Signs of spring: the first chaffinch song

Feb13

I love the markers of the year’s advance, a series of firsts leading to full-blown spring and glorious summer. One of the earliest markers that spring has truly arrived is when our pond starts roiling with mating frogs. That happened two weekends ago. Today I heard another marker: the first spring song of the chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs).

Male chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs). Photo by Gidzy.

We have chaffinches here year-round, but it is only in the spring that they sing this glorious descending song. I associate it with walks in the beech woods with the acid-green leaves bursting out of their buds. It’s not the most exciting of bird songs, but it is one of the most redolent ones for me. It means the sun is on its way back to us.

Gravitational waves – wooo!

Feb11

Congratulations to the scientists at LIGO who just now have announced they have detected gravitational waves, from the merging of a pair of black holes. This is the first time we have had the evidence of what up to now was theorised but not observed. A huge day for science. And Albert was right!

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2016

Jan31

Every year, on the last weekend in January, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) asks the British public to take part in the largest wildlife survey in the world: The Big Garden Birdwatch. We are asked to sit and watch our gardens for an hour, and to count what species and numbers of birds we see during that time. The results help the scientists at the RSPB to get an idea of the health of our bird populations.

Chap and I do this every year. Normally we do it at the same time, with one of us watching the front of the cottage (where our small garden is) and the other watching our tiny back yard. This year we’re doing it slightly differently: I did my stint yesterday, and Chap is doing his today as I type.

Our kitchen has a window that looks out over the back yard. There is a bird feeder with sunflower seeds hanging about a metre from the window, and we have a ‘borrowed landscape’ of our neighbours’ garden, with its shrubs and trees and fat balls in a feeder. I have to admit that I probably slightly skewed the results yesterday: we were sitting at the kitchen table when Chap glanced up and saw a goldcrest (Regulus regulus), creeping about and poking for bugs among the white mossy froth of the woolly aphids that live on the old apple tree. We haven’t seen a goldcrest in the garden for years. At that point I said ‘I’m starting the Bird Watch right now’.

Female goldcrest (Regulus Regulus). Photo by Missy Osborn.

It’s always a very zen time, just taking an hour to do nothing other than watch the wildlife around us. I watched two robins (Erithacus rubecula) having a noisy territorial dispute, with lots of chest puffing and chasing each other, and the occasional physical spat. They were so wrapped up in their fighting that they didn’t notice the third robin who crept in and had a good feed while they were scrapping.

Robin (Erithracus rubecula). Photo by Ramin Nakisa.

A pair of blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) visited the sunflower feeder too, separately, but I hope they are a breeding pair.

Male blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla). Photo by Spacebirdy.

Female blackcap. Photo by Stefan Berndtsson.

Female blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla). Photo by Stefan Berndtsson.

The fat ball feeder attracted a gang of noisy house sparrows (Passer domesticus),

Male house sparrow (Passer domesticus). Photo by Lip Kee Yap.

whereas the sunflower seed feeder was preferred by the even bigger gangs of goldfinches (Carduelis carduelis) – our most common garden bird here.

Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis). Photo by Ómar Runólfsson.

Last year’s results are impressive: over half a million people took part, counting a total of 8,546,845 birds in total.

There is still time to take part: the survey runs til midnight.

RSPB website

Sunday stroll: Portland Bill

Jan24

Today we went for a walk at Portland Bill, the most southerly point on the Isle of Portland. The Isle of Portland is a strange place, hanging off the bottom of Chesil Beach like a stony teardrop. The island is an outcrop of Jurassic limestone which has been valued as a building stone for centuries. If you know the Tower of London: that’s Portland Stone. And St Paul’s Cathedral. And Buckingham Palace. And the United Nations headquarters building in New York City. And the Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand. I could go on …

The Isle of Portland seen from Ringstead Bay on a sunny summer's day. To the right of the photo is Weymouth.

The Isle of Portland seen from Ringstead Bay on a sunny summer’s day in 2012. To the right of the photo is Wyke Regis, near Weymouth. Chesil Beach – a narrow spit of land, or tombolo – joins the two.

Quarrying has created a weird and atmospheric landscape on the island, with worked-out quarries and others that are still in use, and piles of discarded, sub-standard stone and workings piled in heaps and dumped over the edges of the high cliffs.

At the southerly end of the island is Portland Bill, with its two lighthouses to warn ships of the rocks and the deadly currents – the Race – where the water of the English Channel churns around the tip of the island in a furious boiling wash of water. Pulpit Rock is all that remains of a stone arch that was cut away by quarrymen.

Portland Bill lighthouse, and the other lighthouse (once the home of Marie Stopes) visible in the mid distance.

The Trinity House Obelisk, a daymarker to warn shipping off the coast during the day. All the land in the foreground is made ground, waste dumped by the quarrymen in centuries past.

Pulpit Rock.

It was a mild and windy day, and we scrambled down to a sea ledge to have a look at the stone and the seascape better.

Fossiliferous limestone exposed on the ledge by Pulpit Rock.

Dumped rejected stone near Pulpit Rock. The black dot on the water is a cormorant - we watched it repeatedly dive for food.

Dumped, rejected stone on a waste heap near Pulpit Rock. The black dot on the water is a cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) – we watched it repeatedly dive for food.

Earlier in the day we had been in Weymouth looking for jewellery goodies for my Etsy shop, and met this fellow in the car park:

Herring gull on the bonnet of our car in Weymouth.

Herring gull (Larus argentatus) on the bonnet of our car in Weymouth.

A pied male blackbird

Jan17

Today we saw a very unusual bird – a male blackbird (Turdus merula) with lots of white on his body, giving him a beautiful pied appearance.

The photos aren’t very good because I had my not-very-sophisticated camera on zoom and was photographing through a window.

This is what a male blackbird should look like:

Male blackbird. Photo by Sannse.

I’m hoping our pied visitor will come back and that we can get some better photos of him.

January 2018 UPDATE: We have another pied male blackbird.

Tuesday stroll: Glastonbury Tor

Dec29

Today we went for a walk up Glastonbury Tor: it seemed like half of Somerset had the same idea as it was such a beautifully sunny day compared to the mostly soggy grey ones we’ve been having recently. (Click on all photos to embiggen/bigify/largeificate).

Glastonbury Tor in the distance with the ruins of the church of St Michael’s Church on top, the tor rising prominently out of the Somerset Levels that surround it.

Glastonbury Tor is a small, isolated hill which stands out from the flat expanse of the Somerset Levels around it. It is formed from layers dating from the Jurassic period: the tor itself is Bridport Sandstone, overlying Blue Lias and clay. Only the tower of the church of St Michael that formerly stood there now remains. This dates from the 14th century. Local lore says that Glastonbury Tor is the Isle of Avalon of legend, and is reputedly the burial place of King Arthur.

The tower of the Church of St Michael on top of Glastonbury Tor.

South-west face of the tower.

South-east face of the tower.

Lovely graffiti on the tower by J H Burgess, who visited on 21 May 1864, and revisited in 1869 and 1874.

Panorama from the tor, looking from the north-east (in the first photo) clockwise round to the south-west (sixth photo). The village at the foot of the hill in the middle distance in the second photo is Pilton, and nearby is Worthy Farm, of the famed Glastonbury Festival.

On the top of the hill is a lovely engraved plaque showing directions and distances to other notable places and features in the area.

The tor cast a wonderful shadow over the surrounding lower land (view looking north).

The low-lying Somerset Levels are very prone to flooding and drainage is a very important part of the land management there, with many straight drainage ditches (rhynes, pronounced reens) cutting across the landscape.

Waterlogged fields after the heavy rains of the past few weeks.

The countryside is looking unnaturally green for the time of year, a result of the very mild and wet weather we have been having. We’ve barely had a frost this winter, let alone a prolonged cold spell: compare with photos I took on 16 January 2015 on a walk in Wiltshire, almost exactly a year ago.

Fascination with fasciation

Dec21

Every now and then in our garden, we get a flower that has ‘gone wrong’. Sometimes it has way more petals than it should, or the stem is thickened or flattened; it doesn’t look right.

This snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) should have one flower per stem. This one growing in our garden had four, and you can see the flattened stem quite clearly:

Snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) with fasciation.

Snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) with fasciation. The flattened stem is clearly visible.

We’ve also had snakeshead fritillaries with double or more the number of petals they should have.

What has happened is a condition called fasciation. The causes aren’t clear – they may be a combination of genetic, hormonal, environmental, fungal, bacterial, and viral factors. According to Wikipedia

is a relatively rare condition of abnormal growth in vascular plants in which the apical meristem (growing tip), which normally is concentrated around a single point and produces approximately cylindrical tissue, instead becomes elongated perpendicularly to the direction of growth, thus, producing flattened, ribbon-like, crested, or elaborately contorted tissue.

The plants in our garden in which we see the condition the most are euphorbias and fritillaries. We’ve also had our white foxgloves affected by it more than once. It doesn’t happen every year – probably every three or four years – but it’s so noticeable when it does happen, and as I like curiosities and oddities, I’m very happy to see it.

A great space day

Dec15

So excited this morning to watch live the launch of the Soyuz rocket, Soyuz TMA-19M, carrying three astronauts, including the UK’s Tim Peake, to the International Space Station. In a few hours, Tim will become the first British astronaut to serve on the ISS.

Soyuz TMA-19M taking off, 15 December 2015. Photo by Reuters.

The launch was covered by the BBC’s Stargazing Live, a 45 minute programme hosted by Professor Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain. They were covering the event from the Science Museum in London, with ISS stalwart Commander Chris Hadfield joining them to talk them through the technicalities, and with live coverage from Kazakhstan.

I hadn’t realised how historic the Baikonur Cosmodrome is: it was from this launch pad that the first Sputnik – the first ever object to orbit the earth – was sent up in October 1957, and a few years later the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova.

Lift off!

The launch was exciting – nailbiting, as these events always are, but all went well, and Tim even had time to do a few thumbs ups to the on-board camera while suffering from the g-forces of the launch.

Thumbs up from Tim. Earth and space out of the window. What a view.

There’s another Stargazing Live at 7.00 this evening on BBC2 which will cover the docking and Tim’s entry in to the space station, along with Russian Yuri Malenchenko and American Tim Kopra. Can’t wait – I love a good space day!

Stargazing Live launch programme on the BBC iplayer

The official website dedicated to Tim’s mission

Tim Peake’s twitter feed

Thank you, tree

Dec4

This is a beautiful Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) that grew in the garden of my older sister and her husband.

Scot’s pine (Pinus sylvestris).

It had had quite a few boughs cut off over the years, and I always thought it looked like it could be from a Japanese or Chinese painting, with its beautiful shape.

Sadly, they had to have it cut down a few years after I took this photo, as it was diseased. As pine is a very resiny wood, and they live in a thatched cottage, the terms of their home insurance don’t allow them to burn pine, and so … we have been given lots of the wood from the tree, which we are gradually burning in our wood-burning stove. So thank you, tree. (And thank you R, for chopping up all the wood!)

The song thrush sings again

Nov12

One of the joys of the yearly round is hearing the song thrush (Turdus philomelos) resume its gorgeous song in late autumn.

Song thrush (Turdus philomelos). Photo by Pavrabec.

Thrushes sing gloriously throughout the summer until about July. And then they stop. I have never noticed the exact date when they stop singing. It’s always easier to notice when something starts – the first swallows appear, or the first brimstones, or the first crickets chirr – but it’s always harder to pin down when something ceases. Usually, it’s a case of thinking, ‘Hmm, I don’t remember hearing the thrush for a few days.’ And then you realise it’s stopped singing. I don’t know enough about the life cycle of the thrush to know why this cessation of song should be, but I imagine it’s something to do with singing for a mate and establishing and maintaining territory. Once the breeding season is over I guess this becomes unnecessary. And so the song stops.

But hurrah! Yesterday, Remembrance Day, as I was walking up to the post office in the afternoon, I heard the song for the first time. Like an old friend I’d missed, it was lovely to be reacquainted, and it lifted my heart, as it always does.

Inglenookery

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