier that's been seen on numerous occasions over the past week or so, when it flew off northwards and settled in a willow right in front of Drewer Hide. If there was anyone in there, they'll have had a fantastic view of it. Bastards!

Then a small flock of teal arrived, so now there were ten of them, seven males and three females. The males were in real showing-off mode, stretching their necks skyward briefly, then doing much the same with their backsides. Male teal have brown heads with a broad irridescent green eye stripe, and a yellow patch on the side of the tail, and a ~~blue~~ green panel on top of the flight feathers, both of which are visible in the swimming ducks. When the males pointed their backsides skywards, the yellow and ~~blue~~ green flash in the bright sunlight was quite..er..flashy! (Corrections are because I can never remember whether they're blue or green. Mallard have a blue panel (speculum) while teal have a green one.)

More folks arrived, some of whom pointed out a couple of common snipe which I had looked for but completely failed to spot. Now I know where to look, I won't miss them again, I promise myself!

And finally a buzzard flew over, giving a great view of the underside. At that point, my lunch was calling me home, so I left, but I'm just about to return, as the sun is still shining! Maybe I'll see the hen harrier again, who knows?

Later: Yep, hen harrier gave several good displays, though I wasted quite a lot of the view ~~trying~~ failing to photograph her. She didn't come that close, however, frightened off by the clatter of camera motor drives, I reckon! There was a couple of guys with the most enormous ~~penises~~ telescopic lenses attached to their cameras. At one point, the bird was visible for about 5 seconds, not too far away, and one of these guys shot of what sounded like 50 frames in a series of short bursts.

I couldn't find the snipe, despite knowing where to look!

Fen Drayton Lakes

2012-01-03T14:46:00.002Z

Well Jenny is finally better, and has just taken a phone call from her doc explaining that tests had showed she was suffering from Campylobacter infection. We still don't know where it came from, though, but have our suspicions, since three of the seven people who ate my brother's most delicious chicken liver paté went down with similar symptoms.

Anyhow, yesterday being beautiful, if rather chilly, Jenny and I went to the RSPB reserve at Fen Drayton, where we saw lots of waterfowl. Teal, tufted duck, gadwall, half a dozen shag, great crested grebe, as well as more coots than we thought existed, plus goldfinches, chaffinches, long tailed tits, etc.

It was all quite splendid, and we were very pleased we'd thought to take some hot mushroom soup in a thermos, but the real problem was just how far away the birds were. I mutter into my beard at Fowlmere that the birds are too damn far away, but at Fen Drayton it was really hard work identifying things much of the time as they were hundreds of metres away. Our binoculars are quite powerful, but we really needed a telescope, and that's going too far, I mean!

And the map we collected from the stand in the car park didn't show the only hide that exists at Fen Drayton, so we didn't nake it there. We have a feeling it's rather a new reserve, and not really all that well sorted out.

So I didn't take a single photograph, but we did come home feeling really refreshed and pleased we'd made the effort. Not sure we'll be rushing back, mind you.

Mixed Christmas

2011-12-27T17:49:00.000Z

This Christmas we rented the same flat we usually do in Sherringham on the north Norfolk coast. It's a nice, warm, comfortable flat in the middle of the town, with a decent chippie at the end of the street and the most excellent Restaurant No 10 close by. The plan was to spend the whole time watching birds on the reserves at Cley next the Sea and Tichwell Marshes, but on Saturday morning, Jenny wasn't feeling well, having picked up a tummy bug somewhere. We went to Cley anyway, figuring we'd get lunch in the visitor centre there, and we could stay inside and watch birds from there if she didn't want to venture outside. No reason to expect the visitor centre to be closed on Christmas Eve, after all.

It was not to be. The visitor centre was indeed closed, so we had to lunch in a nearby pub before walking across the reserve to the nearest hides. It was bitterly cold in the rather sharp wind. We were very glad to get into the first hide, I can tell you!

Worth it, though, as we saw lots of birds. Marsh harriers, lots of lapwings, a few dozen black tailed godwits, avocets, a few shoveler ducks, lots of teal and widgeon, a scattering of dunlin, a few birds we tentatively identified as golden plovers, a pintail duck and several shelduck.

There were also a few birds I thought were redshank, ignoring the fact that their legs were bright orange, not red. After a bit of quiet discussion between Jenny and me, the guy sitting next to me offered advice, saying they were, in fact, ruff. Now Jenny had thought they might be, but I'd dismissed that, as ruff over-winter in Africa.

Except that the local expert told us there was a small population that over-winters in Norfolk, and we were watching a dozen or so of them, including a male just coming into breeding plumage. That was pretty good!

Jenny was really not well, and in the evening, hardly ate any of the goose I roasted for her. Worse, her sense of taste was affected, and the decent bottle of red I opened was wasted on her. I had to drink most of it myself!

On Christmas day, after opening our presies, we drove to Pensthorpe Nature Reserve, near Fakenham. We knew the gardens and shop would be closed, but figured the nature reserve should be open. Wrong.

It was a beatiful day, however, so we ambled slowly back to Cley, spotting a stoat bouncing across the road at one point, and startling a merlin a few miles later on.

At Cley it was much warmer than the previous day and we sat in the same hides, watching an amazing display. There was a poorer selection of ducks, but the highlight was a vast flock of golden plovers. We're not much good at estimating numbers of birds, but decided there were well over 1000 in that flock, as well as several hundred lapwings. I hope this mpeg movie works in your browser.

OK, it's a rubbish video, but it's the best I could do. When I zoomed back so you could see how big the flock was, the birds were so small as to be almost invisible, but close in, and it doesn't look like anything that special. I blame the birds, me. They just don't fly as close together as starlings!

In the evening, we roasted a haunch of muntjac, which was delicious, but Jenny barely ate enough for a church mouse, poor girl. And I had to drink most of the Klein Constantia Marlbrook red, her favourite wine!

On Monday she was worse yet. We discussed going home, but then went to Tichwell Marshes, which was a pleasant drive. As we went past Cley, we noticed that the visitor centre was open, so hoped for lunch at Tichwell. Wrong again. The notice said they'd been open on Saturday, but would stay firmly closed on Boxing Day. Bummer! Well, by now my guts were threatening, though fortunately the threats have been empty so far. Just the odd twinge you get when you know things are going wrong, but that's been it. It did mean, however, that my appetite was (and still is) quite suppressed, so missing lunch was no hardship. Jenny, however, wasn't up to any birding at all, which was a real shame, as she gets much less opportunity than I do, and had been really looking forward to it.

We arrived to find a cluster of people looking up into some alders right next to the visitor centre, and eventually spotted a notice announcing the presence of arctic redpoll, which are something of a rarity. I got quite a good look, but I don't think Jenny saw them other than being small birds in the trees over there somewhere. I thought they just looked like redpoll, but then the sign did say they're extremely hard to distinguish.

We wanted to go right out almost to the sea, but the walk was too much, and the furthest we got was the very splendid new Parrinder Hide, about half-way to the dunes. There we saw an enormous flock of golden plovers, presumably the same flock we'd seen at Cley. I overheard someone say "three or four thousand" but of course, I've no way of knowing how much better he was at estimating bird numbers than we were. It looked similar in size to what we'd seen.

There were also several hundred (at least!) brent geese, many more teal than at Cley, and several common snipe.

We didn't stay long, however, as Jenny was feeling awful, and soon headed back to the car.

On the way home, we decided we would go home straightaway, though that actually meant leaving at about half past five, as it took close to an hour to get back to Sherringham, then another hour to pack up and load the car.

Driving home, we started feeling the call of our local chip shop, and by the time we arrived in Royston, we were really looking forward to fish and chips! In keeping with the rest of the trip, it was not to be. Both the chippies in Royston, along with all the restaurants we could see, were closed. Feeling rather sorry for ourselves, we got some breaded pollock fillets out of the freezer, fried some chips in the frying pan and boiled up some peas. Not quite what we'd had in mind!

God's teeth, I've typed all that and the bloody video still hasn't finished uploading! Mind you, it is 80Mb, so maybe I'm expecting rather a lot.

Vivaldi

2011-12-18T09:59:00.001Z

Last year, we discovered Christmas potatoes, which you plant in bags in July, and give you new potatoes in time for Christmas. That in itself was pretty cool, but the real discovery was the variety Vivaldi which is exclusively available from Thompson and Morgan.

Quite simply, Vivaldi are the best tasting boiled potatoes we've ever come across, and they're worth growing just for that. They do also roast well, but IIRC the end result is not that different from Maris Piper, so no point wasting your few precious Vivaldi doing that!

This year I grew five seed potatoes in three special bags, and we had the first few last night, accompanying a delicious Spanish dish of duck legs with orange, olives and bacon. You don't get a lot, but then, there are only two of us, and we don't have a way of keeping them for months, so we wouldn't want bags and bags of them.

So if you try this next year, you order them in the spring and they're delivered in July. Remember to water the bags well, as they are thirsty, and feed weekly or your yield will be pathetic.

And don't be tempted to plant tiny potatoes left over from ones you've grown earlier in the year. They'll grow, but not make any fresh tubers. Worse, the original tuber will still be hard, but all the starch will have been used up by the plant, and when you cook it, you'll get what's known as a glassy potato. Stays hard, looks translucent, tastes nasty. One to avoid.

Burning reeds

2011-12-15T18:16:00.000Z

This is actually out of sequence, because I intended to post about it, but got so tied up with other stuff, it fell by the wayside. However, I want to stick the movie up anyway. Yes, the wind is blowing the flames towards me, and it did get pretty hot, but I don't think I was ever in any serious danger of getting burned. Oh yes, and no willows were (seriously) injured making this movie! And I must find out how you suppress wind noise, cos I always get this really loud roar in the mike.

Thursday equals Nature Reserve Day!

2011-12-15T18:12:00.000Z

For some reason I was on light duties today, which meant just walking around the public paths, clipping back brambles and dog roses where they were hanging over the paths and liable to ensnare people as they walk by. When I first arrived, I thought this was going to be miserable, as I was convinced it was going to bucket down most of the morning, but in fact, my fears were groundless. Although chilly, the morning brightened, and much of the time was clear and sunny.

Passing the watercress hut (this was a centre for growing watercress in the 19th century) I spotted a treecreeper, a tiny bird I've rarely seen before. This one was being most obliging, and having had a good look at it, I decided to check out the differences between the ordinary treecreeper and the short-toed. Looking back up, lo and behold, the bird was still around, albeit on a different tree. I was able to creep closer and confirm that it was an ordinary treecreeper, not short-toed. I probably watched it for about 5 minutes, which is pretty good.

From there I went to Reedbed Hide to take five, eat a sandwich and warm up a bit. Of course, while there, I was watching birds, though there didn't seem to be much about, just a few mallard, teal,a heron, some corvids and a moorhen. Just as I was thinking of packing up, however, a raptor appeared from nowhere and attacked the teal!

The teal flattened themselves onto the water and the hawk missed, but it swooped up to a height of about 5 or 10 metres, turned on the tip of its wing and shot straight back down again, repeating this manoeuvre three or four times before giving up and flying away west.

It was quite a big, chunky bird, with pointy wings, dark brown on the top, and characteristic hawk moustaches, and I decided to be hopeful that it was a peregrine. Teal might be our smallest duck, but they're still far too big for most of the other raptors it might have been. No way it was a hobby, which eats dragonflies and small birds, it was too big and the wings were the wrong shape to be a sparrowhawk, and in any case, I thing the teal would be much too big even for a female sparrowhawk. And it certainly wasn't a buzzard (of which there was one about) or any kind of harrier, again, because the wings were wrong.

So I was quietly confident it was a peregrine, though not confident enough to put it on the sightings sheet. I had, however, managed to get two very far-away, blurry photo's of it.

I sent Doug an excited text, but of course, he didn't immediately appear, as the bird had disappeared to the west.

When I met up with him, however, my description of the bird and the way it attacked the teal, along with the photo's, convinced him that it really was a juvenile peregrine.

I'm so chuffed, I'm like a little kid who's had a pat on the head from his favourite teacher!

Anti-vaxxers just won't lie down and die

2011-12-14T14:31:00.001Z

This is a really nasty piece of work. It encourages people to think of measles as benign, when in fact it kills thousands of children every year, mostly in developing countries. Worse, it will mislead children into believing that, too.

Here's what WHO have to say about measles:

Key facts
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally – nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide.
In 2010, about 85% of the world's children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 72% in 2000.

Measles is a highly contagious, serious disease caused by a virus. In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.

That anyone should publish such wickedness is shameful. I can't find any information about who published this malicious rubbish, which is probably just as well, as I'd find it hard to resist the temptation to give them a piece of my mind!

The world's smallest living tetrapod

2011-12-14T14:12:00.001Z

Just published in the open access journal ZooKeys, the world's smallest living tetrapod is described. There are actually two species of these miniature frogs from New Guinea, adults achieving a heady 8 - 9 mm in length! Hard to imagine a tetrapod that small actually working properly!

Another brilliant TED talk

2011-12-12T13:43:00.000Z

This guy, Luis von Ahn, is a member of the team that brought us CAPTCHAs, those little strings of distorted characters that you have to type into an online form to prove to the website that you're not a computer program. The talk is only 15 minutes long, and is definitely worth watching, but here's a summary.

They knew the few seconds we spend entering those characters waste our time and that over 100 million people use captchas each day, so they wondered if there was work that could be broken down into such small bits, it would be possible to do something useful in those few seconds. Amazingly, there is something. They use it to digitise books.

They changed the captcha software to present you with two words instead of a simple string of characters, and you now have to type both words in. One word, the computer recognises, the other it doesns't. It uses the one it recognises to check that you're not a computer program, then stores your entry of the other word, with a probability that it's right. When some number of other people have identified this unknown word, the probability that it has a valid digitisation increases to the point where it can accept it as right. So it moves that word from Unknown to Known and proceeds. With hundreds of millions of such transactions each day, digitisation can proceed fast!

Another project they have going is translating the web into the main world languages. Machine translation is not much good yet, but human translation is expensive. So they decided to recruit anyone who wants, to translate text for them, working at their own level of competence. It's free, because translating English into your chosen language helps you to learn the language, which is enough motivation to keep lots of people doing it. There are millions of people around the world paying to learn a foreign language. Once a dozen people have translated the same piece of text, it's easy to merge the results and be confident the translation is good. He reckons they can translate the remaining 2/3 of Wikipedia into Spanish in 80 hours. Amazing!

Now watch the talk!

Surfing a river in Munich

2011-12-05T18:11:00.001Z

I'm reading the book that won the Royal Society Winton Prize for best popular science book this year, The Wave Watcher's Guide, and came across a reference to surfing on a river in Munich. There's a concrete barrier in the river, so a standing wave forms as the river passes over it, and local surfers have been taking full advantage for quite a few years now. So cool!

Choosing to get cold

2011-12-05T16:23:00.001Z

There's a reason I park my motorbike in the garage for the winter, and I reminded myself what it was today!

For about 6 months, Jenny and I have mulled over the idea of buying a rather weird looking contraption with two front wheels and one hind one, but we've not quite got around to it. Yesterday, however, I spotted that a local dealer had a secondhand one for what looked like a reasonable price, so resolved to go and have a test ride. And this is what I rode.

It's a Gilera Fuoco 500, and it is weird. The front wheels are independently sprung, so when you corner, you just lean it over as you would a conventional bike, but there's a locking button which allows you to lock it in whatever position it's in, which is useful at traffic lights, for instance. No need to put your feet down.

Earlier in the year we were looking at Piaggio equivalents, unaware that the same manufacturer also makes Gileras. The Piaggios come in 300 and 400cc variants, with better underseat storage, but the Gileras are the sportier flavours, hence the larger engine.

I didn't really give it that thorough a work-out, but rode it for 6 or 7 miles, enough to start to get the feel of it, and I quite like it. It didn't immediately leap out and say "Buy me!" but then, it's very different from what I'm used to riding, so that's no big surprise.

It has a 500cc single cylinder 4-stroke engine, with fully automatic transmission, and I confess I was unaware of any of the gear changes. It just goes, and the performance is actually not bad. Having the rear brake on the left handlebar like a bicycle is very strange to start with, since that's the clutch lever, normally.

This one is only a couple of years old, but already has nearly 20,000 miles on the clock, which is a lot for a bike. On the other hand, it's relatively cheap, which suits my mindset right now. I'll sell the BMW in the spring, when I should get a better price for it.

Oh yes, putting the bike in the garage. The BMW has rather poor weather protection, so by the time I'd ridden the 20-odd miles to the dealer, I was somewhat chilled, despite having togged up appropriately, I thought. He gave me tea and we nattered for a bit before I took the Gilera out, then I rode the BMW home again, arriving pretty cold. I put the central heating on and had some hot lunch, but stayed cold until eventually I had a shower, but actually, I'm still not exactly toasty.

So I've still not decided what to do about the Gilera, but the BMW is staying in the garage for the rest of the winter!

Philosophy in prison

2011-11-30T18:47:00.001Z

Many of the TED talks I see are very clever, inspiring, impressive. This is probably one of the most thought-provoking I've seen. It takes less than 4 minutes. I commend it to you. Seriously.

Haydn Seasons

2011-11-30T09:47:00.001Z

We made a mistake a few weeks ago, but it'll all be over soon. Our main choir, Royston Priory Singers, gave a concert in a local church, and the conductor had invited a couple he knows, a tenor and an alto, to join us to bulk up the numbers a bit, and I ended up standing next to this tenor.

We sang half a dozen anthems suitable for Remembrance, though a week early, then did the Fauré Requiem, all of which went off rather well.

At the end, the tenor turned to me and explained that his choir was singing the Haydn Seasons on 11th December, and did I want to come along, as they were a little light on tenors. I've never been invited to help out like that before, and was sufficiently flattered to agree.

That was before I discovered that the choir was a good 45 minutes drive from Royston! So on Tuesdays until the actual gig, Jenny has to catch a slightly earlier train home, I have to have the dinner ready by 6.30 and we don't get home until close to 11pm.

And the Haydn is hard! Neither of us had even heard of it before we started, and we're not that keen on it, now we've met it. Quite often, the tune you're singing simply doesn't go where you're expecting it to. I've been bashing notes at home quite a bit, and there are still large sections I'm hopeless at. Fortunately, the man actually lied, and the tenor line up is quite strong, so it matters less that some of the time I'll be singing in quiet mode.

I'll be much more circumspect if I ever get flattered like that again!

Broken maquette

2011-11-29T16:28:00.001Z

This is a chalk maquette of a goddess I've been working on for the past week or so. I always planned to carve the final version in limestone, but wanted to play around with the design in chalk first, as it's so soft and quick.

To be truthful, I was unhappy with the slot down the front, right from the start, as it makes her torso look too face-like, but I carried on, as I wanted to explore other ideas elsewhere, such as scooping out her thighs, which you can see I started to do on her left.

Although conceived simply as an exercise to explore the shape, there had been times when I'd imagined finishing her to a decent standard, then consolidating the surface of the chalk with a liquid sealant, making her into an acceptable work of art that I could keep inside.

I was distracted this afternoon as soon as I started that scooping out, when I discovered a small fossil, possibly a fish, in the chalk right there. After extracting that and sending Jenny an email about it, I carried on, but then fell foul of a personal characteristic I've brought forward from when I was very young.

I have always had a tendency to rush at things and try to make too much progress too quickly. In this case, I'd carved my goddess to roughly final proportions, (still lots to do, of course) but was then too vigorous when I started to scoop out her thigh. Too rough with the hammer and chisel, and after a while, I looked up and noticed that she'd cracked right across her waistline.

Well, bugger! Fairly happy I know where I'm headed when I start on the limestone final, but actually rather sad to have wasted the maquette, which I was getting to like.

Awesome Octopus!

2011-11-22T11:15:00.001Z

This is astonishing, but I'm bemused as to why exactly the octopus is doing this. I'm indebted to PZ Myers, just for a change!

Printing problems solved!

2011-11-22T10:38:00.001Z

This is the problem I've been having printing out a photograph of my new reclining nude carving. The original photograph shows the colours more or less as they are in real life, a rich red, and on the monitor, all looks good. However, when I printed the picture out, the colours were completely different, and my beautiful nude seemed to be a dull brown colour. It was driving me nuts!

I contacted Canon Customer Support, who recommeded I download and use something called an Adobe Colour Profile, but didn't provide any clue as to how I was supposed to use it once installed. I wasted hours and half a small rain forest farting about trying to get a decent print, since there is a plethora of different settings both in Photoshop and on the printer, none of which seemed to make the slightest difference.

Not knowing what else to try, I stuck a sheet of glossy photograph paper into the printer, instead of plain. Until then, the pictures I'd been printing had come out OK for my purposes, so it hadn't occurred to me the paper might affect the colours that were printed on it. When I hit the tit, bingo! Out came a photo with the colours not unacceptably remote from the original.

Now why didn't someone suggest that right from the start?

An Unsatisfactory Sunday

2011-11-21T10:30:00.001Z

Yesterday was such a glorious day that we decided to forgo the pleasures of gardening and drive to Grafham Water to watch birds. We'd been reading about the reserve in the Wildlife Trusts magazine, and it seemed a perfect way to use a beautiful day.

As we drove around the Papworth bypass, however, we found ourselves entering a bank of fog, with visibility down to less than 100m in places. Well, not so much a bank of fog as an extensive blanket!

Still driving through fog, we stopped in the village of Brampton to buy lunch in a pub I've been to before, only to find it closed down. We found the George Hotel in Huntingdon, where lunch was adequate rather than great, but then we had a bonus as they were running a special offer which we'd not spotted, and our two fish and chips lunches were £10 instead of £8 each. Lunch with drinks for £16 was good value!

The fog had lifted a few millimetres, so we drove hopefully towards Grafham Water, but on the A1 it was as bad as ever, so we turned around at the first roundabout and went home.

At this point, we still had delusions of being able to visit Fowlmere as compensation for our disappointment at Grafham, but by the time we got back towards Royston, it was already too late to be worth the diversion, and in any case, we needed a cup of tea!

Later, turning on my phone to check the calendar (I'm older generation - my phone stays off much of the time!) I discovered a message from my friend Pam, who had called at lunchtime to give us a lift to a choir practice. Oh bugger! We'd completely forgotten that was happening. This was the second of two rehearsals for a concert in Southwark Cathedral on 3rd December, and we'd been unable to do the first as we'd had a visiting Swedish academic staying with us. I made a grovelling apology to el Chef the conductor, but there's no way we can take part now. Fortunately, he has enough bodies in the choir that he wasn't dependent on our being there.

So overall, not a very satisfactory Sunday.

Inventing new foodstuffs

2011-11-15T14:38:00.001Z

We lifted the chilli plants from the greenhouse last weekend, and picked all the remaining fruit. These plants, bought from the local garden centre, were a bit of a dead loss. Although they fruited quite heavily, and needed minimal care, the fruits were so mild, they were barely recogniseable as chillis. In fact, we used quite a lot in place of green peppers, though they were a pain as they were so small. Jalapeno fiery chillis my arse!

Anyhow, I decided I'd roast them and make a sort of pepper aquivalent of passata. I started halving and deseeding them, then realised that as I was going to sieve the result, I didn't need to do that, so just cut the stems off and removed any damaged areas. (We discovered we had a couple of snails resident in the greenhouse!) I drizzled olive oil over them, seasoned with salt and pepper and gave them an hour in a roasting dish at 180°C.

While they were cooling, I went and bought myself a food mill so I didn't have to push the pulp through a sieve with a spoon. I now have a small bowl of chilli paste, and amazingly, the roasting has drawn out the chilli heat quite a lot, so now it really does have a bit of bite. It's not excessive, but definitely useful. Hoorah!

All is not perfect, however, as I was using a mixture of red and green chillis, so the result is a rather unappetising brown colour. And I have yet to work out how to store it. I guess it would freeze OK, so I just have to stick it in the ice tray and I'll have a small pile of 2.5cm cubes of chilli paste.

Art Exhibition

2011-11-14T11:37:00.001Z

Well, the Reclining Nude is as finished as she's going to be for now, though there are still things I could do to improve her. This is what she looks like now. This photograph is not the most thought-through composition I've ever done; I just cleared the mantlepiece in the living room and stuck her up there for the photograph. She'd not even central, and the lighting's rubbish, but there you go.

I've taken the three pieces up to Curwens and installed them there, and now the sixth formers from Freeman College in Buntingford are hanging their pictures. I didn't spend long there as I'd just have been getting in the way, but what I saw was impressive, and I'm looking forward to getting a proper look at the private viewing on Wednesday.

Later. I still have the problem of how to clean my hands. When I applied the first, sealing coat of French polish, I neglected to wear any disposable gloves. The grain of the wood, despite my wiping it down with a damp cloth, still retained quite a lot of wood dust which, mixed with the French polish, stained the resin a deep red.

That went onto my hands, winkling its way into all the cracks and crevices, where it remains. My hands look a complete mess! I've scrubbed them with meths, the standard way to dissolve shellac, without much result, so now I'm pretty much resigned to waiting for the stain to grow out. Lovely!

A busy week

2011-11-11T17:40:00.001Z

Last weekend I suddenly realised I'd only got a week to finish the sculptures that are going into Curwens, the High Street solicitors on Monday, so had to get a bit more focused, rather than smooch idly about doing a bit of sanding, then sloping off to the nature reserve for a bit of birding!

This one is called Tooth Fairy and is carved from a piece of wood I collected from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute when I worked there. They built a new block, starting in 2002, I think, and the process of clearing the land in preparation involved felling a few trees. I'm not sure what wood this is, as the tree was already down and cut up into logs by the time I became aware of it.

Although I finished carving it some years ago, I've only just made the black plinth for it. It's been standing in our hallway, but really isn't stable enough without the plinth to go into a public space. I'm quite sure the solicitor would not let me exhibit it there as it was. So it's actually standing on the plinth while the glue sets, then tomorrow I'll up end it and drive half a dozen long screws into it, just to make sure!

This is Untitled and is a bronze casting I made in 1998. It sat outside in the garden for most of the time since then, and when I started polishing it ready for this exhibition, I discovered I'd never really finished polishing it all those years ago. I used 500 grade wet and dry to sand out all the old scratch marks left by the random orbital sander, then put a polishing mop into my power drill so I could polish it up nice and bright with tripoli.

The third piece I'll be exhibiting is not quite finished, so I'll have some work to do over the weekend, which is why there's no photo of it. I finished shaping it a couple of weeks ago, and have spend much time since then sanding and smoothing it, but today it got its sealing coat of French polish. That has to dry thoroughly, then I'll sand the whole surface with very fine sand paper, as the French polish lifts the grain a bit, and I'll have to remove that before giving it another couple of coats.

It's carved from a piece of African hardwood called paduck, which is a beautiful red colour, which the French polish really draws out. The whole thing is late, because when I started sanding, I found that many of the convex curves were slightly rippled, which is simply not acceptable, so I've spent a lot of time over the past few days scraping away with a metal scraper, to get them smoother. Still not perfect, but whether I'll find the motivation to work some more on it when I get it back from the solicitors in a couple of months' time, I have no idea.

Restoring riverine environments

2011-11-08T10:35:00.001Z

This is really good news, even though the river concerned is far away.

I've been really busy of late, so haven't had much time to check out my usual favourite blogs. I have a few sculptures going on exhibit in a local solicitors office in the High Street next week, and they're not all finished, though they will be!

This video was posted by PZ Myers some time ago, but I've only just seen it. I'm not against all dams, but I do know quite a few were built for rather dubious reasons and without much thought for the local wildlife, so when someone decides a dam has to go, it's really gratifying to watch the time-lapse video of the destruction. I hope someone posts a second video showing it taken through to complete removal, as this one only goes so far.

Saturday

2011-10-31T10:42:00.001Z

On Saturday morning, having finished our shopping, we decided to visit Scotsdales Garden Centre near Cambridge, to buy a Fatsia japonica which we'd decided we wanted for a bare spot in the garden. We regard trips to Scotsdales as a bit of a luxury, but it was a beautiful day, so we just said "What the hell!"

While there, we got details of gabions, as the spot for the plant actually needs to be terraced a bit, to stop the soil just slipping down the slope and onto the path. Gabions are those wire mesh cages you see with cobbles in, forming retaining walls. We fancy using those, so were costing the exercise up. Rather more than we'd imagined, of course!

Coming out of Scotsdales, I just felt like taking the scenic route, rather than driving directly home, so turned left and headed for the coutryside. That idea quickly changed into plans for lunch at the Cricketers Arms in Clavering. The Cricketers is run by Jamie Oliver's parents, and I've been there several times and always had excellent food, but somehow, I've never taken Jenny, so this was my opportunity to rectify that.

Sadly, when we arrived, both car parks were completely full, so we didn't even go in. It's not a vast pub, and with all those cars, there was little chance we'd get our lunch any time soon. We headed towards home, but then saw the Three Tuns in a little village called Great Hormead. I had a memory of having eaten there once, long ago, but it was completely unfamiliar, so I guess I made that up.

Anyhow, we had an excellent lunch, Jenny drank a pint of Old Hookey and I had a decent glass of sauvignon blanc.

After a cup of tea at home, we decided some birding was in order, so headed for Royston Heath. I'd heard there were red kites there, and had read a blog which suggested we might see lots if we wandered along above the golf course.

We didn't see any raptors, but did see skylarks, and hords of chaffinches, which made the walk worth the effort. A very pleasant way to round off the day.

I wonder where the time goes...

2011-10-26T17:38:00.003+01:00

Yesterday afternoon, after riding into Cambridge to pick up a power tool that had been repaired, and then to Stevenage to collect some motorcycle overtrousers, I went straight to Fowlmere Nature Reserve to do a spot of birding. I've added a decent-sized topbox to the bike, so can easily store my crash helmet, boots and overtrousers while I wander around the reserve.

When I got to the main hide, standing on stilts overlooking the mere, the sky was very dark and overcast, with deep blue clouds threatening rain, and making it really hard to see the birds. There were lots of corvids, mallard and tits of various flavours, of course, but I could also see teal and eventually, a couple of snipe, and there was a cetti's warbler calling in the background. Cetti's are secretive birds that we often hear on the reserve, but I've yet to see one.

After about half an hour the clouds had moved away somewhat, and sunshine brightened the mere, and I was very pleased to take a half-way decent shot of the snipe, brightly lit by the sun, low in the sky.

There wasn't much happening, and I was beginning to think about going home, when I became aware of a flurry of avian activity in the reed beds that surround the hide. Quite a few small, brown birds had started flitting about amongst the tops of the reeds, evidently feeding on the seed heads.

After looking them up, I concluded they were reed buntings. This is not quite as straightforward at this time of year as in the spring, when the males are in their quite distinctive breeding plumage. Easy to tell a male reed bunting in the spring, and if there are less obvious brown jobbies around with him, they're probably females, but they all moult in the late summer, and at this time of year, the males are much more similar to the females.

Anyway, at that moment, Doug, warden of the reserve, arrived and confirmed my ID, so that was OK.

We watched for a bit, then saw the resident kingfisher, perched obligingly on a post, and then, to our amazement and delight, a sparrowhawk settled on the cattle gate not 10 metres from the hide, and sat there for several minutes. I took quite a few photographs, but it was coming on dusk by now, and none of them was any good.

When he flew off in pursuit of someone small and tasty, he quickly returned to the gate, sans dinner, but over the next 20 minutes he treated us to a stunning demonstration, mostly done within about 30 metres of the hide, and most of the time when he perched, he was within 10 metres, once within 3! It was fabulous! We get sparrowhawks in our garden, and we've seen them catching small birds, but never so close, nor for such an extended, uninterrupted view. Magical! Disappointingly, he failed to catch anything before I left.

Messing about on the nature reserve

2011-10-21T18:34:00.001+01:00

This morning's Spanish class was cancelled and I rather wasted the whole morning, so was determined to make better use of the afternoon.

I spent the first part working on the wooden carving I'm preparing for exhibition in Curwens, the local High Street solicitors, in November. On a sunny day like today, it's good to get the piece out into the sunshine where I can see the imperfections better, and the end result was that I think the piece is actually ready for final sanding, followed by French Polishing. Hoorah! It's taken over two years, but I'm really pleased with it.

So at about 3:30 I decided to reward myself with a wander around Fowlmere, and I'm really pleased I did. I didn't walk all the way around, just went straight to Reedbed Hide, and quickly realised that had been a good decision.

A pair of greenfinches glowed in the sunlight as I approached the hide, their yellow breasts much brighter than in this photo, and once I was installed, I was delighted by a merlin, obviously in hot pursuit of something small and tasty. It flashed across from left to right almost at eye height, a blur of grey, with pointy wings, phenomenally fast. It veered sharply left, gained height, then turned right, finally vanishing from sight before I could tell whether or not it had caught its supper. None of the pictures I've found on the web show the grey tops of the wings the way I saw it, so you'll just have to take my word for it!

Soon after that I got a brief glimpse of a marsh harrier, mobbed by corvids. It disappeared beyond the reserve and that was the last I saw of it.

There were 10 teal on the mere, and I just love watching them. Resplendent in newly-moulted winter plumage, they were pin-sharp pretty. I apologise that the link is to an American hunting website, but their pictures are much better than all the birding ones I found. The second of the shooters' photographs is rather unlike the birds I see, but the other three match quite well.

There was also lots of activity in and above the reeds, with reed buntings and warblers flying back and forth, mostly too quickly for me to positively identify them. I tend to think that if it's small and brown and has white outer tail feathers as it dives into the reeds, it's probably a reed bunting, but if the tail is shorter and lacks the white outers, it's probably a reed warbler. With such a vague ID, I don't actually tick them off, of course.

As the gloom increased and I started to feel a bit chilled, I headed off, but did spot a few starlings circling ready to dive into the reeds to roost. Too few to be worth waiting around for, even though sparrowhawks are known to lurk, waiting to pick the odd one off. One day soon there'll be a few hundred, and that will be more worth watching. It would be nice if we got thousands, but we don't.

Global warming confirmed

2011-10-21T10:52:00.001+01:00

Of course, most of us already thought global warming was a real phenomenon and sighed and cast our eyes skyward whenever we encountered deniers, but it's nice to have a new, independent study which confirms the data published by other workers. Here's a link to the BBC report of the preliminary results.

It's particularly gratifying that the Berkeley Earth Project, headed by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, was partially funded by organisations which lobby against action on climate change.

This graph shows how closely their results match those of the other three major studies.

What they don't say is anything about what's driving the temperature rise. Ah, now that's a whole different opportunity for speculation and argument. I still stick with the "our fault" side, but I do realise the argument is still raging.

Roasted tomato passata

2011-10-18T14:47:00.003+01:00

In my greenhouse I grow tomatoes, amongst other things, and this year I had three growbags with three plants each of Gardeners' Delight, a small, red tomato, Sun Gold, an orange cherry tomato (and a stunning little taste-bomb into the bargain!) and Black Cherry, a small, dark-skinned tomato. The main motivation was to be able to make good-looking tomato salads, and we were very successful there.

As usual, they produced far more fruit than we could deal with, and during the summer, as has become my wont, I made and froze tomato soup on a number of occasions.

As we get towards the end of the season, the red and orange tomatoes had more or less stopped growing, so we tore them out last weekend, leaving the Black Cherry plants, as they still seems slightly active.

That left us with deciding what to do with the fruit we'd picked off the discarded plants. I opted for passata rather than soup, as there's already some soup in the freezer, but then pulled someone else's suggestion out of my memory and first roasted the tomatoes before sieving them. I can't remember who suggested it, but it seemed like a good idea.

I halved each tomato, then gave them half an hour in a roasting tray at about 180°C. When cooled, Jenny pushed them through a sieve (I was cooking the dinner) and as we cleared up, I sampled a teaspoonful of the passata.

It is just gorgeous, and I'll definitely be doing that again next year. Sweet and rich, with a real "Wow!" factor. What I'll also be trying, is roasting the tomatoes before making the soup, as the flavour of the roasted fruit is so intense. Watch this space!

Robot that flies like a bird

2011-10-10T10:45:00.000+01:00

The other week when Jenny and I were in Spain, I was idly daydreaming about how one might go about making a model bird that would fly by flapping its wings. I knew that imagining I might be capable of doing this was fantasy, but little did I realise that it had already been done!

A great day for a ride!

2011-09-28T15:59:00.003+01:00

I needed to go into Cambridge to pick up a spare part for the sander I use when carving wood, so went on the BMW. As I rode into Cambridge, it struck me what a beautiful day it was, and what a shame it would be to waste it, so having collected the bits I needed, I headed east out of the city, instead of the normal south-west.

Crossing the bypass to the north of Cambridge, I took the Newmarket road, which is lightly-trafficked and has some lovely, swinging bends to blast the bike around. At the end, I just felt like doing it again, so turned illegally right, which took me onto the bypass, drove back to the previous exit, and rode that delicious, curvy section of road again!

I knew there was a roundabout somewhere towards Newmarket where it would be sensible to turn right and head south back to Royston, but instead I just went straight on, heading into the unknown. I followed my nose for a bit, riding through Stetchworth and Ditton Green, turning right in Saxon Street down to Kirtling, Kirtling Green and then Cowlinge.

Eventually the tiny roads spat me out onto the A143 down to Haverhill, from where I took the Steeple Bumpstead road, which gradually turned south-west and took me through Hempstead. (Don't you just love all these village names?) In Hempstead I followed a sign for Saffron Waldon, soon ending up on familiar territory.

The seat on the BMW is not the most comfortable, or maybe I'm just losing my natural padding as I get older, but anyhow, by now my bum was pretty sore, and I still hadn't had any lunch. I'd originally planned to go down to Stansted, then across to the A10 and back up to Royston that way, or to just follow my nose along roughly that route, but the hunger and pain were enough to make me point the bike homewards.

Of course, my hidden agenda for this ride was also to face up to the demons that have grown in my head ever since my crash in May. I was quite traumatised by the crash, and have not ridden much since, so taking the opportunity to get some saddle miles was a good thing to do and by the time I was on the twisty bit between Saffron Waldon and Barley, I really was enjoying myself, pressing on much more confidently than when I set out this morning, laying into the bends where I was confident I could see the line and really exploring some of the extremes of accelleration the bike is capable of. By 'eck, it don't 'alf go!

It's about 15 miles from Royston to Cambridge, but by the time I parked the bike back in the garage, a couple of hours after getting it out, I'd done 82 miles, which is not bad for a shopping trip.

Will it still be sunny on Friday?

What life is really about!

2011-09-27T16:21:00.002+01:00

I'd forgotten this, until my friend Dave sent it to me. Just because I've seen it before, doesn't mean I don't like it!

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand - chocolate in the other - body totally worn out, screaming "WOO-HOO, what a ride!!"

Hols in Spain

2011-09-27T14:34:00.001+01:00

Having been left this flat on the Costa del Sol in my step-mother's will, and having finally got around to putting it in the hands of a letting agency, we felt obliged to go out there last week to assess any damage our guests had done while staying there over the summer. It's a hard life, having to spend time in Andalucia, but you know, you have to take your responsibilities seriously!

Apart from Friday, when it was overcast, the weather was fabulous, with temperatures ranging from 25 - 30° C, and wall to wall blue sky. There was a bit of charging about to do, but really not much. We bought a cheap DVD player to put in the flat, and a few other bits and pieces, but for the most part we were able to just laze about reading. This is not something we would normally do, when on holiday, but this time we just felt we wanted to do pretty much nothing, so that's what we did.

The sea was nice and warm, too, so it only took a few seconds to actually immerse yourself completely, and I could stay in snorkelling for half an hour before starting to feel properly chilled. It was very murky the first time we got in, but twice I got up at 8 for a dip, and we also swam in the late afternoon, when the water was the clearest we've ever seen it.

Last Christmas, I gave Jenny a snorkelling mask with a built in camera, ready for exactly this occasion. I seem to recall she was somewhat underwhelmed, but actually, she was pleased with it when she finally got the chance to use it! It turns out to be much harder to get decent photographs and movie footage than you imagine at first, because you're being sloshed around in the water, but I reckon with a bit of practice, it'll come good.

This was one of several shoals of different sorts of fish, swiming amongst some rocks within about 10 metres of the shore. Jenny saw them on the first day she used the mask, but completely failed to make the video mode work. I then saw them the next morning, and succeeded where she'd failed. It's not exactly stunning footage, but you get the idea.

The thing that struck us most forcibly was that although we've been snorkelling here for years, we've never seen so many fish before. The reason, however, is now pretty clear. Generally speaking, we've steered clear of the really rocky areas, simply because the rocks themselves are pretty sharp, and you can easily cut yourself (I did on Sunday morning!) if a wave sweeps you onto them. Also, in some areas there are rather a lot of sea urchins, and yes, we have in the past, spent time with needles and tweezers, extracting echinoderm spines from flesh! However, the fish have no such qualms, but tend to avoid the sandy areas, as there's not much to eat there.

Been away

2011-09-27T14:10:00.001+01:00

I've not been deliberately neglecting my duties, but we've been away for the past couple of weeks, so there's been no opportunity to post anything. This is the first of (probably) a couple of posts to fill in the gaps.

The week before last, we went to a fossils conference in Lyme Regis, on the south coast of the UK. The Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA) has met each September for a few days, ever since the early 1950's, generally at a UK university, though there have been occasional forays onto the continent.

This year, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mary Anning's brother finding the first ichthyosaur skull near Lyme Regis, the show took place there instead, despite the lack of a nearby university. And very good it was, too.

Jenny and I drove down on the Tuesday, realising as we hit the M3 that we knew a pub near Winchester that does rather splendid food, so we diverted to the Plough at Sparsholt for lunch. It's a few years since we sang in Winchester Cathedral, but on that occasion we stayed in Sparshold Agricultural College, and the Plough was the nearest pub. That was when we discovered how good the food was, and this time we were not disappointed. Well worth diverting for, and we did the same on the way home, too!

I attended the first day's conference, listening to several early tetrapod talks, including Jenny's but after that spent time looking for fossils, which I find much more interesting. Found none I wanted to collect, but I did turn over a rock to discover this wonderful armoured marine worm.
It's probably a Harmothoe species and I think it's rather fine. I did take some movie footage of it, but I think you have to be a bit of a marine polychaete geek to want to watch something like that, so I'll spare you!

Although I didn't make a palaeontological breakthrough, I did manage to get sunburned, as the weather was just lovely pretty much the whole time we were there.

I promise not to keep posting Jesus and Mo cartoons, honest!

2011-09-07T09:51:00.004+01:00

2011-09-07T09:46:00.001+01:00

This delighful chap is an African honeyguide chick, along with the carcases of his nestmates.

Honeyguides lay their eggs in the nests of bee-eaters, which are in holes in trees or abandoned aardvark holes in the ground. Scientists thought that, like European cuckoo chicks, the baby honeyguides were killing the other nestlings, but they didn't know much about how it was being done.

Now a group of Cambridge scientists has placed night-vision cameras in parasitised nests and filmed the honeyguide chick physically attacking and killing the host chicks.

There's a decent report here at the BBC, but I warn you, the video is gruesome.

Jesus and Mo

2011-08-27T14:12:00.001+01:00

I like this enough to steal a copy from the original Jesus and Mo site and repost it here.

Pitcher gets tit!

2011-08-26T16:28:00.001+01:00

Old news, I know, but hey!

According to this BBC article from 5th August, a Somerset nurseryman found the remains of a great tit in this large pitcher plant at his nursery.

It's not that unusual for pitcher plants to catch frogs, lizards and mice, as well as the insects they presumably mainly target, but this seems to be only the second time a bird-for-lunch has been reported.

The assumption is that the bird landed on the edge of the pitcher, leaned in to steal a tasty insect snack, lost its balance and landed head first in the pan. When our cat drinks from the bog, I worry that the same will happen to her!

A week in Canterbury

2011-08-25T12:05:00.001+01:00

This year, our cathedral week was in Canterbury, which I think must mean we've arrived, choir-wise. They don't come much more prestigious than York and Canterbury, so I think we're there.

I was a little apprehensive, following our York experience. In York the lay clergy were very friendly and welcoming, but the big knobs were distinctly sniffy and remote. Not the happy experience you hope for at all.

In the run up to last week, our musical director had something of a struggle to agree a music list with the Canterbury folks, some aspects of which seemed perfectly reasonable, and others quite strange, so I started to expect the clergy to be much like those in York.

I'm delighted to say, the reverse was the case. They were completely lovely, and we had a simply brilliant time. The minor canon who lead us in the responses was a bit concerned when he saw there were only 14 of us on the first day, but when he heard us rehearse, he realised there's no deadwood in this choir - we all make a noise, and when we want to, we can be really quite loud!

We were astonished when we processed in for our first service on Monday, to see a congregation of about a hundred. Normally during the week there are more of us than them, but this week we never had fewer than about 75, and on Sunday, there must have been 300 in the nave for the eucharist. Of course, Canterbury is a big tourist attraction and also has significant numbers of pilgrims visiting. Still, awesome to think that we must have sung to nearly 1,000 people in the course of the week.

I had checked out a very useful website called Canterbury Explorer before we went, so we had some clues about good places to eat, and on Tuesday, six of us had dinner at the excellent, if pricey, Deeson's restaurant. There being just me and five women, I jokingly referred to them as 'my harem'. There were one or two negative comments from other choristers the next day, none directly to me, that they would have expected to be invited, but that's just bollocks. At no point did I consider organising anything for the whole choir, and they have absolutely no right to expect anything of the sort. Sorry, I find myself getting cross about it all over again! GRRR! The only person who could legitimately feel aggrieved was Cynthia, who is part of the Royston 'dining club'. I didn't ask her because she organised the accommodation and I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that she'd need to be on-site to ensure things ran smoothly.

We had lunch twice in the delightful Café St Pierre (which doesn't seem to have its own website), once in the excellent Goods Shed and once in Café Mauresque, a middle-eastern restaurant. We also had dinner in the Mexican restaurant Café des Amis and in Café Mauresque. This might sound as though the food at the school wasn't good, but in fact it was very satisfactory, just we felt inclined to eat out much of the time.

The Goods Shed was a particularly splendid find. An old railway shed, it had a variety of stalls, selling fresh meat, fresh fish, vegetables, sandwiches, wine and beer, cheese, etc, as well as a restaurant where you could get an excellent lunch. We bought freshly made sandwiches twice to take as a picnic lunch, and were delighted both times.

On Wednesday after the morning rehearsal, we drove to Whitstable, where we ate our picnic on the beach, then west to Oare, where Jenny had spotted a bird-watching spot. That was spectacular, with about 50 avocets, hundreds of black-tailed godwits, a little egret, lots of lapwings, dunlin, cormorants and a few redshanks.

The choir always has one day off, when we don't sing a service, though we do rehearse in the morning. On that day, Jenny and I took our picnic to RSPB Dungeness for a spot of birding. It was windy and overcast, but we saw lots of really interesting birds, and had a most excellent time. Marsh harriers, great crested grebes, common terns and lots of ducks of various sorts. Excellent!

We also had a walk in Blean Woods nature reserve, which was really lovely. Didn't see many birds, but the wood, a mixture of coppiced birch, mature oak, open heathland, etc, was so still and quiet, we didn't care. We just ambled gently through, soaking up the peace.

And to round of a very satisfying, if exhausting week, I heard today that our director has had a letter from Canterbury, thanking us very much for singing for them and saying they're looking forward to us returning. We must have done OK if they're inviting us back!

Talking about dragonflies...

2011-08-10T10:59:00.003+01:00

One of the things that drives me nuts about dragonflies in particular, is the way so many of them cruise up and down, seemingly without ever stopping for a rest anywhere I can get a decent view of them. Without clocking a good look, I have no hope of identifying them, and even then, can usually only narrow it down to 3 or 4 species. I mostly have to get a photograph.

So I was particularly smug when I just waited for much longer than usual on the boardwalk in Fowlmere yesterday, watching this big green and blue jobbie teararsing around, when it finally settled on a twig I could actually see clearly and get a decent photograph.

It's a male Southern Hawker,Aeshna cyanea and I'm pretty pleased with the snap.

I also saw my first Ruddy Darter of the season. I took this picture in July last year, and have just had to visit british-dragonflies.org.uk to check that it wasn't a Common Darter, but it isn't.

Suppressing adverts

2011-08-10T10:07:00.004+01:00

I was just reading a British Trust for Ornithology review of a new British dragonflies DVD and was nearing screaming point, driven mad by the blasted animated adverts cluttering up the page. I googled for suppressing adverts, and hit gold. There's an open source add-on for Firefox which suppresses ads, so I installed it, and it's bliss! I had to share the good news!

You can download it free from here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

I'm not exactly sure what the stuff about filters is, but I accepted the default EasyList filter which sees to work just fine.

Oh and in a fine irony (this is irony, isn't it?) the ads on my own blog have been suppressed! Ho ho ho!

Barbecue

2011-08-08T16:13:00.006+01:00

On Saturday we hosted a barbie for Jenny's colleagues at the University Museum of Zoology, which went rather well. After two solid days' preparation, we had about 25 turn up. They brought whatever they wanted to cook on the fires plus some booze, while we provided baked potatoes, half a dozen different sorts of salad and three desserts, as well as the backbone of a drinks supply.

We had to borrow stuff from the lovely Lorna and Richard, and had four barbies spread around the garden as well as loads of chairs and a reasonable number of tables.

Jenny and I were very circumspect about the alcohol in the early part of the evening, just to make sure all went according to plan, but once most of the eating had been done, we allowed ourselves to relax a little. The weather was kind and we spent the whole time outside, a regular trickle of people returning to the kitchen to replenish their drinks. As dusk came on, the night-scented stocks did their biz and all were suitably impressed!

Some people had driven, and they tended to drift away earlier than the rest, but most had come by train and caught the last train back to Cambridge, which meant it was almost midnight before they left. We, having had to work pretty hard, were absolutely whacked by this time, of course!

In the morning, nursing hangovers, we broke the back of the clearing up, then just idled the rest of the day away, recovering. It's rare for us to just sit about reading at the weekend, but that was the therapy we needed, so we indulged oursleves Sitting in the attic, I was reading a Classic Bike magazine that Richard had passed to me (I pass my Motorcycle Sport and Leisure to him and he passes me Classic Bike!) and started finding myself wanting to buy an early 1950's BSA 500, but Jenny was quick to point out that I hardly use the BMW, never mind a second bike in the stable, so that brought me back to reality!

I found this picture on the web, which I presumably shouldn't have copied, but hey. This is a very tidy 1937 example. BSA made hundreds of thousands of these, especially during the war for the armed forces, and a lot get restored into military style, but I prefer the civilian look.

All academic, of course, as I'm not going to get one!

Wow! Data transmission by light!

2011-08-04T13:42:00.006+01:00

I'm not too impressed by this guy's presentation, but the idea is brilliant. Summary: use a new piece of kit to flicker a standard LED lamp so fast you can't tell it's not on continuously, and use the flicker to transmit data to a suitable receiver. eg Traffic lights could talk to your car.

A trip to Scotland

2011-08-04T11:19:00.004+01:00

On Tuesday last week, Jenny and I took the train up to Edinburgh for the reopening of the National Museum of Scotland after a major refit. It was quite a big investment of time and money, considering we only stayed at the event for a couple of hours, but it was very good to meet up with our old friend Nick Fraser, Keeper of Natural Sciences there. And it was pretty impressive, with over 1000 attending.

Sadly, I didn't take my camera, and my phone is useless in low light levels, so although I took quite a few photographs, none was worth posting.

On the birding front, I've been maintaining the "What's About?" sheet in Doug's absence, so have visited Fowlmere several times. I'm rather pleased with this action shot of a kingfisher, taken from Reedbed Hide.

Catching Up

2011-08-04T10:46:00.003+01:00

I've been having a few problems with blogger, with which I'm now getting some help from the blogspot forum, so this is a new post just to try out the fixes they've given me. First, I need to upload a photo, so here goes.
This is a juvenile muntjac which walked across the front of Spring Hide on the bird reserve the other day. You can tell it's a juvenile because when I leant out of the front of the hide to take the photo, it watched me, instead of running away. Bambi, you're dinner!

OK, I've been up to other stuff, but that can go in another post after I see what happens with this one.

Slutwalks

2011-07-18T17:01:00.000+01:00

I know I should have posted this a few weeks ago when it was topical, but I was busy and just overlooked it. Here it is anyway.

I have a difficulty with the slutwalks, because I think they're conflating two separate issues, and that is unhelpful. They're mixing up the crime of sexual assault with the likelihood that the way you dress might provoke such an assault. These are not the same thing and should not be treated as a single entity.

First, sexual assault is intolerable and inexcusable, and it's a disgrace that so few cases are successfully prosecuted in the UK. I know there are grey areas and all is not always as unambiguous as we'd like, but just a glance at the statistics should have our alarm bells ringing.

Second, in my view the cop who sparked the whole thing off to start with was actually right. If you dress provocatively, you might provoke. That doesn't excuse that reaction, but it certainly makes it more likely. And if you do something that makes an assault more likely, there's a case to be made that you contributed to the situation you find yourself in.

Let me offer a less controversial example. If I crash my motorbike while driving at 80 mph, I can hardly complain if I hurt myself more than if I'd crashed at a rather more legal 60 mph. I have contributed toward the severity of my injuries, although the actual cause of the crash might have been a careless car driver pulling out of a side turning. The fact that I was speeding doesn't excuse him for not looking properly, but it does make the consequences worse than they might otherwise have been.

(Belated) Happy Birthday, Neptune!

2011-07-14T19:19:00.000+01:00

Damn! I missed a really significant birthday the other day!

Neptune was discovered by two astronomers in Berlin in 1846 and with an orbit around the sun taking almost 165 years, 12th July was it's first birthday since being discovered. How about that!

Happy First Birthday, Neptune!!!

These pictures are courtesy of the very splendid Hubble Space Telescope, and I stole them from the Starts with a Bang blog posting, where you can read the whole story and see more excellent pics.

Outreach in Berwick upon Tweed

2011-07-11T18:27:00.004+01:00

A year ago, Jenny and I discovered some really interesting fossils in the borders region of Scotland, and in March returned to look for more. Rather to our surprise, we were accosted by a couple of beligerant Scots, who accused us of plundering their heritage. They took us for commercial collectors, and they didn't like it one bit.

After a rather awkward conversation, they departed, taking details of Jenny's email address and website, and we curtailed our trip with a distinctly nasty taste in our mouths.

However, over subsequent months, the senior Scot established our bona fides and he and Jenny exchanged a series of emails, which culminated in our returning north at the start of last week, for Jenny to give a talk to the local villagers about the major project for which she's shortly to apply for funding, its scientific significance and the importance of the fossils from the area in terms of our understanding of evolution of land vertebrates at that time.

We were a bit apprehensive, and no-one had any idea how many people she might have in her audience, not even the senior Scot who had done all the organising. He'd advertised the talk quite widely, but until the day, you can't tell.

To our amazement and delight, the village hall was packed with over 70 locals, and they had to ship in extra chairs to accommodate everyone. One local said he'd never seen the hall so full in all the time he'd been living there. Jenny's talk was very well received and not only do we know now that we're welcome up there, but we've had offers of help should we need it. The audience included a local girl who is about to start an MSc at Glasgow University, and who'd made the trip home especially to come to the talk.

This is all particularly good, as the funding body to whom Jenny is applying, is strong on outreach, so we've already got a good example in the bag. There are several other sites in the area where good fossils have been retrieved, so we're anticipating repeating the talk to other communities once things get going.

Another thing we needed to address was making contact with the owners of the cliff we've been collecting from. We had been under the mistaken impression that the cliffs were Crown property, but in fact, that is just everything below the high water level. The cliffs belong to the farm above.

Jenny had exchanged letters with the farmer's secretary, but wanted to meet up so as to know who she was talking to when she phoned to say we'd be on-site. She had had an email from a Scottish Heritage person who'd made the initial contact, apparently with one Pete Davidson, so we turned up and asked to speak to him.

A confused look crossed the secretary's face. No Pete Davidson here. After much backwards and forwards, and to great hilarity, it turned out that the farm owners are David and Peter Allen. Peter is David's son. So the man we wanted was Pete, David's son, not Pete Davidson. Ho ho ho! Anyhow, even though we didn't get to meet Pete, his father was there, but in reality, it was the secretary we needed to meet, as she's the one who will answer the phone.

So that was all very satisfactory, too.

And to round off the trip, I was playing 'how many miles can I get out of a gallon of diesel?' all the way there and back. I drove slightly slower than usual, 80 instead of 90, very easy on the acceleration, try to reduce braking as much as possible, coast down hills and if you need to accelerate, try to do so when going downhill. Avoid accelerating while going uphill. Of course, you can't do too much of that without being antisocial, but I just did my best.

And the result? Normally, the car does about 45mpg. On this trip, 56mpg. I was quite astonished.

Moore at Hatfield House

2011-07-07T15:16:00.000+01:00

On Sunday we went to Hatfield House to see the exhibition of large Henry Moore sculptures they've got on at the moment, and this is my favourite of all, called Hill Arches.

I really like Moore, but was surprised to find there's quite a bit of his stuff I don't much care for. I've never really come across much that wasn't to my taste before.

Shiny! Shiny!

2011-07-06T17:58:00.000+01:00

This is me posing with my new bike, a BMW F800ST, and I'm very pleased with it, even though it was an impulse buy.

I'd been looking at a small variety of bikes, based on the criteria that they must not have a chain final drive, they must have some sort of weather protection, they must be rather lighter and more agile than the Pan and they must have ABS.

I'd not really considered a BMW until strongly recommended by a friend and BMW nut who lives on Shetland, but when I saw this one on a dealer's website, I realised it ticked all the necessary boxes, so went and had a test ride.

Rather to my surprise, I found myself agreeing to buy it on the spot, especially when the man threw in a secondhand pair of panniers for nothing.

It's smaller and lighter than the Pan, has ABS, some rather rudimentary weather protection, and a toothed belt final drive. The panniers are rather smaller than on the old bike, but at least I can get a helmet in one of them. The screen is rather abbreviated, and I might have to buy a taller one, but I'll stick with the original for a while and see how I get on.

Jenny was less than impressed by the amount of research I did before buying it, but as I was still pleased when I got it home on Saturday, has somewhat relented in her criticism!

Another trip to A&E

2011-06-30T17:54:00.011+01:00

Yesterday, just after a rather large lunch, I started to get pains in my lower abdomen, which rapidly got worse. After a while, I took my tummy up to the local Health Centre, where the duty doctor poked and prodded and did all those things you'd expect, but didn't seem to really have much idea what was wrong. This is no criticism. At no point throughout proceedings did anyone actually decide what was wrong.

At first she recommended standard pain killers, but as my pain got worse, while I was just sitting there, she suggested I go to A&E. I'd already decided that was where I needed to be, but by then the pain was too much for me to safely drive to Addenbrookes, so she referred me to A&E there and called me an ambulance. By now I was lying on the bed in her surgery, groaning.

The ambulance crew fitted me up to all the usual instruments and then, oh bliss, gave me 10ml of morphine. I began to imagine I might survive! They didn't treat me to blue lights and a siren, however. Damn, twice in two months I've missed out on that!

From the ambulance I phoned Jenny to let her know what was going on. This being Wednesday, a group of us were down to eat in a local Indian. Obviously I wasn't going to be there, but there wasn't anything Jenny could do to help me in Addenbrookes, so no reason for her not to eat out as usual.

At A&E I got more pain killers and then a battery of tests, lots of poking and prodding, lots of questions and few answers. As time passed, the pain got worse and I started groaning again. At around 6.30 a nurse fitted me up with a drip. I inferred from that and the rest of the proceedings that one possibility was a perforated bowel, which would require surgery, and I was then on nil-by-mouth, as you'd expect.

I asked this nurse if I could have more pain relief and she said she'd sort it out, but 20 minutes later, nothing had happened and I could see the end of my tether. I spotted a red button labelled Emergency - Pull, so I pulled it. That got me a telling off, since that button is the Cardiac Arrest Alarm button. Still, it worked. I got instant attention, which is what I wanted!

I was given two tiny grey and green capsules, which worked after a bit, though not as well as the morphine had. And a nurse squirted some anti-nausea stuff into the cannula in my hand, because I kept thinking I was going to throw up. By this time they'd done all the blood tests and everything else they could think of, apart from an X-ray, and everything was showing as completely normal, so still no idea what's actually wrong with me.

Some time around 7.30 I think, I was taken for an X-ray, then shunted back to my cubicle to ~~die~~ wait. With the pain slightly ameliorated, I was able to doze, and when I awoke, to my amazement, the pain had subsided to almost nothing.

They still took me to the Clinical Decisions Unit, back of A&E, where I was given a bed to wait in, along with two other, sick-looking guys. Nothing happened for a long time, except Jenny, Lorna and Richard turned up, having thrown together an overnight bag for me, which I thought was really good of them. It was lovely to see them, too.

Their timing turned out to be impeccable. Around 10, not 10 minutes after they'd arrived, my surgical team turned up, listened to my tale of how the pain had gone away, and discharged me on the spot. So not only had my lovely wife and friends brought me stuff I might have needed, but they were on hand to run me home when I was liberated! Perfect!

But the medics still had no idea what had caused my pain. One of the nurses in CDU said it's like that with most abdominal pain - it goes away by itself and no-one knows why it came or went. Terrific!

Update: as recommended by A&E I visited my doctor on Friday and he said, testing my urine, that a kidney stone will often leave a trace of blood in the urine, having scratched the inside of the ureter, but there was no trace on Friday. When I reported this to Jenny, however, she said the nurse in CDU had seen blood in my urine sample just before I left on Wednesday, but I'd completely forgotten that.

So it seems likely that I was passing a kidney stone, and when I looked that up on the web, the symptoms do match quite well. The way you avoid kidney stones is to drink lots of liquids, which I already do, so a repeat is not impossible. Well, it's progress, but not necessarily of the sort I'd like to make!

Heavenly scent

2011-06-30T17:38:00.000+01:00

These rather unpreposessing, scruffy little plants are among our absolute favourites this time of year. The flowers, which are nothing much to look at to start with, close during the day, only opening as dusk approaches.

And there's the clue to why we like them. Flowers that open only at night tend to be pollinated by moths, and to attract the moths, they produce wondrous scents, though sometimes only when it's warm enough.

These night-scented stocks have been more successful than often in the past, and we're not really sure why. They're a bit sensitive to drought, so I suppose we must have been careless on those occasions we've failed to grow decent ones.

Anyhow, on Monday evening, Jenny and I were sitting out on the patio enjoying a glass or three, and the temperature was obviously pleasing to the plants, because the scent was just overwhelming!

It's not a sweet scent, like a rose, but much more musky and spicy, and it tends to hit you in wafts, as the air currents swirl it around. Just glorious!

So here's what I did. In March or April I got some 3 inch pots and filled them with JI No1 Seed and Cutting compost. Scattered seeds thinly across the surface and covered with a couple of millimetres of compost. Watered gently and stuck them in the greenhouse (unheated) with a sheet of glass over to maintain humidity. As soon as the seedlings emerged, I removed the glass.

Once the seedlings were about 5cm tall, I lifted the whole lot out of each pot and teased it into 3 or 4 chunks before planting again in 6 inch pots, this time using JI No 3. By now there was little chance of severe frost, so I moved them outside, but in any case, the plants are not that vulnerable to frost.

Then, when those pots started looking crowded, I just potted up into 8 inch pots, without splitting. In fact, these are now tending to wilt before I get around to watering them, so I'll pot them up one more time, and will add some water-retaining granules, which might help.

Pork loin recipe

2011-06-23T19:30:00.000+01:00

Jenny is at a conference in Switzerland, so tonight I invented a stir-fried pork loin recipe, which worked well enough that I thought I'd share it with you. It's not an oriental-style recipe at all, but part of the cooking is done in a wok.

To feed one person, you will need:

A pork loin chop, diced. If you like a lot of meat, get a big one. I had rather a small one, so there wasn't a huge amount of meat in my dinner.
4 or 5 spring onions, chopped.
A clove of garlic, finely chopped, or crushed if you prefer.
As much courgette as you feel like putting in, chopped the way you like.
A handful of mange tous, chopped to match the courgette.
Basmati rice - I use half a cup; adjust to suit yourself.
A generous sprig of fresh Greek or French tarragon, leaves stripped from the stems and roughly chopped.

Set the rice to boil, then, when it's about half done, stick some oil in the wok and brown the meat. When it's taken on some colour, add the spring onions and stir for a few minutes, followed by the garlic, courgettes and mange tous. Keep stirring every now and then to turn the food and stop it sticking.

By now the rice should be more or less done, so throw the tarragon and rice into the mixture in the wok and give it a generous grind of black pepper. Stir it all up to coat the rice with oil and distribute the tarragon. Serve immediately.

One reason why children should be vaccinated

2011-06-22T11:51:00.003+01:00

In May, the Guardian reported a 10-fold increase in the number of measles cases in the UK, a total of 330 so far. The trouble is, many people seem to think measles is not a serious illness. They should watch this video clip.

Oceanic deceiver

2011-06-17T15:57:00.000+01:00

Tip o' the hat to PZ Myers.

Jackdaw update

2011-06-14T10:10:00.002+01:00

In cleaning up the jackdaw poo, I couldn't help noticing the large amount of dust and cobwebs all over the place, not to mention the spider poo on the windows! I'm not convinced we've given the attic a decent clean since it was converted into a room, erm, some years ago. Sunday, being rainy, was the perfect day for us to rectify this.

I cleaned the windows inside and out, though not as thoroughly on the outside as I'd have liked, it being kind of wet out there. With two vacuum cleaners going, we got the room done in about an hour and a half, which was not bad. Gave away an old TV, freeview box and VCR on Freecycle, and took another old TV and VCR to the recycling centre.

With a tiny amount of time available, we visited Focus DIY in Letchworth. We knew Focus were in administration, but hadn't realised how far the closure had progressed. There was very little on the shelves, and we were unable to find the bookcase we were after. We did find a bentwood chair, which was also on our list, so bought that.

As we drove home, we realised that in our rush, we'd not investigated the colour of the chair, so didn't know what colour the wood or fabric were. We just hoped for the best. Turned out both were what you might call 'blonde', ie the pale creamy colour of the natural, which suits the room rather well. Quite comfy, too.

There was less good news on the jackdaw front. Although he showed some improvement initially, after a couple of days the poor mite died. Caroline told me that sometimes severe dehydration can do all sorts of invisible damage, like kidney, for instance, after which it's only a matter of time. Oh well, we did our best.

Little Owl Soup

2011-06-08T12:58:00.002+01:00

This morning I are mostly been poking around in a bowl of little owl soup!

Last summer, the warden of the bird reserve found himself with three dead little owl chicks. They were soaking wet and he inferred they'd died of hypothermia. Knowing Jenny works in the Museum of Zoology, he wondered whether the museum would be interested in mounting the skeletons. They were interested in having one, but did not have the resources to deflesh the carcase, so Jenny and I did that.

Doug had already left them hanging up somewhere for the flesh itself to rot, so we got three dessicated, largely defleshed bodies, which we put into individual zip-up bags of the sort you use when you put small, delicate items into the washing machine, before burying them in the compost heap.

In the winter, when we turned the heap, we removed the bags and tipped the contents into three old saucepans which were lying around the garden, and left them exposed to the elements in the hope the weather would clean them up a bit. No such luck! Although the flesh had gone, the feathers had not, and with a whole body's-worth of feathers, the bones were all glued together in a lump, and we'd have risked breaking many of them if we'd simply tried to pull the mess apart.

Instead, we tipped one into a shallow dish and left it soaking in water with a bit of detergent added, and this morning I spent a couple of happy hours picking through the resulting soup, extracting the bones. We now have most of the bones of a little owl skeleton, laid out on a piece of paper, drying, and in a day or two, Jen can take it in to the museum. I know it's incomplete, because I only have 6 talons, where I should have 8. No idea what else is missing.

Juvenile jackdaw

2011-06-07T14:23:00.001+01:00

I know you're not supposed to pick up juvenile birds on the ground as generally the parents will be in close attendance, but on Sunday we kept our eye on this baby jackdaw for 5 or 6 hours, during which time no adult bird went near it, so we concluded it was probably abandoned.

And when it tried to fly, we had the impression one of its wings was damaged.

Finally, the cat spotted it, so we figured it was doomed whatever happened, so caught it and put it in a cardboard box in the attic, gave it a bowl of water and another of mixed wild bird feed, and left it for the night.

In the morning I opened its box at about 5 and went back to bed. When I checked it later, it was looking very sorry for itself, but in the meantime I'd found a website which talked about what to feed it (catfood is good!) and what other needs it might have. Armed with my newfound knowledge, I realised immediately that the bird was cold, so put heaters on to warm the room, and after a couple of hours, the it did start to perk up.

I couldn't persuade it to eat anything, but it did at least sip some water, and seemed quite alert, if not very active. When it did move about it seemed clumsy, and it kept failing to fly. It really hadn't got the idea and didn't really flap hard enough, so quickly crashed each time, but I think it was just young and incompetent.

So this morning, having failed once more to get any food into it, I started looking for a wildlife rescue centre nearby, and what a task that proved to be! Springwatch directs you to the RSPCA but their website search engine, given my postcode, said "Nothing within 50 miles" which I know is simply not true. The RSPCA phone menuing system sends you down a blind alley and then hangs up on you. It was useless.

Veggies Animal Contacts Directory was not much better. Several of the phone numbers are simply wrong - all UK numbers these days consist of a 5-digit area code, followed by a 6-digit personal phone number - so just by looking at 5-digits followed by 5-digits I could see they were never going to work. And references to those centres are replicated several times across the net, always with the wrong phone number. The centres with good phone numbers never answered the phone.

Safewings near Kettering was very helpful, but simply too far away. Bedford and Cambridge Wildlife Trust was full, but did suggest I contact my local vet to see if they had contacts. They did, but by then, parallel enquiries on the Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue site yielded Caroline Huxtable in Stevenage, who kindly agreed to take the bird. I boxed it up and shipped it over pronto!

Caroline examined it and declared it pathetically undernourished and dehydrated. She weighed it and calculated the amount of fluids she was going to have to administer per 24 hours, then warned me that it was absolutely touch and go. If it survives the next day or two, it will probably be OK, but right now it's in deep trouble. Poor little thing.

She did reassure me that we had not done the wrong thing by rescuing it. They're getting lots of corvids right now, as the ground has been so hard for so long, the parent birds have been having real trouble finding enough food for their chicks, so this one probably really was abandoned. The wing did show signs of injury, but I'm not sure it was actually broken or deformed. And in any case, the cat would have had it, if we'd left it.

So having found someone who knows what she's doing to look after it, all I have to do now is clean up the poo liberally scattered across the attic!

Choir 18 in St Edmundsbury Cathedral

2011-06-06T16:08:00.001+01:00

On Saturday, we sang with Choir 18 in St Edmunsbury Cathedral, and once more, acquitted ourselves well. We did a short, lunchtime recital, then had the afternoon off, before singing Choral Evensong at 5.30. It was a lovely day and everyone seemed very pleased.

Sadly, I was timed by a policeman at 96mph on the way home. He was very civilised about it, and didn't actually seem to take it at all seriously, but even so, I have the fixed penalty notice which is going to cost me £60 and my licence will be returned with 3 points added, which is a bit of a bugger, actually.

Getting back into the swing

2011-06-03T15:23:00.001+01:00

It being a month since my crash, it was getting time to get back in the saddle. Tradition has it that when you crash a motorbike, you should ride again as soon as you can. The longer you put it off, the less likely you are to return, so I knew I needed to do something about it.

Jenny was in London yesterday afternoon, but I was pretty tired by the time I finished at the bird reserve, so didn't make the effort. There was a slight, but detectable, note of derision in Jenny's response when I mentioned this.

Today Jenny had to go to work by train, so I had another opportunity to ride her bike. I had to take a defective power tool back to the shop in Cambridge, but Jenny's kit (mine was ruined in the crash, of course) doesn't fit all that well, which was all the excuse I needed to go by car. But as I drove in, I was berating myself for my cowardice!

So after lunch I got kitted up, wearing Jenny's jacket, trousers and crash helmet, my own, damaged boots and my summer gloves, which I was not wearing on that fateful day. I didn't have anywhere in particular to go, so thought I'd ride up the A1198 for a bit, then turn east onto the A603, down the M11 to Duxford and home along the A505 past the crash site.

In the event, my hands started to hurt quite badly within about 5 miles, and when I realised that the further end of the A603 had just been top-dressed with loose chippings, making skidding a real possibility, I turned off right and rode quietly though some villages to the A10, then came back to Royston that way.

By the time I arrived, my hands were really sore, and in fact, have still not fully recovered as I type this. I also found Jenny's bike a real handful to ride. I don't think I've ridden it since she was knocked off last July, and I found it hard to steer accurately at low speed, with excessive dive on the front forks when you hit the brakes, and an irritating buzz from the faring at around 2500 revs, where the workshop clearly hasn't fitted it correctly. Jenny did complain when she had it serviced, but they didn't fix it.

We've used this bike shop since we first came down to Cambridg in the early 80's, but practically everyone we know has now left, so we no longer feel the loyalty to them that we used to. I don't think we'll be going back.

In my garden this week

2011-06-03T15:12:00.002+01:00

We're growing mange tous this year for the first time. These are a golden variety which grow to 7 feet, and they seem to be most of the way there already! I suspect the rather flimsy cane support will need to be reinforced when the July and August rains lash down! They also come with rather dinky little two-tone purple flowers, which you can see if you click the picture to enlarge it, and which are an unexpected bonus.

And yes, they are leaning over to the left, as a result of being so close to the bramley apple tree. Too bad!

Common lizard

2011-06-03T15:05:00.002+01:00

I don't remember when I last saw a lizard in the UK, so you can imagine my pleasure yesterday at the bird reserve, when I spotted three common lizards sunning themselves on the boardwalk, not far from where we were trimming back reeds, brambles and hawthorn.

It was a beautiful day, and we got a lot done. I also saw a grasshopper warbler, which was buzzing away in a nearby willow, so I was a happy bunny!

On the down side, the mozzies were out in force, and by the time I got home I could tell I was in for an itchy night, as there were several visible bites on my left forearm, and I could feel a new swelling on my left shoulder.

After struggling not to scratch whenever I was awake, I arose this morning to find a 5 cm diameter bump on my left forearm and the outside of my left hand significantly swollen. Most of the other bites seem to have caused a much more normal reaction. I hope I'm not developing a sensitivity to mozzie bites. Generally I don't do allergies, so this would go strongly against my public persona.

Strasbourg!

2011-06-01T11:20:00.010+01:00

When we heard that this spring's Choir 18 European trip would be in Strasbourg, I was less than enthused, but signed up anyway, and I'm really glad I did! Although it rained on us when we arrived on Friday afternoon, the weather was much kinder for the rest of the trip, and we had a simply brilliant time. On Friday morning we took Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris, one stop on the Metro from Gare du Nord to Gare de l'Est, and the TGV thence to Strasbourg. Easy, comfortable and fast. Total journey time, door to door, about 8 hours.

This shot just gives you a flavour of the place. The cathedral, in the background, is surrounded by buildings so close I couldn't get a decent photograph, but it is a magnificent building and worth the visit on its own. The carved stonework is wonderful, and the stained glass (12th, 13th and 14th century) fabulous.

The acoustics are pretty good, too! On the Saturday afternoon we gave a concert in the church of St Pierre le Jeune (site in French, sorry), which was good fun and we thought we did pretty well, but then we got to the cathedral on Sunday.

In the morning we sang in the Mass at 11, where we discovered the acoustic decay was over 8 seconds. That means, when you stop singing, you hear the sound continuing to bounce around the building for at least 8 seconds! Wonderful.

We sang Victoria Mass Missa O Magnum Mysterium, Stanford Justorum Animae, then during communion, Harris Faire is the Heaven (lots of not very good recordings on YouTube! Even this one I'm not really sure about.). The first two went well, but the Harris was simply electric! We were just on fire! The assistant organist, who was giving directions to make sure we sang the right stuff at the right moment (service in French and German, so none of us could understand much of what was going on) gave us silent applause at the end, so he liked it!

We stayed in the Hotel Mercure in the centre of Strasbourg, which was fine, although it had no bar. They share the next-door Hotel Sofitel's bar, and when we went through, we found this fabulous bronze greyhound sculpture in the Sofitel reception. It's by Chiqui Diaz and is way beyond our budget, no surprise! This gallery web page is really irritating, but at least you get to see a good selection of the works.

After busking in front of the cathedral (stuff like Kings Singers settings of the Beatles Blackbird, for instance) we were taken by coach to the Abby at Marmoutier where we sang the same concert as on Saturday, only this time even better!

At one point, walking around the city, we crossed a bridge which had pots of flowers hanging over the handrails, and spotted this most obliging hummingbird hawkmoth, which continued sipping nectar for several minutes, while I took some video footage.

Finally, as we were walking back to the train station on Monday morning, we spotted this entertaining item. No idea of its significance, but we liked the man striding purposefully up the pole!

Lessons from a dead racing pigeon

2011-05-26T14:22:00.001+01:00

The other day I saw a dead pigeon by the side of the road just outside Royston and noticed that it had rings on its legs, so recovered it and took it home. After removing the rings, one of which had to be hacksawed off, I put the carcase on the compost heap, which is what I generally do with the bodies of small animals I find in the garden. (There's never been a problem with flies or smell, incidentally.) Curiously, I was too squeamish to just chop the leg off!

Today at the bird reserve I learned that racing pigeons often have their owner's contact details stamped on the wings, so when I got home I fished the bird out of the compost heap and took a look. Sure enough, there was a name and a London phone number.

Turns out the bird had been sent to Alnwick in Northumberland on Saturday but had not returned. Obviously the owner was sad at the loss of his pigeon, but grateful that I'd made the effort to contact him.

I also reported the bird as a stray on the Royal Pigeon Racing Association website. As well as the stamp on the wing, the warden at the bird reserve had mentioned a central BTO ringing website, so looking for where to report the bird, I started there. The BTO website directed me immediately to a list of pigeon racing websites and given I knew the bird was from London, I reported it to the association that seemed most likely to be the right one.

And I'd finished within the hour. Imagine how much more cumbersome that procedure would have been even a few years ago! Isn't that interweb thingy wonderful?

Good night, good Spirit!

2011-05-25T13:51:00.004+01:00

Spirit was the Mars rover expected to last 90 days but in fact which kept soldiering on until a little over a year ago. Since then, NASA has sent a daily call, but has had no response from Spirit. Today they send their last message. They're not expecting any response, but will keep listening for another month.

With deep respect, I lifted this cartoon from XKCD's blog. You'll need to click it to view it big enough to read easily.

Ahh!

A better ecosystem in our pond

2011-05-22T18:04:00.006+01:00

In July last year we had one of our garden ponds redone and when I restocked it, I put sticklebacks and minnows in instead of goldfish. Well to be truthful, I managed to accidentally introduce a black goldfish, and have completely failed to catch it since. It's now a nervous fish and I don't know how I'm going to catch it. The idea was that the goldfish used to eat all the wildlife which tried to live in the pond, whereas the new fish are smaller, so should have a less dramatic effect, but we hope the sticklebacks and minnows will eat the mosquito larvea that would otherwise inhabit the water and emerge to bite us of a warm July evening.

Well the upshot of having only one goldfish is a pond full of tadpoles for the first time in years, and we were pleased enough with that, but then yesterday I spotted baby fish, so somebody's been at it down there. But then today we managed to top even that, when we spotted a smooth newt in the pond. We tried introducing newts years ago, without any noticeable success, so this was completely unexpected.

Sadly, all is not perfect. Blackbirds nested in the hedge next to the pond earlier this year, and one of their fledgelings' inaugural flight was straight into the water, with terminal results. On the opposite side is a brick pillar into which I built a nestbox, which this year was used by great tits. And one of theirs ended up in the drink last week, too.

I think of it as putting evolutionary pressure on the fledglings to get it right first time. Is that cruel?

Oxymoronburger!

2011-05-12T14:07:00.000+01:00

Last night, Jenny and I went to the Cambridge Corn Exchange to see Uncaged Monkeys, which is a quasi-scientific performance by Robin Ince, Simon Singh, Brian Cox and Ben Goldberg, along with a few extra guests, who are not announced in advance, as far as I know. The show's been going around since the beginning of the year, and I really wasn't sure what to expect.

I've never seen Robin Ince before, and found him quite funny. Simon Singh spent his slot talking about the 'alternative medicine' scene and how essentially they take your money but sell you water, along with various obvious parallels. (It was a long show, and I've forgotten most of the details, which is not good, but no surprise.)

Then came Steve Jones, not on the expected list, who was really entertaining and talked, amongst other things, about the fact that the £10 note is all Darwin, evolution, Galapagos, etc, but includes a humming bird. There are no hummingbirds on Galapagos. Oops! Although Steve quoted some text about the hummingbird, which I assume came from the Royal Mint's website, I notice that, although the bird is still pictured, the text associated with it is now more generic, and hence, accurate. Maybe someone from the Mint saw the show!

Brian Cox talked about the LHC, as you'd expect - "We build these things next to an airport, so you can get a sense of the scale of them - that small straight line there is Geneva airport!" - as well as cosmology, particle physics, the results of Gravity Probe-B and so on. All good stuff. BTW all the press seem to be saying that Gravity Probe-B proved Einstein's General Theory of Relativity right, missing the crucial word "again" off the end of the sentence! It's been proven right several times over the years, and this is just another aspect. As Brian said, it's a good job this experiment worked, as GPS is crucially dependant on the the theory it was actually testing!

By now we were already half an hour late in a long show, so we had an interval, then resumed for first, a mercifully brief Q&A session, a genetics person I'd never heard of and sadly, who's performance has fallen out of my head, a girl singing some funny, geeky songs and finally Ben Goldacre. Ben talked a lot about how testing of drugs is quite often skewed in such a way as to favour the company performing the test, by testing against a placebo instead of the most effective other drugs on the market, by simply not publishing small-scale tests that don't show the results you want, and so on.

Ben does himself no favours by hopping around the stage like a demented hamster. Is he hyperactive as a result of imbibing sweet drinks with high concentrations of e-numbers? I don't know, but I was glad when he stopped as it was most distracting.

Anyhow, I recommend you go if you can. It's an evening of Science and Wonder and although it's expensive and long, it's definitely worth it!

Oh yes, the Oxymoronburger. We ate at Jamie's Italian restaurant just over the road, before the show and I had a burger. The last burger I had was in a MacDonalds in High Wycomb in about 2000, and it was so ghastly, I swore I'd never eat another one. This one was just delicious, and I'd cheerfully repeat the experience! Sadly, they forgot to drizzle the Posh Chips with the promised Truffle Oil, but the nice waitress left those off the final bill, which I didn't actually ask her to do.

Damn bird!

2011-05-10T17:32:00.001+01:00

This great tit has changed what it's feeding to its young. Until a few days ago, both parents were rushing back and forth, delivering caterpillars and whatnot to their babies, and ferrying away the faecal sacs like good, houseproud parents.

But today I noticed this one, which is busily emptying my bird feeder, scattering food far and wide, evidently in search of something special. I think it's sunflower seeds, though that doesn't make complete sense, since there's a feeder on the other side of the garden which supplies only sunflower kernels, and it's studiously ignoring that.

Anyhow, I rigged the white thing below the feeder to try to catch the waste, but it's not nearly big enough. The bloody bird is chucking most of the stuff it doesn't want way beyond the edge of that!

What's the point of my preventing the grey squirrels from getting to the food if the damn birds just hurl it to the ground anyway?

GRRR!

The north Norfolk coast

2011-05-09T14:47:00.001+01:00

For many years now, Royston Priory Singers has sung a couple of services in Binham Priory, on the Sunday of the first weekend in May, but with all those bank holidays over the past few weeks, there's not been enough rehearsal time, so this year the gig was cancelled.

Not to be done out of our weekend's fun, Jenny and I booked our usual holiday flat in Sheringham, and on Friday, drove up there with Lorna and Richard. One difference this time was that Richard drove my car, as my immobilised knee prevents me from driving. We went in our car as it's slightly bigger than theirs. Just to make packing everything in more of a challenge, I'd hired a wheelchair from WheelFreedom, and I'm really glad I did as it made an enormous difference.

The pattern for the weekend was much as usual - fish and chips and champagne on Friday night, a visit to Titchwell Marshes bird reserve on Saturday, followed by dinner at the wonderful No 10 restaurant in Sheringham. On Sunday we visited Sherringham Park to see the rhododendrons and azaleas, then home for about 6pm.

So I'll spare you the bird and flower pictures, but this is one Jenny took of me just after we'd arrived at Sheringham Park. Out of the blue, we found electric buggies by the visitors' centre, available at no charge. A member of staff took my details, showed me how it worked and let me loose on an unsuspecting public! Result! Instead of leaving the wheelchair at the visitors' centre, Lorna used it. Lorna has arthritis in her hips, and was in quite a lot of pain yesterday, so being able to sit in the wheelchair and have Richard push her around was an unexpected bonus. On the bird reserve on Saturday, she and I had taken turns.

Amazing tree hoppers!

2011-05-05T15:27:00.001+01:00

I was led to this fascinating article about tree hoppers by the Discover Magazine blog. These tree hoppers have evolved bizarre structures from the first segment of their thorax (the middle blob of the body, between head and thorax) and no-one really knows what they're for, but even more interestingly, it seems these structures are modified wings.

Now everyone knows that insects only have wings on segments 2 and 3 (T2 and T3) of the thorax (you did know that, didn't you?) so for modified wings to spring from T1 comes as something of a surprise.

Turns out that some early insects did indeed have wings on T1, but in modern insects the genes that are expressed in wing growth are suppressed by another gene in T1. Except not in tree hoppers. In tree hoppers that suppression doesn't seem to work properly, and these bizarre growths occur.

It's worth visiting the site just to look at the pictures, believe me!

Nasty, dangerous things, cars!

2011-05-04T13:30:00.005+01:00

This photograph is entitled "Thank goodness for full-face helmets!"

Yesterday morning I went to the dentist for a checkup, scale and polish. It being a beautiful day, naturally I went on my motorcycle. I try always to use the bike because although parking is usually possible for a car, sometimes it's a bit problematic, so the bike is just easier. And usually more fun!

Sadly, on the way home, it turned out to be less fun. A car waiting to turn right out of a junction on my right, failed to see me, so pulled out in front of me. I was unlucky in that when I hit the brakes, there must have been some gravel or similar under the front wheel, because the bike just vanished from under me. Given it was a warm, sunny day and the road surface was dry, there's no way I should have lost control like that, but there you go. I did.

Fortunately the car stopped half-way across the junction, so I bounced in front of, rather than into him, and the bike slid off leftwards, through a wooden fence and into a wooded area. I still don't know what kind of shape it's in, but suspect the worst.

The critical thing, when you come off a bike, is not to hit anything. Hitting things hurts, so is best avoided. Which I did. I bounced quite a long way down the road, ruining all my gear in the process, but when I finally came to rest on the grass verge, my first thought was "I believe I've not broken anything. Bloody hell! How did I do that?"

Of course, I was rapidly surrounded by a crowd wanting to know if I was OK, so I took my helmet off and then stood up, continuing to be surprised I could do so. One of the witnesses suggested that I get checked out at Addenbrookes, and I agreed, so she called an ambulance. I'd not been going as fast as I would normally, being in the frame of mind to just pootle along enjoying the ride, but even so, I wasn't doing 30mph!

Climbing into the back of the ambulance, I noticed a sticky feeling around my left knee, and investigation revealed a short, rather deep cut, which the paramedics said would need a stitch or two. Three, as it turned out. They checked me out quite thoroughly before setting off to Addenbrookes, and I was gratified that my initial impression was largely correct. I was shaken, but not stirred.

Disappointingly, that meant I wasn't treated to blue lights and sirens, which I thought was part of the deal!

At Addenbrookes they X-rayed my right hand, which was quite swollen and painful, but proved otherwise intact, and my left knee from about 6 different directions. The nice lady doctor apologised that they revealed I had actually cracked my kneecap, so my knee was going to have to be immobilised, even though there were otherwise no symptoms. So my left leg is encased in something not dissimilar to a cricket batsman's leg pad, whcih stops the knee from flexing. This is seriously inconvenient, since it means I can't drive the car. As Jenny doesn't drive cars, that's quite limiting.

As the evening progressed, my hands got more and more painful, despite liberal applications of 'anaesthetic' in the form of Porcupine Ridge Syrah, and this morning are still too sore for me to use the crutches the hospital kindly provided. Fortunately I managed to speak to someone at the fracture clinic, and she confirmed I could do without the crutches as long as I treated the leg sensibly. Phew!

So today I'm just waiting for the worst of the pain to subside, after which I'll just be stuck with an inconveniently straight left leg for a bit. If there's a god in his heaven (yeah, I know!) at the fracture clinic on Wednesday they'll say "No need for the splint. Take it off and go home!"

Later...
Oh yes, and just to cap it all, today I've got gout in my right big toe. For those who've not experienced the joys of gout, I recall my mother thinking she must somehow have broken her big toe, the pain was so intense. Today's is not as severe as that, but it's pretty bad, so I'm now limping with both legs! How fair is that?

A few days in Nova Scotia

2011-04-27T14:15:00.001+01:00

Jenny was invited to give a presentation at the opening of a new exhibition in the Joggins Fossil Cliffs centre in Nova Scotia on Saturday, so we've spent the past several days in Canada. We flew out on Thursday, landing at Halifax airport at about 1.30pm, hired a car and drove about 180 km to Amherst, where our hosts had booked us excellent accommodation in the Regent B&B, run by the delightful Jim Kerr and his wife Gwen.

On Friday, Jenny had arranged that we would visit Chris Mansky and Sonja Wood at the Blue Beach Fossil Museum, which they run, near Hansport, about 250 km away. The fossils from Blue Beach are comparable in age to the ones we found in Burnmouth, so Jenny is looking to include Chris and Sonja in her mega-project if she manages to get the funding. It was a long day and some of the roads were pretty rough, as Nova Scotia winters really hammer their highways. Temperatures alternate between frozen and thawed, which allows water to penetrate the cracks in the surface, then expand when it freezes, enlarging the cracks. End result, you have to drive fairly slowly sometimes!

We ate in the Old Germany restaurant in Amherst, which was pretty good. I'll spare you their website, which is dire.

The next day was Jenny's talk, which went down well. There were about 100 in the audience, and the new building, opened about 3 years ago, is an impressive place.

In the evening we were invited to the director's parents house, along with about a dozen others, mostly staff and their relatives, where we were treated to a mountain of lobster, along with turkey, ham and a variety of other dishes. I'm not that keen on lobster, mostly because it seems to always come on its own, and I find a big pile of meat rather hard work unless accompanied by some sort of stodge. Fortunately I was able to lay hands on some mashed potato, so survived the ordeal. The rest of the food was fantastic.

We also saw a pileated woodpecker, which obligingly landed on a tree not 5 metres away, and posed for me to take photographs, and this really brilliant child's swing made from an old car tyre.

On the Sunday, we took a scenic drive to Cape d'Or, where Jenny was a miserable killjoy and wouldn't let me play sideways games with the car on this most excellent dirt road. Boo!

Bird life chez Clack

2011-04-17T12:05:00.000+01:00

For the past several weeks we've had blackbirds nesting in one of our hedges, and it's been fun to watch the parents rushing back and forth feeding their young, and listening to the crescendo of cheeping each time a parent visits the nest. Sadly, the other morning, I found one of the nestlings face down in the pond. It had evidently decided to sample flight, but had misjudged badly. The remaining three seem to have fledged successfully, though we've only seen one since. I assume they're around somewhere and have seen at least one parent with a beakful of food, so that's probably OK.

Another bird event became obvious yesterday, too. We have a brick-built raised bed in which we grow red alstromerias for cutting. These plants die back during the winter, and had started sprouting a few weeks ago. They're about 30cm high, perhaps half their flowering height. Yesterday we found a big area in the middle had been flattened and there were collared dove feathers all around. And the wings of a collared dove in the middle of the flattened area.

This is typical sparrowhawk behaviour. After killing their prey, they chop off the wings before flying to a feeding post, where they pluck and eat what they've caught.

I'm rather more in favour of sparrowhawks than I am collared doves, so am delighted to have physical evidence of a sparrowhawk feeding in our garden. I'd be less enthused if it was catching blue tits or house sparrows, I think! The alstro's will recover, I'm confident.

Blue tits in a sparrow terrace

2011-04-15T11:28:00.001+01:00

When I put up this sparrow terrace (a row of three nestboxes in one), the idea was to encourage house sparrows to nest, but in fact it's only been used for nesting by sparrows once. Within a very short time after I put it up, blue tits had moved in, and mostly since then, it's always been occupied by the tits.

For the past few days, I've been watching the female blue tit ferrying nesting material to the nest box and finally thought to take a photograph. The fact that she's taking in feathers now, rather than moss and grass, suggests the nest is nearly finished, as the softer stuff is used to line the nest bowl and make it more comfortable.

The male is in much closer attendance now, too. When the female dives into the box with nesting material, the male lands in nearby bamboo or a silver birch tree and waits until she reappears. Then he follows her to wherever she goes for the next load.

What I'm not sure about is what else is nesting in the garden, apart from the blackbirds. There are a couple of dunnock, which are likely nesting nearby, but I've not found the nest, ditto robins and great tits. And I've not seen any evidence the house sparrows are actually nesting, though I've yet to spend much time on that.

Nesting garden birds

2011-04-13T12:24:00.001+01:00

For the past few weeks we've been aware that a pare of blackbirds were nesting in one of our hedges - in early March I'd seen one collecting grass and mud and repeatedly flying to a particular point in the hedge. This is a good clue. Then for a good few days now, the parent birds have been taking food back to the nest and you could hear the young cheeping as the parents arrived.

Doug wanted to come and ring them, so I took a couple of photographs so he could see how far advanced the chicks were, but in the end, pressure of work prevented him from coming, so this brood will remain unringed. I have reported the nest on the BTO garden nestwatch website, but there was nowhere for me to report the number of chicks, just their presence. Answer: four.

So having entered the blackbird nest, I wanted to follow that up with a blue tit nest in a box on the house wall. Yesterday I saw a blue tit, first cleaning stuff out, then later, carrying nesting material into the box. But today I didn't see ~~him~~ her. The lid of that box was not properly secured, so this morning I decided to latch it properly closed while there was no sign of bird activity. Rather to my surprise, I found a dessicated, long-dead house sparrow in the box. This could be why the blue tit decided against that box after all.

It might also explain why so few birds visited the fat balls I hung from beneath that nest, despite the long, cold winter. I guess the smell of dead sparrow might have put them off a bit!

Well, since the sparrow is now in the brown bin, perhaps both feeding and nesting will resume.

Later: There seems an obvious pair of blue tits hanging around and one is rapidly nest-building. I'd assumed it would be the male that built the nest (no idea why I thought that!) but when I checked in the book, it's the female doing all the work. The quickest collecting expedition I saw was about 15 seconds, though most are rather longer than that. And it seems to take only about 10 - 15 seconds to add the new material to the nest, before the bird emerges once more.

Birding at Fowlmere

2011-04-07T17:37:00.000+01:00

As usual on a Thursday, I was at Fowlmere volunteering today, and what a delightful day I had! First, Doug told me there were wheatears in the field just beyond the reserve, so I went straight there and met a man who knows about these things. He showed me a picture and pointed out where the birds were, so I got a reasonable look. They were rather far away, so without the instruction, I'd not have been able to identify them, but was pleased to see them, nevertheless.

At lunchtime I sat on the bench at the end of the boardwalk, where I saw a chiff chaff, three buzzards, a reed bunting, two willow warblers and a green woodpecker.

After lunch, when the rest of the volunteers had gone home, I helped Doug install a window into the back of a blue tit's nest. There is a small hole in the wall of the Reception hut, and the tits had built a nest between the inner and outer walls of the hut. After blocking the entrance hole with a rag, to stop the birds entering while we were working, we removed the inner panel of the wall and installed a pane of glass Doug had had especially cut. Then we cut the inner panel in two and pinned it back in place. Doug will buy the necessary hinges and latch so that when all is done, the inner panel can be opened, exposing the window into the blue tits' private lives! I'm guessing that's going to be interesting to visiting parties of school children, as well as to me!

Doug will also be able to count the eggs without disturbing the birds, and ring the chicks before they fledge.

Once that was finished, I went in search of some redstarts which had been reported. Sadly, I saw none, but I did come across a couple of male blackcaps singing at each other, which was some compensation!

Diseased water boatman

2011-04-06T13:23:00.001+01:00

I was just enjoying the warm spring sunshine and admiring our pond full of taddies, when I noticed this water boatman. Before we had the pond rebuilt last year, we had only pond skaters, but almost as soon as the pond was filled, several water boatmen appeared. I'm glad to see them, even though they do prey on tadpoles and small fish.

This one has a nasty-looking grey fuzz around it, which I assume is a fungal infection, so extensive I can't imagine the insect is long for this world.

I scooped it out and put it in its own bowl in the hope the fungus doesn't spread to the other insects in the pond, but I may be too late already.

I can't find anything about this on the net but am reluctant to constantly pester Jenny's entomologist contacts at the university.

Royston Priory Singers in York

2011-04-05T09:54:00.003+01:00

Over the weekend we went up to York, where we sang four services in the Minster, and it was simply lovely. What a wonderful building; what a superb city!

Jenny and I set out early, so as to have lunch there, but were even earlier than expected, as the RAC route planner lied to us! 160 miles took only 2 hours 30, not 3 hours. Actually, I should have been able to work that out myself, but didn't engage brain at all! Fortunately, the Park Inn Hotel was willing to check us in early, so we could get that bit out of the way immediately.

I'd looked online for eateries, and The Living Room, which turns out to be a chain but of which I'd never heard, was just around the corner. It was slightly pricey, but the food (we both had eggs benedict) and service were so good, we went back for lunch the next day! Jen had chicken caesar salad with bacon, while I had an extremely delicious slow-roast belly of pork on black pudding, rosemary and apple mash. Yum! Low cholesterol, of course!

The singing went well and we were pretty pleased with ourselves , receiving many compliments from members of the ~~audience~~ congregation. The lower orders of clergy were very friendly and welcoming, but the higher echelons were distinctly snooty. No doubt they didn't want to dirty the hems of their frocks by associating with us. One of our sopranos also sings in another choir which has been to York, and she says they got much the same reception. It would be nice to go back, but the look in the big knobs' eyes says it won't happen.

Somthing else noteworthy was that we were slightly short of tenors, so Phillip, one of the first bases, was elevated temporarily to exalted tenori status. This was a cruel thing to do, as Phillip lives on the other side of the country and wasn't able to get to any rehearsals, so Saturday was his first sight of what he was going to sing. As a headmaster and sometime organist, his musicianship skills are much better developed than mine, and he really did well, but even so, it was a bit of a struggle for him. I tried to turn and sing towards him, to help all I could, and some of the time he was just a fraction behind me, which is what you'd expect. I was deeply impressed, though forgot to say so in the scramble to get away after Sunday's evensong. (A scramble only because, with evensong at 4 it was 5.30 before we actually left York, and we wanted to get back to Royston in time to hit one of the restaurants for dinner.)

Redefining disability

2011-03-31T17:31:00.002+01:00

This is a brilliant TED talk and definitely worth the 10 minutes it'll take you to watch. I strongly recommend Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs. There are one or two hearty laughs in there, too!

Injury time

2011-03-10T17:44:00.002Z

Today, just 45 minutes after starting at the bird reserve, I pulled a muscle in my lower back. Decades of painful experience dictated that I down tools immediately. I lay on the floor of the nearby hide for 10 minutes to let everything settle down, then did a few back exercises, then went to find Doug to tell him I was finished for the day.

But in fact, not only was there no need for me to go home,there was actually a good case for staying on the reserve, walking gently around and gently flexing my back, so that's what I did.

I saw two tree-creepers where yesterday I saw just one, a buzzard being mobbed by rooks, lots of the usual, great tits, blue tits, long-tailed tits, possibly a coal tit, though I really didn't see it for long enough to make a solid identification. From the Reedbed Hide I saw a red kite very briefly, but I've seen enough of those to recognise one instantly, these days.

And, to my great delight, a goldcrest. Tiny bird darting about an ivy-covered tree, chattering away continuously. I was entranced. Tried to take photographs but just got blurred leaves or silhouettes. Tried to record the chatter but just got wind roar on the camera microphones. I did have to come home and check the book before I was confident that I knew what it was, despite talking to Doug about it, since goldcrest and firecrest are very similar. The key difference is that the firecrest has a bright white supercilium (eyebrow), but if you only get glimpses, it's hard to be confident. Anyhow, the book confirmed it: female goldfinch. Hoorah!

Anyway, this is a picture of a repoll, just for JennyTA who commented on yesterday's post. I should have put the links in, but just didn't think. As usual. As the saying goes "Trying to think; nothing happens!"

Oh yes, when I got home, I put my back in a hot bath for really quite a long time, and it's feeling much more relaxed now, thank you!

Some great birding!

2011-03-09T16:53:00.000Z

Jenny bought me a wonderful pair of binoculars with image stabilisation for my birthday the other week, and today was the first opportunity I had to really use them in anger. I've been watching the birds in the garden every day, of course, as part of the BTO Garden Birdwatch project, but haven't been able to get out into the field so far. For the image stabilisation, you hold a button down, and after about a second, suddenly all your hand-shake vanishes and you can see clearly. It's particularly useful for small birds far away, of course.

So today I went to Fowlmere to actually watch some birds, instead of the usual head down slash and burn I've been doing for the past several weeks.

I walked anticlockwise around the nature trail, calling first at Drewer Hide, where to took the trouble to look up the greylag geese I could see there. I'm pretty poor at identifying water fowl, so looking them up is a good thing to do. There wasn't much else there, so after a while, I wandered on.

Very soon, I heard a commotion in the bushes and stopped to see if anything was visible. I saw a couple of great tits, a blue tit and several long-tailed tits, but then, to my delight, caught sight of a tree-creeper, hopping up a completely unobscured tree trunk not five metres away. Fabulous! If I'd not seen anything more, it would still have been worth the trip!

On I walked until, near the watercress hut, I could hear another cluster of birds giving it some, so investigated. These proved to be half a dozen goldfinches, obligingly staying still for long enough for me to focus the super-whizzo bins on them.

Next, I went to Reedbed Hide, which is on stilts and overlooks a mere, arriving about 1.30. There was a teal there (which I also had to look up!), three coots, a moorhen and five greylag geese. As I was about to leave, I spotted a barn owl settle down far across the mere, near the end of the boardwalk. There were half a dozen rooks in a nearby tree, and they took turns to mob it until eventually it got fed up and flew away. I heard it calling later, as I neared the car park.

From Reedbed Hide I went to Spring Hide and as I did so, heard a curious call, which I thought must be some kind of tit, but it was completely unfamiliar. I couldn't see the bird, nor get closer to it, so gave up.

At Spring Hide I saw only coots and moorhens for a while, but then saw a small flock of little birds land in the tops of some alders beyond the mere. The mighty bins enabled me to see them, but I didn't recognise them. I thought they might be bramblings, but looking them up disproved that. Then, on the reverse of the brambling page, I saw a picture of a redpoll, which matched perfectly. And to solidify the ID, someone else had put 'redpoll' on the sightings sheet in the hide, dated yesterday.

While I had the book open, I looked up tits, and found that the call I'd heard earlier matched that of a marsh tit, described in the book as 'very distinctive', so I hope I've heard a marsh tit, even if I haven't seen one.

And that makes the best day's birding I've had in a long time!

Is Tim Minchin being sarcastic?

2011-03-03T18:43:00.002Z

You need to listen all the way through, but I think he just might!

Useless meat thermometer

2011-02-26T16:39:00.001Z

This rather out of focus picture is of a meat thermometer I bought from Tesco this afternoon. It was astonishingly cheap, at only 74p, but I still imagined it would work.

So I poked it into our piece of beef and put that into the pre-heated oven, but for boeuf en croute you hardly pre-cook the meat at all, so I had my eye on the thermometer from the off.

To my amazement, after a few minutes, I saw the clear front of the instrument, which I had taken to be glass, balloon up and start to blister. Clearly it was plastic, not glass, and completely unfit for purpose. I whipped it out pronto, in case it started to give off toxic fumes and ruin my Aberdeen Angus!

Sadly, I didn't think to photograph it before setting out for the store, which is why I used my phone to photograph it propped on the bonnet of the car.

Tesco refunded my 74p, and promised to take the rest of the stock off their shelves, but you have to wonder how much product testing they do before releasing stuff like this on an unsuspecting public!

Fabulous contemporary dance

2011-02-22T11:29:00.000Z

A few weeks ago we went with Lorna and Richard to see the Henri Oguike dance company perform in the newly-refurbished Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, and I have to say, I was pretty disappointed. There were some interesting ideas, but overall, it just didn't do anything for me. I wondered whether it was the performance, or me, and couldn't come to any conclusions.

So I was looking forward with some trepidation to last night's performance by Ballet Black in the Cambridge Arts Theatre. I needn't have worried - it was simply stunning!

This show celebrates the tenth anniversary of the founding of the company, and they performed five pieces, four dating from 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2010, giving a flavour of the way the company had changed over the years, while the fifth was the premiere performance of Orpheus.

Summary
Eurydice, wife of the great musician, singer and poet, Orpheus, has died after being bitten by a snake. An inconsolable Orpheus descends into the Underworld to try to reclaim her. He charms the dead by playing his lyre and Hades, King of the Underworld gives him the chance to reclaim his wife. However, he must return to the land of the living blindfolded.

Orpheus agrees, but as they draw close to the surface, he can bear it no longer, and rips the blindfold from his eyes, and Eurydice dragged back to the Underworld and dies for a second time. The Furies, who guard the entrance to the Underworld then tear Orpheus limb from limb.

This was the first performance we've seen by Ballet Black of a dance with a story. It was beautifully danced, and completely clear what was going on. At the end I, like many in the audience, had tears streaming down my face. If you get the chance to see it, you must do so!

Singing in St Edmundsbury Cathedral

2011-02-21T17:22:00.002Z

Most years we do a weekend set of services in the cathedral in Bury St Edmunds during the February half term, and last weekend that spot came around once more. The clergy are very welcoming, the cathedral is actually not quite freezing and the acoustic has been greatly improved by the completion of the new tower, added in celebration of the millenium, I think. The extra height at the crossing pays dividends. Oh, and they've spent a fortune on the organ, and to an organist every day playing on it is like having another day of Christmas! Our pet organist, David Boarder, did have a lot of fun on it!

We acquitted ourselves well apart from the first Eucharist yesterday morning. Saturday evensong was:

Tomkins responses
Sumsion Mag & Nunc in G.
Mendelsohn Verleih uns Frieden

No youtube videos for the Tomkins or Sumsion. The only real cock up was when the basses came in half a bar early in the Mendelsohn. They got a filthy glare from the conductor, and too bloody right! It's not rocket science.

Sunday morning there were two Eucharists, the first with the Sandersted Mass which we didn't know well enough and predictably, screwed up somewhat. The motet, Saint Saëns Panis angelicus was fine, though. In the second Eucharist, we sang a Mass by Willis which we've not done before and which not many of us liked. All the voices sing in unison, while the organ provides the interest. We did it OK, but we don't want to do it again, thank you!

Sunday afternoon's Evensong went well, though we were all very tired by then. Barnard Responses we've been doing since the beginning of time and could probably do without music. The Dyson Mag & Nunc is relatively new to our repertoire and was quite nice. And we finished off with our favourite anthem: Maurice Greene - Lord, let me know mine end. I think that's just about the whole world's favourite!

By the time we got home, we were completely whacked, of course, but very pleased with ourselves.

Some hymns are great!

2011-02-07T12:37:00.002Z

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

A BMW is just...

2011-02-06T10:01:00.000Z

a Moto Guzzi with saggy tits!

Watch and then share these videos!

2011-02-03T18:32:00.001Z

Look Mummy, it's pretending to be spring!

2011-02-03T16:36:00.005Z

Today at Fowlmere bird reserve we were back at the "grasshopper warbler meadow". Well, three of us were for the morning. We made the fire in the same place as last week and started pollarding the row of willows which is just about visible in the picture I posted last week. This is what it looked like just before we came home today.

The other two guys were a bit tentative when it came to the pollarding, and really didn't do much to the willows, but I thought we should do much more.

The problem is that the wind was changing direction all the time, so those pollarding often got smothered in smoke. I didn't let a trivial thing like that stop me, so determined to at least get the nearest willow done before Doug arrived,

It was quite hard work, because what you can't see in the photo's, is that those willows are standing in a ditch. I had to do quite a bit of sawing above my head while standing in water, which is tough going.

Anyhow, I've watched and done enough tree felling to understand a bit about how you get a branch to fall where you want it, and how to be out of the way when it does come down, which was handy, as some of these branches were a good 10cm thick. One of those landing on you, or even just swiping you in passing, could sting, I can tell you!

So I was pretty pleased to get the first one finished, the second, quite small, the other two had done OK, so then I moved on to the third, largest. That, too, came down, and I started feeling pretty smug.

At 12.30 the other two had to go home, so I spent the next hour or so cutting up the remaining branches and feeding them onto the fire.

Two more lads arrived to help and started cutting down hawthorn scrub. Anything more than chest high had to be cut down.

Finally, Doug arrived with the remaining volunteers and his chainsaw. He set to in a copse of hawthorn and buckthorn, but fortunately around 3.15 he ran out of petrol, so we were obliged to stop for the day! I was well ready to stop, I can tell you, though lasted better than on some previous days.

But the thing we all remarked on was what a beautiful day it was. Clear blue sky all day, and although chilly to start with, it warmed up as the day progressed, and we shed our thick jackets while we worked. Glorious! But not spring yet. Spring doesn't start until March, and here it is only 3rd Feb, so when it pretends to be spring, I'm not fooled. It's still winter, I tell you! One sunny day does not a spring make, or something like that!

A stonking fish pie

2011-01-31T15:38:00.000Z

While compiling the shopping list for our weekly shop on Friday, I found myself craving a fish pie, so we decided to do that for Saturday night. At the Tesco wet fish counter we discovered they did a pre-mix for fish pie, consisting of smoked haddock, salmon and Vietnamese river cobbler. (I knew nothing about VRC and googling has made me doubt the wisdom of eating it, but so far I've not seen anything verifiable, so will have to continue looking.) We bought some frozen prawns as well, which turn out to be from Indonesia, and I'm a bit dubious about that, too!

Anyhow, Jenny made this really wonderful fish stew from it. Was going to be a pie, but turned into a stew. She poached the fish lightly, made a thin-ish creamy white sauce with white wine and fresh parsley, then topped it off with par-boiled, cubed potato and sweet potato and gave it 20 minutes in the oven. Extremely yummy, and generous enough for my lunch today.

I do like food!

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

2011-01-30T15:36:00.000Z

This is the second year we've taken part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, in which people across the country spend an hour some time over this weekend counting the birds they see in their gardens or in local parks. The numbers of birds were pretty similar to last year's, 11 species compared with last years 10, and although this year we didn't see buzzard, redwing or long-tailed tit, we did see a sparrowhawk, great tits, a chaffinch and a wren. I'm a little disappointed with the total count of only 9 house sparrows, as I know the local population is about 25. The full results will be out in March some time.

Grasshopper warbler meadow

2011-01-27T21:33:00.001Z

This is the beginnings of a meadow designed to encourage grasshopper warblers at Fowlmere. We spent the day clearing and burning hawthorn scrub, which is not that much fun as the spines are ferocious. Not only do they penetrate your clothes and flesh, but they are just like giant velcro in the way they intermesh with each other and anything else they can find.

Apparently grasshopper warblers like tussocks of grass, and many of the lumps and bumps here should suit them, I gather. Quite a few of these bumps are antheaps, which Doug the warden seemed to think was a good thing, though I never got to the bottom of why.

Anyhow, we finished a bit after three and I went home, intending to collapse into a deep, hot bath.

Before I got home, however, I'd remembered that Jenny is giving a talk at Royal Holloway College in London, so would not get home much before ten. I'd promised I'd cook something of which I would have my share at the usual time, and the other half would survive reheating when she got home. So I stopped off at Tesco and bought some lamb shoulder fillet, plain yoghurt and an aubergine, thinking I could do a Madhur Jaffrey Indian dish.

The post-shopping bath was deep, hot and delicious, and yes, I did fall asleep. I still ache quite a lot, mind.

Sadly, I decided to cook a korma, which really required cream rather than yoghurt. I thought it would be fine, and indeed, it did taste good, but actually, the yoghurt curdled and it did look like a pile of sick. The aubergine I fried with turmeric, cayenne and black pepper and that was fine.

Anyhow, Jenny is due at the station in 10 mins, so I'll go and collect her.

Real science and Climategate

2011-01-25T11:17:00.002Z

Just watched a really interesting, if somewhat depressing Horizon, in which the President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, discusses the way in which the public perception of science has been damaged over the past few years. I hope that if you click that link, it'll allow you to watch the programme. What it seems to come down to is that the internet allows anyone who feels like it to publish their own point of view, whether that's based on reality or just their own particular fantasy, and search engines throw up the links without providing any clue as to which is the real science and which the fantasy. They all appear to carry the same weight. No wonder the public is confused.

Much of the programme is based around Climategate, and the key thing it clarified for me was the way in which that controversy arose.

Summary
Much of the data telling us about global temperatures in the past comes from tree rings, and some of the bits of wood that provide that information are very old indeed. From the time thermometers were invented and temperatures recorded, there's a very good correlation between the dimensions of tree rings and temperature, so we can be pretty secure in deriving temperatures from wood that was growing before the invention of the thermometer.

Unfortunately, after about 1960, the correlation starts to break down, and no-one yet understands why. So the controversy started because in preparing a graph showing global temperatures, the scientists used real temperatures, measured using thermometers, in preference to tree ring-derived temperatures.

The Telegraph journalist who latched onto this called it "apples and oranges", ie you're not comparing like with like, but that's clearly nonsense. What the scientists were interested in was the global temperatures, and the fact that they needed to use two different techniques to measure temperature is irrelevant. What's important is the temperature, and that's why the science was vindicated.

One of the depressing aspects of the programme was seeing the way different newspapers had reported the vindication. Rags like the Daily Express presented it as if, despite doing poor science, the guy somehow managed to hang onto his job, which is a gross distortion of the truth. I guess screaming headlines always did sell more papers than boring old truth.

Not wasting time!

2011-01-22T16:11:00.001Z

Just to prove that we don't mess about on the bird reserve on a Thursday, here are before and after photographs of last Thursday's efforts. Three of us got about half of this done in the morning, then after lunch four more arrived to finish off. We were done by about 3pm and feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.

To start with, I was in charge of the fire, so spent some time collecting dry twigs so that after coffee we'd be in a position to start the fire and not have to charge about looking for kindling. Fortunately there was plenty nearby, so I soon had a decent-sized stack ready. Then I helped out pollarding the willows and cutting up the waste, dividing it into stuff to be burned immediately and logs to be stacked. Not sure whether the stacked logs are regarded as a habitat or whether they get ferried out of the reserve to be used as firewood. We just left them. After coffee I lit my fire and I'm glad to say that it got going straightaway and we soon had a decent blaze.

This last photo is just of a hawthorn stump which the warden had chopped down recently, and I thought the effect was rather attractive. Although it will undoubtedly send up shoots in the spring, the deer will almost certainly eat all the new growth, and eventually the stump will die. That's why we were pollarding the willows, rather than coppicing them. (Both pollarding and coppicing are described here on the Bluestem Nursery website, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about!)

Curwen's Solicitors, Royston

2011-01-18T21:18:00.002Z

An artist friend of mine, Paul Bainbridge, suggested I get in touch with Curwens, a local solicitors, because they exhibit works by local artists for a couple of months at a time in their office on Royston High Street. Sadly, they don't have a page dedicated to the art, despite having been doing this for a couple of years.

Anyhow, the reason for this post is that in mid-March I'll be exhibiting a few of my own pieces of sculpture there, and I'm really delighted to get that opportunity. It's inspired me to get on with my Reclining Nude, carved from African Paduck wood. Sadly, today I had to send back the Proxxon power chisel I've been using, as it's developed a fault, but hopefully it won't be away for too long.

The problem with this piece of work is that it's by far the biggest thing I've done so far, and is also pretty complex. And the wood is cracked, so I've had a few disasters as bits have just flaked off. What with those and my mum dying in 2009, work ground to a halt. I made a start last year, but the stresses of my employer folding in the summer distracted me, so here we are a couple of years down the line and really, not much has changed.

Until last week, when I really started to crack on! Not sure if publishing this picture is a good idea, so I think I'll duck. People don't tend to be too impressed by work in progress!

Fishfight

2011-01-18T09:37:00.002Z

Delighted to see that Hugh's FishFight has raised over half a million signatures so far!