36.2055 years in science communication
You wait around all summer, waiting for a grey heron (Ardea cinerea) and then as the leaves start falling three come along all at once, cavorting and basking in the autumnal sunshine. They took flight when they saw me and the dog, but landed on the other side of the bridge, then began whirling back and forth across the road and landing within 15 metres for me to photograph them. Not sure whether that one in the upper photo was trying to get a better look at my lens or what…
At the time of writing, the UK’s Environment Agency is busy clearing reeds from the Cottenham Lode to allow the drain to do its job properly in the winter. The reed warblers, reed buntings, whitethroats, corn buntings, meadow pipits, linnets, yellowhammers, and others that spent the summer along the Lode and in the fields and hedgerows close to it all seem quiet or to have moved on. The warblers migrating to warmer climes, the buntings, pipits, and linnets maybe just hiding or perhaps having relocated away from close to the watercourse to elsewhere in the surrounding countryside.
However, I did spot one straggler. The UK’s smallest and most common native bird, the Wren. It was flitting in and out of the reeds and almost playing at reed warbler earlier today possibly taking its last chance to snatch at insects and spiders living among the water plants before that EA dredger scrapes them out of the water and dumps them on the bank of the flood defences.
Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) – the name Wren comes from a German word of unknown origin. In old High German the bird is also known as a kuningilin meaning kinglet. The troglodytes of its scientific name comes from the Greek meaning something that dives into a (mouse) hole (or in a related sense a “cave dweller”). The doubling of the word makes it a tautonym, which I’ve mentioned before means this species is the “type” of the family.
Having stalked this particular specimen for a few minutes on a drizzly, lunchtime dog walk, I eventually got a decent snap of it clinging to a reed stump (see above) and also caught it as it took flight (below). I should add that this is probably the same specimen I photographed on this exact patch of reeds at the beginning of the year.
There are lots of programs out there that purport to clean up your computer, removing temporary files, logs, installation residues and the like. Among the best was one that goes by the name of CCleaner. It’s been a useful tool over the years and I used to use it a lot. But, a few years ago I switched to Moo0 Disk Cleaner, which basically does the same job, freeing up hundreds of megabytes, if not a gigabyte or two of space on your PC with a click or two.
Nevertheless, CCleaner probably remains the more well known of the pair. But, I just heard that CCleaner was targeted by hackers and a lot of people who downloaded updates during August and September may well find that their machines were infected with malware. That said, it seems the attack payload was targeted at compromising computers on big company networks, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and others. Individual home and small business users were probably at less risk.
This does highlight the risk you take when downloading software and keeping it up to date. Even if you have antivirus software running and scan all your downloads, if a program carries out an auto-update when a new version is online and that new version has been compromised, there’s a chance that your antivirus software will not have been updated in the interim and your PC could be infected. Hashtag: #ZeroDayAttack.
Piriform the company that distributes CCleaner quickly released a clean update and blocked the hackers and their infected servers. It was only the 32-bit version that was attacked and most users were probably on the 64-bit . Nevertheless, I suspect Piriform is still on red alert.
My recommendation: switch to Moo0 Cleaner. It’s far less well known and perhaps less of a target than the popular CCleaner.
The image above shows Moo0’s report after I’d already done a full clean and used the PC for a few minutes afterwards. Generally, there will be several hundred megabytes that accumulate on your disk over the course of a week’s use. To be honest, I don’t really need to clear a gigabyte of space each week as I have a 250GB SSD for OS and programs and a 1 TB hard disk for data on this PC and neither is even half full at the moment. Your mileage may vary.
Incidentally, do not let any computer cleaner “clean” your registry or your pre-fetch folders, that way is the road to ruin and a likely need to reinstall your entire operating system and programs at some point in the near future. Cleaners are best used to simply run a quick scrub of temporary/temp files, logs, windows update residues, browser caches, the recycle bin, and program installation left-behinds.
The universe’s first-ever 360-degree video filmed in open space on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS). The video shows Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryazansky and Fyodor Yurchikhin launching satellites and generally spacewalking…
I talked about oak apples at the end of the May, on Oak Apple Day by no coincidence, as it happens. But there are other kinds of galls. Here’s a mossy rose gall growing on a dog rose (Rosa canina) on the edge of local woodland.
As with oak apples, these growths (a mossy rose gall, rose bedeguar gall, Robin’s pincushion gall, or moss gall) are the result of a type of wasp, in this case the tiny Diplolepis rosae, laying its eggs (approximately 60 of them) in an unopened leaf axillary or terminal bud. There is a chemically induced distortion of the bud, which triggers the rose to generate what is essentially a protective mesh around the eggs and then the larvae which will help them survive the winter until they emerge in Spring.
Apparently, there were several herbal remedies that used dried and powdered mossy rose galls to “treat” colic and to act as a diuretic, The ash was even mixed with honey and rubbed into the scalp to supposedly prevent baldness.
The “Robin” of the name Robin’s pincushion refers to Robin Goodfellow an alternative name for Puck, the impish character of English folklore, also referred to as a hobgoblin and made famous as Puck, referred to as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin, appears as a vassal of the Fairy King Oberon in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
Back in June 2017, I spotted a pair of treecreepers (Certhia familiaris) creeping up a tree in the local, Rampton, woodland. I was too close to get a shot with the zoom lens and by the time I’d stepped back from the tree they’d crept around the back and out of sight, flying off when I took another step towards them. I framed the blurry tail of one of the pair.
Ever since, I walk through the same patch of woodland quietly in the hope that they’re there again, they never are. But, I did see another specimen on the edge of the wood close to the Cottenham Lode. Again, too close for the lens to focus, unfortunately. I’ve seen and photographed the unrelated nuthatch (Sitta europaea) which also creeps up tree trunks and along branches. Treecreepers only creep upwards though.
At last, 3rd October 2017, listening and spotting long-tailed tits in Rampton Spinney (again), I hear some high-pitched warbling among the whistles and chatter of the longtails. Look up at the nearest ash tree and there’s a treecreeper heading up to the canopy. Quick snap of it and then another lands. So, at long last, a decent shot or two of this active and resident British bird, which apparently tags along with tits in autumn and winter. Not to be confused with the short-toed treecreeper (Certhia brachydactyla), which lives in the Channel Islands (presumably for tax purposes)
Earlier in 2017, I wrote an acoustic rock song about homelessness. Specifically, it was about the streets of Cambridge and was a nod to the charity Jimmy’s Cambridge (donate now) for which we, as The TyrannoChorus, are choir in residence this year and raising funds and awareness for the night shelter.
Anyway, the song Bridges (Crossed and Burned) is online – SoundCloud and BandCamp, but I wanted to try and transcribe the melody and then arrange some harmony parts (SATB) for the choir. Not my strong point, to be honest, and I was hoping to find a shortcut. If I could record me singing the melody then perhaps I could use a file converter to turn the raw sound file into MIDI and so automate the first step and get the tune down as a score that I could then add harmonies to and flag with the guitar chords over which our pianist might ad lib the accompaniment. Too ambitious?
Well, I tried a wav to midi converter…and the results were interesting, to say the least. To my ear the result bears no resemblance to the tune I sang and is more akin to some kind of early twentieth century, dawn of jazz, classical avant garde crossover…have a listen. It’s quite entertaining:
And, here’s what the resulting MIDI file displayed as a score in my MIDI editor looks like:
I reckon if we are going to get to sing this before the end of the year, I somehow have to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise persuade our pianist Tim to take on arranging it…but that incurs the bigger assumption that our choir leader, Siobhan, likes the song and wants us to sing it in the first place…
Have you ever seen a grey feathery, pigeon-shaped outline on a window? It’s usually left when a bird has somehow not seen the glass and attempted to fly through. If you’re in the room when it happens it can make a surprisingly loud thud but pigeons seem to crash land after the collision, look very stunned, ruffle their feathers and move on, But, what exactly is that grey powder that they leave behind on your window? It’s known as powder down.
Down feathers are fine feathers found under the tougher exterior feathers. Chicks usually have only down feathers until they grow their adult feathers. Powder down, or pulviplumes, is somewhat different and occurs in a few unrelated groups of birds – pigeons, tinamous, herons, and parrots, for instance. In some species, the tips of the pulviplume barbules break up into a fine powdery form of keratin, which forms a “feather dust” among the feathers. In others, powder grains are generated by cells that surround the barbules of growing feathers.
Powder down is a known allergen and is one of the causes of “bird fancier’s lung” and related conditions in people who keep or work with birds, including pigeons, parakeets, cockatiels, budgerigars, parrots, and turtle doves.
The above picture shows the imprint left by a woodpigeon that had slammed into my office window recently, cropped from the photo is the big smudge of powder down left by its body. You might also like to note that our window cleaner has not visited for quite some time.
Several other species produce powder down too, including notoriously, parrots, although you’re less likely to have a Mealy Amazon slam into a back bedroom window in East Anglia than a Wood Pigeon.
Today, we took our second trip of the year to WWT Welney. I checked what was “showing” before we set off. Common, or Eurasian, cranes (Grus grus) apparently, more than thirty of them. We saw a few a long way off from the main hide on arrival and then a couple of small flocks in flight later in the day from different vantage points on site.
Of the other birds sighted by others today, we saw: Goldfinch, Linnet, Meadow Pipit, Pied Wagtail, Tree Ssparrow, Marsh Harrier, Kestrel Greenshank, Black-tailed Godwit, Lapwing, Chiffchaff, Tufted Duck, Pochard, Wigeon, Teal, Mallard, Greylag Goose, Canada Goose, Cormorant Grey Heron, and possibly Curlew Sandpiper (but it may well have been merely a Dunlin, in fact, it almost certainly was).
In English we know Aegithalos caudatus as the long-tailed tit. It’s a tit-type passerine bird with a long tail. So much, so obvious. In Germany it’s Die Schwanzmeise, which literally translates as the “tail chick”…which perhaps hints at why Americans call tits chickadees and indeed in French, the long-tailed tit is known as la mésange à longue queue, the long tail chickadee.
However, A caudatus is not a member of the Poecile genus like the Carolina chickadee, Black-capped chickadee, Mountain chickadee, etc. In North America many of the tit-like birds are chickadees, but they do have some of the same Poecile species as we have in the UK: Marsh tit and Willow tit, for instance. Wikipedia suggests that the term chickadee derives from the call made by the birds “chick-a-dee-dee-dee”. But that sounds like a reverse engineered explanation to me, better ask Mr Fields.
Bush tits, babblers and long-tailed tits…