There’s something alive in the chimney. Which is mildly creepy. I just hope to god it manages not to die up there. On the subject of which:
Q. What goes ‘shriek shriek bonk’?
A. A parakeet flying into a window pane.
Which I heard happen yesterday, but as there wasn’t a stunned parakeet lying outside the house afterwards I assume it managed to escape without too much more than a headache to show for it.
The parakeets only reached this part of London about three years ago, but now we have flocks of them every day; there are often seven or eight on the feeders and more in the surrounding trees. They’re attractive and full of character, but as ever with foreign species you worry about their impact on the native birds; they must be competing for nest-sites if nothing else.
I was having a go at photographing the juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes to the birdfeeder, but it’s kind of tricky. My success rate when digiscoping is never that high at the best of times; and as you can see, it’s not temperamentally inclined to stay still:
Still, the motion blur can be a fun effect:
And it makes it all the more gratifying when one of the pictures comes out just right.
I thought these unfurling cycad fronds in my mother’s garden were rather remarkable:
The cycads are an ancient family of plants, more recent than ferns but predating conifers and much, much older than flowering plants, so there’s a certain fittingness in the fact that a cycad at Kew Gardens is thought to be the oldest pot plant in the world. Apparently other botanical gardens make the same claim, but in all cases the plant is a cycad.
In the book The Island of the Colourblind, Oliver Sacks wrote about a couple of neurological disorders concentrated in Pacific island communities. The first half of the book deals with a form of congenital colour-blindness; the second dealt with lytico-bodig, a neuro-degenerative disease found on Guam which is similar to Parkinson’s or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). One of the major hypotheses for the cause of lytico-bodig was toxins from the local cycads, the fruits of which which were used as a source of starch.
In that book the cause of lytico-bodig is left unresolved; the cycad theory was undermined by the fact that the fruit was carefully processed before eating because the locals knew it was poisonous raw, and tests on the cycad flour revealed very very low levels of remaining toxins. But I learn from Wikipedia that an intriguing theory has since emerged to explain it: that the local fruit bats fed on the cycads, and very high levels of toxin built up in their tissues; it was eating the bats that provided a large enough dose of neurotoxin to cause lytico-bodig. You can read the details here.
I heard an owl last night, for the first time in years. I think there are quite a few tawny owls in London—they’re a basically woodland species and fairly well suited to a suburban mix of woodland, park and gardens. A few years ago I used to hear them quite regularly here, but as I say this is the first for a long time. I guess it’s probably a young bird dispersing from its parents’ territory.
Tawny Owl, Sparham Pools (Norfolk), 24-May-07, originally uploaded by Dave Appleton.
There’s something incredibly atmospheric about hearing animal calls at night. It’s hard not to hear the quavering calls as somehow mournful, although presumably the owls aren’t actually permanently depressed. It makes a change from foxes; we’ve got a lot of young foxes around at the moment (one wandered into the house the other day) and they make a complete racket.
From Love’s Labour’s Lost:
WHEN icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.When all around the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl—
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
Most of Shakespeare’s owls are referred to as screeching or shrieking; indeed he sometimes calls them ‘screech-owl’. Those are probably barn owls. But ‘tu-whit tu-whoo’ is the call of the tawny owl. In fact it’s the call of a pair of tawny owls; the female does the ‘tu-whit’ followed immediately by the male saying ‘tu-whoo’. That wasn’t what I heard last night, though; mine was saying ‘hoo… hu-hu-hu-hoo’. So it was just a male owl on its own.
And on an unexpectedly sinister note; according to Wikipedia “This species probably injures more people than any other European bird. It is fearless in defence of its nest and young, and strikes for the intruder’s face with its sharp talons. Since its flight is silent, at night in particular it may not be detected until too late.”
It just occurred to me a couple of days ago that since my digital camera has a video mode, I could try digiscoping some video. I thought it came out fairly well, considering. I just hold the camera up to the telescope, so it’s a bit wobbly, and the audio is dominated by aeroplane noise, and the YouTube conversion hasn’t improved it, but I’ll certainly consider doing it again next time I’m doing proper birding. This is a greenfinch, btw.
I wish I’d thought of it when I was in Crete, when there was a Little Crake walking backwards and forwards past the same spot over and over again but because of the difficulty of timing the shot, I mainly got lots of pictures like this:
And while I’m on garden wildlife, look what was in the basement light well. His price for being rescued was having his photograph taken with flash. There are lots of frogs and newts, but it’s a very long time since I’ve seen a toad here.
