36.2055 years in science communication
I’ve mentioned the comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album) previously on Sciencebase, but at the time didn’t have a photo of the underwing marking which gives it its name. Well, I do now, after a visit to RSPB Ouse Fen Reserve (spotted it resting on a bush just as I was heading back to the car park). You can see the white “comma” very easily, there’s one on each wing. Also, note the curled up proboscis which butterflies all use to get to the nectar in flowers.
UPDATE: There are several accessible chunks to this reserve now in addition to the Needingworth side: The Over side, which is the shortest route to the Reedbed Trail via a very rough drove, parking is potholed, but the section is beautiful, the Earith entrance which is relatively new, good parking. Also, you can access the Barleycroft Lake section from another reserve RSPB Berry Fen. At some point, these will all be joined by trails so you should be able to park in Earith and wend your way through to the Reedbed Trail, across the Great River Ouse and through the Needingworth side.
I am bit reluctant to tell you about the little jewel I have found. It’s not three quarters of an hour’s drive from Cambridge. Although the title of this blog post sort of gives it away…
It’s a lovely picturesque place, lots of decent footpaths, trees, ponds, hedgerows, reed beds, and lakes, and lots of bird life. And, there was nobody else there almost the whole time I wandered around, I only saw one couple when I arrived and a couple of people as I was leaving.
Admittedly, it’s a former gravel works/quarry and is flanked by active quarrying, which is feeding materials to the A14 roadworks, I reckon. The site will no doubt be rendered as a nature reserve when they have scooped out the last of the shingle and sand. Of course, many a nature reserve emerges from quarried land, better than it being used as a landfill site.
Anyway, we had hail this morning, thunder and lightning, and torrential rain. My plans to visit were almost scuppered, but the clouds cleared a little and I jumped in the car, camera in hand. By the time I got there the clouds had regrouped and it was spitting with rain, half a mile into the reserve and there was thunder and no little lightning. I was too far away from the Faraday cage of my car, so I clung to the hedgerows and kept camera dry in my coat until the storm passed and the clouds broke again. By mid-afternoon it was too hot and I had no water.
So..the birdlife, lots of green woodpeckers (Picus viridis), juvenile pictured above. They’re also known as yaffles around here and generally feed on ants along the footpaths and on the clear spaces, there were common terns winging it over the lakes, moorhens, swans and numerous reed warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) in the, you guessed it…reeds (top photo). I inadvertently scared a buzzard (Buteo buteo) from its woodland perch into flight, I turned out of that wooded area and caught sight of a red kite (Milvus milvus) pictured below. You’ll notice both of those latter scientific binomials are tautonyms, that means they repeat the first part of the name and it implies that this species is the “type” of the family, the achetypal species one might say.
I heard at least a couple of turtle doves (Streptopelia turtur) in the undergrowth of another wooded area, but didn’t see them. Saw one or two reed buntings (Emberiza schoeniclus), but heard many more. Rare was the sound of chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita), until after three hours of walking I’d got back to the car. I don’t think I heard nor caught sight of a willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) at all.
In abundance, however, were goldfinches (Carduelis carduelis), another tautonymic bird, whitethroats, blackbirds, starlings, long-tailed tits, great tits, blue tits (all three species with juveniles in tow), wood pigeons, wrens, lapwings, yellowhammers, dunnocks, common tern (below) and a few unidentified LBJ (little brown jobs). There were even oystercatchers around.
More intriguing though were the warbler-type birds at the farthest point away from the (free) car park. I certainly saw a few more reed warblers, perhaps a sedge warbler, in this area of the reserve (the reedbed trail). But, looking at the shots I got I cannot positively identify some of them as they were flitting among bushes and out of sight. Others, it turns out, are whitethroats (Sylvia communis). The barbed shot below is a juvenile, Mrs Sciencebase suggests.
Now, I’ve told you about the place, I would recommend a visit if you enjoy the peace and quiet of a nature reserve, although there is a bit of industrial traffic and the endless churning of the gravel conveyor belt for the quarry, but don’t let that put you off. Looking at the RSPB map for the site, I see now, that in my three hours, I only saw half the site, so another visit is needed…might even get a shot of an adult yaffle!
Elbow are a magnificent band, their proto-musical roots perhaps lie in singer Guy Garvey’s admiration of Genesis-era Peter Gabriel although the early elbow song Newborn was, he told interviewers, modelled on a song from “A Trick of the Tail”, namely Ripples, which was post-Gabriel Genesis. Nevertheless, they continue to write and play enigmatic and evocative music of which the song The Bones of You is a fine example.
Now, the ubiquitous guitar tab sites have all sorts of versions of the chords guitarist Mark Potter is purportedly playing on this song. Weird, twisted things that are almost impossible to move between without a lot of digital contortions and attendant noise. Moreover, none of the versions I saw sounded even remotely like the harmonies Potter is producing with six strings on the album or live.
So, I took a quick look at a clip of the band playing the song with the BBC Orchestra. One thing is immediately obvious, Potter, as many guitarists, is efficient. He’s not contorting, it’s just him shuttling between two simple chord shapes. Of course, it’s in an odd time signature against the main beat, as you often expect with this genre and there are some of the same open strings ringing the same notes in both chords.
The two chords which fill the song are a D6/9 chord and A minor-9, the latter with an added D (there’s an implied F# with the bass and vocal melody, giving an Am6/9. The song implies the D6/9 has an added A implying an E7sus4. However, that’s not the end of it Potter is playing with a capo at fret three, so the above discussion is up three semitones: the main chords are thus F6/9and Cm9, with their attendant passing notes C on top of the F6/9 and an A on the Cm9.
Here’s a quick snippet of me playing the two chords with capo 3, not exactly the rhythm Potter plays on The Bones of You but close enough for a demonstration.
More Classic Chords here.
UPDATE: If you don’t want to or cannot use the hack described below, then simply install a plugin or browser extension that acts as a user-agent switcher. Such an extension basically lets your browser pretend it is an Android phone, an iPhone or indeed any other type of browser. I tried uploading to Instagram with this user-agent switcher extension installed under Chrome and it seemed to work fine.
You have been able to access your Instagram account from a desktop browser for quite some time but you cannot post a photo without a workaround. The workaround is quite straightforward. You simply log into Instagram on your desktop browser, switch to developer mode (right-click “inspect” in Chrome) and choose a mobile device view. Full instructions are here.
I just tried it successfully with my recent kingfisher photo…seems to have worked. Saves me having Instagram running on my phone as it drains the battery really quickly even with the app supposedly “inactive”.
One guitarist friend, Ted from local band The Lonely, refers to the guitar capo as the “Devil’s Clamp”. We all know what he means, it’s a necessary evil sometimes if the singer needs to be up a tone or two to match their range but the guitarist really doesn’t want to re-learn the song with all those altered chord positions and inversions. Moreover, using a capo keeps the sound of the song similar. After all, playing the basic CAGED chords with open strings is very different in terms of timbre and sustain etc to playing them at second, third, fourth positions. Same applies to melodic riffs.
There is a caveat, of course, a capo on the first three or four frets doesn’t alter the overall sound of the guitar very much, but once you get past fret five and you’re capoing at fret 7 say you’ve lost most of the bottom end and are getting an almost mandolin sound now with very little sustain when compared to those open strings without the capo. Compare two fairly similar, folky songs – James Taylor’s Fire and Rain (capo 3) versus The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun (capo 7).
Anyway, whatever your reasons for using or not using a capo and there are many, there are a few tips and tricks that can help you get the best out of it without causing problems for your guitar. I did a rough-and-ready video tutorial just to show you what I’m talking about, in the vid I’m using a spring-loaded Kyser capo.
The common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) I wrote about earlier in the year seems not to have taken up long-term residence where I photographed a female in January 2017. Mrs Sciencebase and myself saw others at WWT Welney, as one might expect. But despite watching and occasionally searching, even at a local nature site called Kingfisher Bridge, we didn’t see another until a trip to the National Trust site at Wicken Fen.
Over the pond at the Roger Clarke hide there was a family – male, female and three fledglings. Mrs Sciencebase saw all five while I was staring through a zoom lens and photographing the male who alighted on a branch very close to the hide.
I was hoping to find a current piece of scientific research about kingfishers to share. There was something last year about the kingfisher and other piscivores and tracking the foods they eat, but that wasn’t as interesting as scientific research that suggests that “kingfishers prey upon the most accessible types of prey.” Not quite the earth-shattering breakthrough I was hoping for, basically tells us that kingfishers minimize their energy expenditure when foraging…well, don’t we all?
The common kingfisher’s scientific binomial (the monicker most people call an animal’s “Latin name”) is Alcedo atthis. The word Alcedo is indeed Latin for kingfisher and is derived from the Greek word for kingfisher “halcyon”.
Atthis was the name of a beautiful young woman who in mythology lived on Lesbos and was a favourite of Saphos.
Strictly speaking this classic chord isn’t a chord at all, it’s an interval, the gap between just two notes rather than at least three different notes played together. The interval in question is often described in Western music as “dissonant” and perhaps because of the beating of the harmonics of the two notes against each other (constructive and destructive interference) it has been various labelled the devil’s interval, or more archaically, diabolus in musica. Moreover, it’s often been banned and at the very least lambasted over the centuries in many different realms of music.
The devil’s interval is two bits of what technically we refer to as a tritone. A jump from a root note, up a whole tone and then up a whole tone again, so F to G, G to A, and finally A to B. The leap from F to B is quite dissonant.
In the right hands, it can add an electric frisson to a piece of music. Think of the intro to the Rush instrumental YYZ from the 1981 Moving Pictures album. The guitar pattern played staccato in 5/4 time oscillates between F# and C (the tritone being F#-G#, G#-A#, A#-C) and represents the Morse Code for YYZ (Toronto Airport’s call sign). Similarly, the Blue Oyster Cult song Workshop of the Telescopes from their eponymous 1972 debut album, uses the devil’s interval A-D#.
Although odd, almost occult, importance has been attached to this interval, fundamentally (pardon the pun), it’s just an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. Picture the scale of C major:
Where would rock and blues be without the 7ths (which of course are flat relative to the major scale. Look at CDEFGABC again, 7th note would be a B, but it’s down a semitone, so flat, in the (dominant) 7th. In the chor of C major 7, it stays as a B and has a much softer, almost summery sound, relative to the grittier dominant 7th with its devil’s interval.
Rush use the clash of a tritone in several songs, the intro to Between the Wheels has one with a F#11 chord resolving to an Am (both have a D note in the bass, so they’re more correctly, Dm13 and Am(add4), respectively.
Neither Rush nor BOC were being original in using this interval it had been around music for centuries, stirring passions and summoning the devil. Wikipedia has more details and more examples from musical history. In pop and rock music George Harrison uses tritones on the downbeats of the opening phrases of The Beatles’ songs “The Inner Light”, “Blue Jay Way” and “Within You Without You”, to create musical suspense resolution and of course, the opening riff of that most classic of heavy rock songs, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze uses the very same interval before leaping into the Hendrix Chord (Classic Chord #3). The opening of Maria, from West Side Story too.
Oh, almost forgot, here’s the interval in action, with me playing a version of the YYZ intro:
Over the last few months I’ve got to learn a little about the birds we call warblers. It was always a joke between Mrs Sciencebase and myself, if we heard a tweet we didn’t recognise one of us would proclaim “warbler!” and we’d move on…
Well, it turns out that a lot of the time we were right without knowing it. I’ve snapped a few of them and we’ve definitely heard the grasshopper warbler (at RSPB Folwmere) but don’t think we’ve seen it.
Cetti’s warbler – WWT Welney
Sedge warbler – RSPB North Warren, Fen Drayton Lakes, Ouse Washes
Reed warbler – RSPB Fen Drayton, Ouse Washes
Common whitethroat – RSPB Bempton Cliffs, South Cambs
Lesser whitethroat – Rampton, S Cambs
Blackcap – RSPB Minsmere, Rampton, Cottenham, elsewhere
Willow warbler – Rampton, Cottenham, elsewhere
Chiffchaff – See and hear almost everywhere there are trees
Grasshopper warbler – possibly heard at RSPB Fowlmere and Overhall Grove
Marsh warbler – yet to positively ID, very rare, 2-3 breeding pairs in UK
Wood warbler – Photographed in Croatia
Dartford warbler – Seen but not photographed at RSPB Minsmere
Moustached warbler- yet to positively ID
Sardinian warbler – ditto
Savi’s warbler – ditto
Sub-alpine warbler – ditto
Bonelli’s warbler – ditto
Great reed warbler – ditto
Garden warbler – ditto
Pallas’s warbler – ditto
Yellow-browed warbler – ditto
Icterine warbler – ditto
Melodious warbler – ditto
Barred warbler – ditto
Fan-tailed warbler – ditto
The term warbler applies to some distinct species as you can see, it’s more of an umbrella term for perching (passerine) birds that share characteristics, such as being fairly small, vocal, and insectivorous.
The shape of a bird’s eggs depends on how it flies, according to new scientific results. Sleek birds adapted to streamlined flight tend to lay more elliptical and asymmetric eggs, according to new research published today. The work cuckolds the classic theories about egg shape.
Broadly speaking, birds’ eggs can be ball shaped or elongated ovals. They can have one pointy end or be very symmetrical. Diet, nest space, cliff dwelling and other factors have all been scrambled to explain why some eggs are one shape and others another. Now, Joseph Tobias from Imperial College London, writing in the journal Science explains how he and his colleagues have measured the shapes of almost 50,000 eggs of 1,400 bird species. They analysed this hard-boiled data in the context of the bird family tree and species characteristics, such as nest type, clutch size, diet, and flight ability.
The researchers discovered there was a correlation between strong fliers and more elliptical and asymmetric eggs
The team found that murres, aka guillemots, (pictured above, prepping some eggs) which are fast, direct flyers that can also dive deep underwater had some of the most asymmetric eggs in the study. This was previously thought to be about precluding the egg rolling off a cliff edge into the sea below; an over easy theory. By contrast, owls – built for light, gliding flight – had some of the most spherical eggs, although the barn owls eggs are rarely sunny side up as it’s a dusk/night hunter.
“Bird eggs – previously described as ‘a miracle of packaging’ and ‘the most perfect thing in the universe’ – have fascinated people for millennia, yet only now are biologists beginning to crack the mystery of what makes some eggs more ‘egg-shaped’ than others,” says Tobias.
Lead author on the paper Mary Caswell Stoddard of Princeton University, adds: “In contrast to classic hypotheses, we discovered that flight may influence egg shape. Birds that are good fliers tend to lay asymmetric or elliptical eggs.”
The most obvious reason for this adaptation is simply that the sleeker fliers have less room in their abdomens and narrower oviducts for spheroidal  eggs. So, it’s a packaging problem for mother birds.
There’s no poaching of theories here, Tobias says that his team “found no support for the traditional ideas that variation in egg shape is caused by nest structure or placement on perilous cliff ledges, and instead found that egg size was related to the amount of calcium in the diet, and egg shape was best predicted by adaptations for powerful flight.”
Remember, if you don’t speak French one egg is never un oeuf…
“Avian egg shape: form, function and evolution” by M. C. Stoddard, E. H. Yong, D. Akkaynak, C. Sheard, J. A. Tobias, and L. Mahadevan, Science, (2017).
It’s so easy to be distracted, especially when it’s 30 degrees Celsius in the shade, and you’re flagging after a long-winded drive to a reserve (today RSPB Ouse Washes at Welches Dam near Manea in Cambridgeshire). There seemed to be a reed bunting every 30 metres in the reeds along the waterway behind the flood bank and bird hides. There were a lot of barn swallows and a lot of sedge warblers and reed warblers.
The RSPB members’ book suggests there are some 13 different warbler species seen on the site, so when I saw this beautiful creature I leapt to the assumption that it was some kind of warbler…as ever it took my virtual ornithological mentor to correct my misconception – yellow wagtail (Motacilla flava). It’s a juvenile though hence the muted colours.
I must add though that I’d seen on on a post on the washes side of the flood bank close to some lapwings and had thought it looked like a wagtail. But, it was a long way off and on a hot and hazy day no zoom lens is going to correct for refractive abberations due to turbulent hot air rising.
Anyway, yellow wagtail it is, another one for the gallery.