Category: wildlife

Coasting

Gez and Lucy drove us to the seaside for the weekend, stopping en route to admire a neolithic monolith in a churchyard:
It was a glorious late-summer day, and we travelled on to Bempton cliffs…
…where we saw a tatty one-eyed jackdaw

and a plunging of gannets. Later we went to Scarborough and observed the moon over the water. After fish and chips on the prom from Winking Willy’s, A1 and A2 went back to Green Gables Hotel but Gez and Lucy went out on the razz. They were up for breakfast though.Thank you Lucy, thank you Gez and thank you Caroline for looking after our cats.
And back home, to end the day, a rainbow:

Critter of the Day: Volucella zonaria

Oh no, not another bee photo, even if it’s an exceedingly large and beautiful one. But it isn’t a bee; it’s a hornet mimic hoverfly, the largest of its kind in Europe and quite rare in these parts. Fun fact: it lays its eggs in wasps’ nests and the wasps look after its children. Fun fact 2: it’s also found in Battersea Park Nature Area (see below).
A2 is reading Eden Falls by Ajay Chowdhury (thank you A1); another Indian novel relocated to America, set in the near future and featuring an alien artefact pursued by several different security services and a techlord called Markus Noel.

Feed Me!

Here’s Ganny, crying for his supper.
A1 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which took ages for the plot to get going but the journey was highly amusing and entertaining. It’s about the somewhat farcical setting up of 1951’s Festival of Britain, part of which was a funfair in Battersea Park. This evoked childhood memories, as I was taken there in the mid 1960s and had three rides on the Rotor (mentioned in the book) until I was sick.
A2 is reading Agrippa by Robert Harris; ancient Roman war and politics, carried on in most brutal terms, so not unlike today.

On the Rails

Today we had new handrails fitted on our garden steps which makes getting up and down them one hell of a lot easier.

The acetone smell of the paint turned out to be very attractive to insects (pheromones probably). Here’s a jewel-like rosemary beetle revelling in the perfume, its antennae vibrating with excitement.A2 is rereading The Predicament by William Boyd.

Critter of the Day: Harvestperson

Oh no I can’t think of anything to say about this leggy creature of autumn, except that its diet of squashed slugs, bird droppings and jam seems more healthy than that of its lookalike the pholcus which just eats other spiders, the bastard.
A1 is reading Body of Lies* by Jo Callaghan, the conclusion of JC’s trilogy of crime novels about an AI detective. Somewhat melodramatic and polemical, and unfortunately the plot was in service of the polemic, rather than the other way round.
A2 is reading The Clues in the Fjord* by Satu Ramo.

Ghost of a Pigeon

An unlucky bird must have flown full tilt into our window today. There was no corpse on the ground below so it must have flapped away with an aching head leaving a print of itself on the rain-soaked glass and a feather where its beak should be. Here’s a brief video:

Later: a pile of feathers at the bottom of the garden provides a clue. Most likely the pigeon rammed the window when fleeing in terror from a sparrowhawk but the bird of prey caught up with it and now it is probably a ghost indeed. How sad.A1 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw. A2 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee.

Web Surfing

A very warm and humid day (31.9°C) to start the heatwave, so we opened the windows in the bedroom. It was gusty, and down came a very impressive cobweb.
Here’s the Met Office forecast for the next couple of days. It’s not often we get red temperatures (max over 25°C) at midnight, and it looks like tonight might be tropical — which is when the temperature stays above 20°C.

Gold at the End of the Rainbow

Woke up this morning, sun shining through the rain. Looked for the rainbow and instead saw, through the rain-blurred glass, what seemed to be a giant black and yellow bee sitting on a cornflower. Got a better look; it was a goldfinch eating the cornflower seeds. The rainbow arrived later. Here it is:
Meanwhile A1 is reading The Third Nero* by Lindsey Davis.

For Fox Sake

A bold fox crossing next door’s garden on its way to meet another fox lurking in the undergrowth in our garden.
A1 is reading Desperate Undertaking* by Lindsey Davies, in which a series of elaborately staged theatrical murders in Ancient Rome are investigated by a well-drawn heroine. Entertainingly written and light-heartedly gruesome, LD’s Rome bears more than a passing resemblance† to Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork (by no means a bad thing), with its eccentric inhabitants and somewhat cynical approach to policing. A fun read.
A2 is reading Ghost-Eye* by Amitav Ghosh, an engrossing saga combining reincarnation, psychic powers and environmentalism.

† It turns out LD is a big fan of TP, and cheerfully acknowledges “tribute plagiarism”.

Critter of the Day: House Sparrow

Passer domesticus, a very common but also extremely endangered bird. We’ve never photographed one before.
March was more or less average on the sun, rain and temperature fronts, but it was frequently unpleasantly windy. In like a lion and out like a lion.
A2 is reading The State of the Art by Iain M Banks.

Critter of the Day: Tit

A little bird sitting on the weather station.
A1 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass. A2 is reading Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I don’t generally like reframings of well-known works of literature but Atwood’s reprise of The Tempest as an avant-garde production in a prison with the producer hell-bent on revenge was a joy and an education.

Fly Me to the Moon

Our last post was about dinner at the ivy and tonight a boy called Ivy joined us for our family dinner but nobody thought to take a picture. Instead here are a couple of shots from A1’s Dwarf Mini telescope: some iridescent starlings and the crescent moon.

The menu for tonight was spag bol followed by nectarine cake and the GSQ at which we scored 10.5.

Dwarf Mini first light

A new toy! The Dwarf Mini is an ultra-portable smart telescope designed for deep-sky astronomical imaging. Controlled from a smartphone (in our case a Pixel 6a), it can track objects, take multiple exposures and automatically stack them to increase the image quality.

This hasn’t been a good time for astronomy here — we’ve had unrelenting gloom, rain and cloud cover for the last couple of months. But today, Valentine’s Day, the sky finally cleared enough to try the device out. The picture above is the sun, showing three groups of small sunspots. It’s a stack of 20 shots each exposed for 1/200s. The tracking was spot-on, with no need for special mounts or alignment — the device was indoors looking through an open window. Here’s a screenshot from the phone before it was taken (note the very useful inset wide-field picture):

At about 1:30am this morning the sky started to clear with some gaps in the clouds. I took a test sequence of a random part of the sky, centred on the star HIP80364. The Dwarf Mini took 21 15-second shots , of which 16 were usable — the device detected occasional cloud cover and discarded them. Again the tracking was perfect, with no discernable trails or elongation of the stars (click for full size):

 That’s a rather boring image, but given clearer weather we can hopefully do better. Oh, and it’s also good for wildlife:
A2 is reading Signals of Distress by Jim Crace.