The Shelduck Ordeal

More photos on Flickr!

I was amazed this morning on an excellent walk organised for members of the Bristol Ornithological Club [BOC] to the Gordano Valley. What caused my amazement was the sight of nine Shelduck in a field on Weston Moor, 2 or 3 kilometres from the sea coast which is their usual habitat. Well not so much the sight, as they can fly anywhere, but the tale we were told: They like nesting in the willow thickets near to one of the many rhynes (drainage ditches) in this area of relative safety for them. However once the ducklings are old enough and long before they can fly, they have to be led by their mothers from their nest sites, over several fields, over two roads and over a hill to reach the coast and they walk the whole way. Have a look at the map! There is a public footpath [the red dashed line] marked on the map from Weston Moor, it goes Northwestward across the B3124 road towards Walton Bay in the Severn Estuary, but most ducks of my acquaintance anyway, can't read maps or road signs!

Best Stories of Childhood -

I was discussing earlier with a friend our best remembered and loved childhood stories. In England I think I am right in saying that Antoine de St Exupery's "The Little Prince" is not as well known as it should be and I introduced to her "The Colour Kittens," a little tale by Margaret Wise Brown and ilustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen that in my family, entranced several generations of children.

I expect my brother and his family has the copy that was in our parents' house from the 1940's on. It is still in print but I am going to stick my neck out and "privately" publish it here because I like it and so does every child of three years old going on seventy that I know. The Colour (Mostly on Google as Color) Kittens is a timeless and educational story of Hush and Brush so listen!

“Once there were two colour kittens with green eyes, Brush and Hush. They liked to mix and make colours by splashing one colour into another. They had buckets and buckets and buckets and buckets of colour to splash around with. Out of these colours they would make all the colours in the world.
The buckets had the colours written on them, but of course the kittens couldn’t read.
They had to tell by the colours. ‘It is very easy,’ said Brush. ‘Red is red. Blue is blue.’ said Hush. But they had no green. ‘No green paint!’ said Brush and Hush. And they wanted green paint of course, because nearly every place they liked to go was green. Green as cats’ eyes. Green as grass. By streams of water. Green as glass. So they tried to make some green paint.
Brush mixed red paint and white paint together - and what did that make? It didn’t make green. But it made pink. Pink as pigs. Pink as toes. Pink as a rose. Or a baby’s nose.
Then Hush mixed yellow and red together, and it made orange. Orange as an orange tree. Orange as a bumblebee. Orange as the setting sun. Sinking slowly in the sea. The kittens were delighted, but it didn’t make green.
Then they mixed red and blue together - and what did that make? It didn’t make green. It made a deep dark purple. Purple as violets. Purple as prunes. Purple as shadows on late afternoons. Still no green!
And then…
O wonderful kittens! O Brush! O Hush! At last, almost by accident, the kittens poured a bucket of blue and a bucket of yellow together, and it came to pass that they made a green as green as grass. Green as green leaves on a tree. Green as islands in the sea.
The little kittens were so happy with all the colours they had made that they began to paint everything around them. They painted… Green leaves and red berries, and purple flowers and pink cherries. Red tables and yellow chairs, black trees with golden pears.
Then the kittens got so excited they knocked their buckets upside down and all the colours ran together.
Yellow, red, a little blue and a little black…and that made brown. Brown as a tugboat, brown as an old goat, brown as a beaver. BROWN. And in all that brown, the sun went down. It was evening and colours began to disappear in the warm dark night.
The kittens fell asleep in the warm dark night with all their colours out of sight and as they slept they dreamed their dream - A wonderful dream of a red rose tree that turned all white when you counted three…One…Two..Three. Of a purple land in a pale pink sea, where apples fell from a golden tree. And then a world of Easter eggs that danced about on little short legs. And they dreamed of a mouse, a little gray mouse that danced on a cheese that was big as a house. And a green cat danced with a little pink dog, till they all disappeared in a soft grey fog.
And suddenly Brush woke up and Hush woke up. It was morning. they crawled out of bed into a big bright world. The sky was wild with sunshine. The kittens were wild with purring and pouncing - Pounce Pounce Pounce. They got so pouncey they knocked over the buckets and all the colours ran out together. There were all the colours in the world and the colour kittens had made them.

Sing Ho for the colour of Brush. Sing Ho for the colour of Hush. Sing Ho for the colour of Brush and Hush. Sing Ho for the colour of colour.

Now hush!”

Language acquisition

The Yerkes National Primate Center in Atlanta GA has come up with some interesting but not very startling ideas about the acquisition of language in early humans from study of the behaviour of Bonobos and Chimps. This week’s New Scientist carries the full article.
Human spoken language they postulate, may have evolved from a complex and varied set of hand and arm gestures, not simply through improvements in the basic vocalisations made by primates.
Bonobos and chimps both split from the line that led to Homo sapiens about six million years ago, and they themselves parted about 2.5 million years ago. However, several lines of evidence suggest we are slightly closer to bonobos than we are to chimps. De Waal says that their work suggests bonobos are a more useful species for understanding the evolution of language. For one thing, they seem to have moved further from the common ancestor, at least in terms of the complexity of their communication, than have chimps.

May Day Walk to Work

Sadly there are no Bank Holidays for us here in Britain this week. Next Monday we do have though! Quite apart from the fact that my car is sick and is in the garage being fixed, it was a lovely day to walk to and from work today. I took my camera and have uploaded my shots to Flickr - please take a look! I am very lucky to have such a green and leafy route to take with only the busy Bristol Ring Road to cross on foot at a badly marked crossing point! The University campus grounds with ponds and streams are well worth a short detour. The walk takes me about half an hour and I really should do it more often!

My Photo of the Day

The Roman Bath in the city of Bath, just 8 miles away from Bristol. There is a new spa centre just outside this building, the Thermae Bath Spa which has cost millions of pounds to complete and is proving very popular. The natural spring that provides the water emerges at a hot 47 degrees Centigrade - [see link above] but I would not reccomend drinking too much of it!

St George's Day

Patron of many but little is known! Today April 23rd, is St Georges Day, the Patron Saint of England, but widely ignored by most of my fellow English. I suppose the majority have heard of him, “he killed the dragon, didn’t he,” but few know more than that and it is to some, a shame that a public holiday on this day is not celebrated.
In researching this little article I have found the excellent website of Woodlands Junior School of Tonbridge in Kent and I commend it to you dear reader! The Wikipedia article lists all the patronages of our Saint, but to raise an eyebrow or two here are a few of his many!
Scouts; butchers; farmers; Bulgaria, Greece, Germany; Genoa and Moscow; saddle makers and syphilis sufferers; archers and shepherds; horses, sheep and lepers.

Flightless Steamer Duck

My blog is now over one year old and in celebration of this here is my photo of a Flightless Steamer Duck (Tachyeres brachypterus) and her little family who were sitting in this pebble beach outside Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands enjoying the spring sunshine - Late November 2005

My Photo of the Day

Another remarkably warm day yesterday and so I took myself off for a walk not far from home. The Dower House in the background, originally a private house, then a hospital, is now converted to luxury flats. Between it and the camera the M32 Motorway runs in a cutting, left towards Bristol city centre.

Britain is in Bloom!

Magnolia and Daffodils

Britain is in Bloom! Mid April has to be the very best time of year to appreciate our countryside and colour. Any later than this and the trees, bushes and other plants have come into full matronly leaf, but now daffodils and primroses are still in flower, bright yellow forsythia bushes and many trees are in full blossom, most notably the large white or pink flowers on the magnolias in many gardens. In the fields, new spring lambs are playing, testing their young legs and their mothers’ patience and the dawn chorus from many small birds courting and defending their territories makes a welcome return to my ears.
Yesterday afternoon I drove from Bristol to Banbury which is a town a few miles north of Oxford. The route took me through some of southern England’s best small towns and villages with picturesque names like Adlestrop, Bourton on the Water, Stow on the Wold, the Rollrights, Upper and Lower Slaughter, Hook Norton, famous for its brewery and Slad, famous for having been the haunt of Laurie Lee who wrote Cider With Rosie.

The landscape away from the built-up areas is mixed farmland and scattered woodland, with rolling hills and small river valleys. Almost fully in flower are many fields of Oil-seed Rape – Canola, making whole hillsides of brilliant yellow. I am not usually allergic to flower pollen but Canola seems to make me sneeze and so for the next few weeks I will try to avoid it.
Any variation in my route would not have mattered with great views nearly all the way, and today I did just that for my return this morning. The only sad sight to report at this time of year is to see all the young badgers lying dead at the side of roads, I must have seen six at least. I understand that the young males are ejected by their parents and begin to roam farther afield and so, inevitably some get caught in the glare of vehicle headlights and are run over.

Good News for Easter!

At least today, Easter Monday there has been at least one good piece of environmental news. The Kazakhstan government has secured a multi-million dollar loan from the World Bank to help save the Aral Sea; a formerly huge inland sea that because of mismanagement in the days of Russian domination shrank to only a quarter of its former size during the last third of the 20th Century.

Many years ago, as a child I was encouraged by my mother in a general knowledge and memory game we called "categories". We would choose a subject, say animals, and make an alphabetical list, scoring a point for every entry not duplicated by another player. Thus Animals might start with Antelope and finish with Zebra; while Seas would start with Aral and finish with Zuider Zee, which ironically is another sea that has virtually disappeared, though that was deliberate, providing the Dutch with more land for agricultural expansion at the expense of a former fishing resource. [Jan de Hartog's 1951 story The Lost Sea, tells a wonderful tale of his own experiences as a ship's boy during the last days of this fishery before the creation of the polders.]

With the Aral Sea, the Zazakhs plan to build a new dam to hold back water in part of the nothern area and there are reports of improvements already.

Please see also the 2003 report with its dramatic images of the sea from space and the photo of a former fishing village now 150km from the sea, with nothing but a salty desert between.

BBC Antiques Road Show at Bristol

On Sunday I went to the Great Hall of the University of Bristol to join hundreds of other people with boxes and packages wanting to have valuations for their antique treasures from the experts of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. For many years, one of the early evening highlights of Sunday's TV has been this excellent programme. It is recorded months in advance of transmission and so whether or not I will be seen in one of the crowd scenes, I do not know.
Anyway! – I arrived early to join the queue of people in the road before the building opened at 9:30 am and shuffled slowly forward until, much later I took one of my treasured books to be seen by Clive Farahar the book expert. He was a bit scathing about the way it had been professionally rebound but generally liked it and valued it at £100, which was around what I thought. I then went to join another queue for the “Miscellaneous” experts to show them my 1860’s binocular brass microscope which I bought while I was still at school for what was to me then quite a lot of money - £18. It is housed in a fine mahogany case and is a good example of its type and made by W. Ladd of London. John Foster, the expert who saw me, liked it immediately and said that he wanted to get it filmed for the show and asked if I could wait until a suitable time could be found with the producers. To cut a long story short, it was not filmed as there were too many excellent antiques presented on the day for all to be included. He valued it at £1,200 - £1,800 which is a little more than I had expected. My other piece did not fare so well. An almost identical late 18th Century compass type microscope [see the bottom of the photograph], I had seen valued elsewhere in the thousands, he gave me a value of only £500 or so. Considering that the compass microscope had come to me in the box with the binocular microscope, I cannot complain at the total value being over one hundred times what I had paid, albeit over 40 years ago!
It was great listening to the experts, mostly familiar TV personalities in their own right, talking so knowledgeably to some of the other people there, sometimes with pleasing valuations, some not quite what the owners had hoped for. Also interesting were some of the quaint and curious items that were being brought into the hall. In front of me at one stage had been a 17th Century oak chair, well made to have lasted this long, but nevertheless very damaged and worm eaten. I wouldn’t have thought it could have been worth more than £50, but what do I know?! Another was a fine sword with an intricate handle made of Bristol Blue glass; that, they did film.

Much Improved!

[Click on the photos to enlarge them!]

When my brother and I sold our parents' cottage towards the end of 2005 we knew we had sold to people who had major plans for improvements, but perhaps more importantly were going to love it and make it into a magnificent home. This is certainly the case and I was shown around the almost fully finished house by the proud new owners this weekend. The south face of the long barn has picture windows taking in the wonderful view and above, a balcony juts out from the master bedroom. With a window open as spring goes on, they will be deafened in the early mornings by the dawn chorus of birdsong from the trees beyond the garden. The roof has been raised somewhat, I believe after some problems with planning permission from the council but the whole works so very well in the landscape. Click Here for more pictures from my excellent long weekend in the area!

PUZZLE PICTURE OF THE DAY

Any ideas what this is a photo of? - I will post the solution sometime next week if no one has got it!

My Photo of the Day

View from near Oban and a late evening ayrshire cow. June 2004

Pill, Pill, I love thee still

Today, in need of some fresh air I went to the village of Pill at the mouth of the River Avon for a walk and to take some photos. [Take a look please at all John's Pill photos] With the wind from the North, the air was certainly fresh and for about the first time this winter I felt the need of a pair of gloves. It was low tide and all the boats in the little creek harbour were stranded on the mud, which was gleaming in the sunshine. Pill was in centuries past, the home of the skilled river pilots who met larger ships, entering the River Avon from the sea. The river winds upstream for about 10 km from here to Bristol City Docks and with the second highest tidal range in the world and many shifting sand and mud banks, the entrance to Bristol by sea was always treacherous and needed a special local knowledge. Ships had to be towed upriver on the rising tide and safely moored before the ebb. At low tide ships had to rest on the river bed. The journey for a ship being towed from Pill to Bristol could take a week. Some ships anchored up at Pill and transferred their cargoes to small boats which, piloted by the famed Pill Hobblers were rowed and towed upstream to the port.
Pill has been made famous in Folk Song by the Wurzels: -
Chorus:
Pill, Pill, I love thee still
Even though I'm leaving
Pill, Pill, I love thee still
When the ferry boat starts heavin
When the rain down pours,
the thunder roars
The lightnin flashes bright
I'll be better by far in The Duke or The Star
Than on the Old Pill Ferry tonight.

Dominic, Shakespeare and Me

Yesterday I spent a very pleasant evening at Bristol University’s Wickham Theatre listening to a talk given by Dominic Dromgoole, the Director of The Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank. A full and appreciative audience heard Patrick give anecdotal and passionate thoughts on Shakespeare, his plays and how these fitted into Shakespeare’s own history, travels and family life. He referred often to his own walk of pilgrimage from Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon to the Globe Theatre which he wrote about in his best-selling book “Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life”.
Although Dominic is 20 years younger than me, I gave thought to the similarities and differences of our childhoods. My father was, in his prime, a Shakespearean actor of some repute; Dominic’s father Patrick was also a leading director and producer. Dominic remembered as a child having his father recite Shakespeare to him and his siblings before bedtime and being entranced by the words and the cadences, the beginning of Dominic’s love of drama. For me the experience was different, I did hear my father practice his lines, was taken occasionally to see the plays, but I cannot remember being deliberately recited to in that way. Often my father was away performing on stage in the evenings and so my brother and I saw little of him at bedtime.
But our house was full of books. Available to us were most of the major works of literature, plays and poetry among many other genres such as art, history and detective fiction for the lighter moments and train journeys. However I sadly admit that I was an avoider of literature for most of my school years. Perhaps I rebelled against the arts because I could not compete with two extremely well read parents or with a more studious younger brother. In the many years that have passed since my schooldays I have learned to appreciate all the branches of the arts with the possible exception of the opera (sorry opera!) and have in more recent years gone out of my way to improve a knowledge that was sadly lacking by the time I had reached my late teens. After the talk, I spent a few moments talking with Stephanie Cole OBE, one of the UK’s finest character actresses and who had known my father. She is now President of the Bristol University Theatre Collection the organisers of the talk, and she urged me to read Dominic’s book – I certainly will.

How much longer Mr Mugabe?

The chaotic rule of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe must surely be nearing its end?

Violence once again hits the news: Even public prayer is now a political offence in Zimbabwe. A rally called by church, opposition and civic groups to pray for an end to Zimbabwe's deepening political and economic crisis was thwarted by police riot squads, who shot and beat those taking part. Dozens of opposition figures were arrested, including Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democratic Change. Many were beaten and allegedly tortured in police custody; Mr Tsvangirai is reported to be in "bad shape" after passing out three times. Far from being ashamed of such police brutality, the Mugabe Government appears keen to publicise the torture: the beaten men were put on parade at the police station to intimidate Mr Mugabe's courageous opponents. [from The Times] There's lots more on the newswires.

That such a beautiful and potentially successful country has been brought to its knees by this despot is such a terrible shame.

My Photo of the DAY

I have been busy for the last few days with building a new wardrobe for my bedroom. All finished now with only a few pieces left over that I haven't found a use for despite the many sets of instuctions that came in the many boxes that were carted upstairs last Tuesday. I mean - what are the long plinth rails for? Yes I know they are MEANT to go around the top edge, but that means there is less access to whatever I need to put up there. Anyway apart from vacuuming the floor all is neater now. Sorry about the colour of the wall paint - it was the choice of the previous owner - not me! I'll get around to changing it one day!

No Surprise to me!

The headline in the New Scientist tells me that Stone Age men would not have been impressed by size zero women. I cannot think of any men from whatever age that would have been!
Polish archaeologists have found, preserved in ice, 30 flint female figurines dating back 15,000 years revealing that the preferred body shape for women was curvy with prominent buttocks.
While not I am sure that most modern men still prefer gigantic buttocks, I am not at all surprised that our ancestors appreciated curves!

My Antarctic Photo of the Day

Gentoo Penguins near a block of washed up Blue Ice, Neko Harbour December 2005

My Nose

I am reminded to post a short note to say that my nose, though still a bit sore, is getting there. I cannot as yet guarantee totally quiet nights - for me or anyone else in my vicinity. A favourite family book that as far as I know was looted by my father from somewhere in Germany in 1945, was a volume of Wilhelm Busch's poetry and cartoons. I could not understand the German words, but Busch's famous and pioneering cartoons left a lasting impression. I have found this apt cartoon on the internet to illustrate my nose, though mine was never in a bandage like this!

Breathing a sigh of relief

Three years ago, before I joined the Pearce Group, I had been rather unhappily working as a budget and resource planner for the aircraft manufacturing giant - Airbus. I had worked at the Technical Centre on Filton Airfield for over two years and though I enjoyed some aspects of the job, I found that management methods were overbearing to say the least. Today's news of thousands of European job losses comes as no surprise to me.
The massive plane, the A380 is assembled, as are all the Airbus fleet, at the Toulouse factory final assembly lines in France, from parts brought together from all the manufacturing plants in Germany, UK, France and Spain - a logistical nightmare in itself, but massive delays caused by problems with the aircraft electrical systems, and lack of firm sales has meant that a restucturing of the company has become inevitable. I am glad that I left when I did!

Fritallaries

Spring is Here
Photo taken Dartington, Devon, 2004

The Rocky Shores of England

Photo taken looking vertically down the cliff, North Devon, February 2004

Comet McNaught at Cape Town

Pictures sent on to me by a friend. An amazing view of Comet McNaught from Table Bay, taken last month.

In the bottom picture, the comet appears to be cascading down the slope of Lions Head (Table Mountain to the left) and in the top picture, Venus can just be seen to the left of the crescent moon, just above the horizon on the right!