I’ve got a new camera, so I thought I’d celebrate it in the approved internet fashion: catblogging. You can click through to Flickr to see larger versions.
This is Boris:
And this is Posy, who is a difficult cat to photograph, because she’s so black and shiny:
I’ve just started a book called ‘Irrationality’, about the irrational behaviour of human beings. So far, much of the general drift has been fairly familiar, but no matter how many times you get told about the untrustworthy tendencies of the human mind, the specific experiments are still startling. Three that happened to jump out at me:
‘In one study, a telephone call was made to a nurse by someone claiming to be a doctor in the hospital whom she had never met. he told her to give a patient a 20 mg dose of a drug called Aspoten (in reality a placebo), adding that she must give it immediately because he wanted the drug to take effect before he saw the patient, when he came to the ward. He added that he would sign the prescription then. Despite the fact that he had ordered twice the maximum dose set out on the label and that there was a rule that no one should administer a drug before the doctor had signed the prescription, 95 per cent of nurses approached complied.’
‘Subjects were encouraged to give (sham) electric shocks to a stooge. When they were dressed like nurses they became less aggressive than those normally dressed, while wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits made them very much more aggressive.’
‘In a simple experiment, four short lines were each labelled ‘A’ and four slightly longer ones ‘B’. People saw a bigger difference in the average length of the two sets of lines when they were labelled in this way than when no labels were attached.’
With National Moth Night and the Perseids, it should have been a good weekend for night-time stuff.
I didn’t have a lot of luck on either front. Really of course you need a moth trap to count moths effectively. I had a go at treacling—spreading a mix of treacle, brown sugar and rum on tree trunks to attract the moths—but nothing came. In the end my total count was three species; Jersey Tiger, seen earlier in the day, a Marbled Beauty attracted to the porch light, and a Double-striped Pug which came into my bedroom. Still, Jersey Tiger was one of the target species for NMN this year, so that’s good.
One thing becomes apparent walking around the garden at night; lots and lots of slugs.
And here’s some hot slug-on-slug action.
I didn’t try very hard with the meteorites, I must admit. And didn’t see any. But little white flashes of light appearing in the sky because the orbit of our planet is rolling through the dust trail of a long-gone comet seems like a good enough reason to post this:
The moth in this picture isn’t particularly exciting, it’s just a rather scruffy Pyrausta aurata, sometimes called the mint moth. Mint is one of their foodplants, but so are its relatives like the oregano (or is that marjoram?) in the picture:
I didn’t get a picture of my exciting moth, which was a Jersey Tiger. Exciting not just because it’s a spectacular species, but because as far as I knew, in the UK it’s only confined to Devon. Which would make mine a rare vagrant. Anyway, a quick bit of Google reveals that a couple of years ago, the big news among the UK moth community was the discovery of a colony of Jersey Tigers in south London. No-one’s sure if they got here under their own steam or if someone accidentally introduced them; either way it makes my sighting slightly less remarkable. Still neat though.
I was reading in the garden today and heard a distinctive chirp: there was a female house sparrow on the bird feeder. Once, this would have been normal, but British house sparrow numbers have plummeted in the past few years; the sparrow population of London declined 75% between 1999 and 2004. It was the first one I’ve seen here for years.
No-one quite knows why they disappeared. Loss of nest sites because of changing roofing materials? Loss of hedging? Less waste ground? Inevitably some ‘bird lovers’ blame sparrowhawks and magpies, or cats or squirrels; equally inevitably some people have tried to blame it on mobile phone masts. It seems difficult to account for the suddenness and scale of the decline by any obvious change in the environment, and it’s tempting to suggest disease; but honestly we don’t know.
Food Fight!, originally uploaded by ScottCatskill.
There’s a particular poignancy because Londoners have long identified with the house sparrow as the ‘cockney sparra’. In Victorian London, when the air was murk and anything left in one place for too long was gradually covered in a layer of flaky soot, and city gardeners had to choose their flowers from species which could survive the pollution, there weren’t many birds found in the heart of the city. But the sparrows were there, nesting in the gutters and tiled roofs and any little nook in the brickwork which would offer them enough space to build a nest out of sweet papers and cigarette butts. The very character of them—drab, scruffy, gregarious, chirpy, impudent, noisy, tuneless, and given to squabbling and shagging in public—makes them seem like proper London birds.
Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings.
—from Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The idea that the house sparrow is a cockney bird is admittedly parochial. Sparrows are found nearly everywhere there are people. And they are only found where there are people; they have become so closely tied to human habitation that no-one knows quite what habitat the ancestral sparrows preferred, or what part of the world they lived in. I like to think that sparrows started hanging out around people at about the moment some Mesopotamian farmer built the first granary, and they’ve been with us ever since, hopping around our barns and farmyards, our parks, markets and pavement cafés; nesting in our thatch, under our tiles, and in our lamp-posts.
Little bandit,……, originally uploaded by Hans Viveen.
I also feel a certain kinship in the fact that house sparrows, like the other species that have hitched a ride with humanity—rats, pigeons, cockroaches—have been successful because, like us, they are generalists. They are adaptable. They may not be exquisitely adapted to efficiently exploit a particular evolutionary niche, but provide them with a new environment like a city, and they find a way to thrive while other species are left stuck in their evolutionary rut.
When the sparrows disappeared from this bit of London, I didn’t consciously notice them go. But when I’m staying somewhere that does have them—if I’m woken in the morning by their chirping, if they try to steal the crumbs from my morning croissant—there is a sense of order restored. Deep down, I feel that a house without sparrows is lacking something important. I know that people in the Americas and Australia, for whom the house sparrow is an invasive, non-native species, may not feel the same way. But to me, the sparrows are our companions, our familiars, our symbionts.
I just hope that today’s was the first of many.
Earlier in the season, most of the damselflies were blue ones; now they’re all blue-tailed:
This bit of south London is, slightly unexpectedly, a stronghold for the increasingly rare stag beetle. At this time of year you tend to see them flying overhead in the evening; but the weather has been so miserable that I haven’t really been outside much in the evenings. I did see one crawling across the pavement a couple of days ago, though. This, however, is not that species; it’s the more common lesser stag beetle, which is not nearly as big, and even the males don’t have antlers.
This is a hoverfly. Like most hoverflies, it’s a wasp mimic; they nearly all have black and yellow stripes, but they don’t sting. This is more spectacular than most, though; the large size and brownish colour are its attempt to look like a hornet. I think it does quite a good job, although looking at it closely like this it’s obviously a species of fly. We don’t actually have any hornets around here—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in the UK, although they do live here—so I don’t know how effective the mimicry is.
And here’s a holly blue. You can see the abdomen curled around on the ivy; presumably it’s laying eggs. It’s lives on the holly and the ivy, which is very Christmassy of it.
