Author: David Bradley

Great spotted fledgling

The Great Spotted Woodpecker chick (Dendrocopos major) I have been photographing these last few days is getting very bold and almost bouncing out of his tree house when the adults visit with food.

I am surprised that there is only one chick, maybe nest size limits how many eggs the female lays. Either way, this little fellow with his red crown (does that make him a male?) is clacking away requesting regular invertebrate meals from the male (with the red nape to his neck) and female (black and white, but for her rump). Mrs Sciencebase reckons the clacking of the adults from neighbouring trees is probably encouragement for the chick to fledge (we’ve not heard much calling from them). The chicks head seems at least as big as his mother’s, so presumably he is almost read to leave the confines of his woody abode.

Here are a few more shots of male and female attending to the needs of the chick. That beak is sharp, makes sense for Dad to close his eyes while passing grubs beak to beak.

 

Speckled brown butterfly

Snapped a speckly brown butterfly in the local woodland, went to my book…misread the page pictures, thought it was a woodland brown (Lopinga achine), but 1 AND 2 were of the same speckled brown species, the woodland brown is absent from British shores. Turns out to be a female speckled brown (Pararge aegeria). A lot less timid and flitty than many of the butterflies around, sunning itself on a nettle patch while I walked around it to get a couple of closeups. I was using a 600mm lens from about 3 metres away, but had to walk closer to it along the path to get to the other side for the open-wings view.



Thanks to Lisa King for correcting the error, I have now added the speciment to my invertebrates gallery on Imaging Storm.

Classic Chords #19 – Fire and Rain

James Taylor has written many classic songs, they’re the archetypal singer-songwriter songs you might say. Wonderful melodies, intriguing lyrics and when you’re listening to the originals, wonderful guitar tone and fingerstyle playing. One of the things you quickly learn in attempting to play and sing these simple-seeming songs is that they’re not at all simple, in fact they’re quite tricksy. Taylor does not always use the standard fingering even on the simple “CAGED” major chords like D and G.

Ring finger at D on the B-string and the F# is usually played with the second finger fretting the E-string at the second fret. Taylor prefers to twist that around, so that his index finger is doing the fretting on the highest string and so he can then use it to bring in bass notes on the lower strings. Presumably to toggle between the D major, a D(addE) and Dsus4, he lifts off the index finger and uses his pinkie to get the G on the high E-string.

Anyway, Fire and Rain…one of the best songs ever written, evocative and autobiographical and particularly poignant in being partly about a friend of Taylor’s Suzanne Schnerr, a childhood friend who committed suicide while he was recording in London. There’s lots of fingerstyle tricks in this. It’s usually played with at capo 3, but for simplicity let’s forget the capo. The intro has some little slides and movements back and forth from a G to an A at the fifth fret and back and then jumps to a D, the open position A, with various hammer-ons, pull-offs and trills an E and then a bass run to the G major.

Well, I say G major, what he does is arpeggiate what you’d think of as a conventional G-major but with the ring finger giving us an extra D note on the second string at the third fret (remember capo free in this key). The pinkie lifts off the G note on the top E-string to give us a G6, but the index finger also jumps off the bass B note on the A-string and comes down on the F# on the top E-string to give us a Gmaj7 (well, actually if you keep that D fretted on the B-string it’s a D9Add4), but if you lift that off to give us a B again, it’s the Gmaj7.

Rather than a simple sample of this issue’s Classic Chord, I’ve got a complete cover of the song I recorded a few months ago and I’ve made a lyric video.

Of course, if you want to watch the great man playing it with his interesting fingerings, feel free.

Don’t touch me there

Every year little blue flowers emerge…I can never remember their name and always have to ask Mrs Sciencebase to remind me…oh yeah: “forget-me-not” also known as “mouse’s ear” because of the shape of its leaves, and one of many types of scorpion grass, common one here has the scientific name Myosotis scorpioides)

But, the forget-me-not is not the only plant giving us orders, there’s also the “touch-me-not” (Mimosa pudica, the shame plant; pudica is Latin for shy, bashful or shrinking (as in violet)) Anyway, the pinnate leaves of this species will fold back on to themselves quite quickly with the gentlest touch.

This behaviour is presumably a protective mechanism to avoid the leaves being eaten by herbivorous insects or to make it awkward for female insects to lay eggs on the surface of the leaves. So, how does a plant “know” to do this with its leaves? The leaves of many plants respond to changes in light and weather by closing up, it is known as seismonastic movement, most are quite slow, but all involve plant chemistry responding to an external stimulus whether falling light levels, temperature change, wind or the touch of a finger (or insect alighting on the leaf).

Whatever the stimulus it is transmitted through electrochemical changes at the cellular level, passage of an action potential which causes potassium ions to flow out openings in the plant cell walls, this then causes water to flow out of the cells through osmosis through the cells aquaporin channels, to attempt to balance the change in potassium ion concentration. Loss of water from the cells makes them floppy, or technically speaking become less turgid. Differences in turgidity in different regions of the leaf and stem lead to the “closing” of the leaflets.

Classic Chords #18 – Times Like Foo

Fellow C5 band member Andrea had a suggestion for a classic chord, one she’s not found a satisfactory resolution for in “Times Like These” by Foo Fighters. As Andrea points out, there are two versions: the original Rush-influenced album version with the following riff that sounds a lot like a Lifesonesque version of The Cult’s “She sells sanctuary” and a softer, less discordant acoustic/unplugged/laidback version that lends a little bit more to R.E.M.

I had a quick look at videos of Dave Grohl playing both versions just to get a measure of what he’s doing in both settings. The simpler way to play the intro to this song is to fret a conventional D major chord but lift off your (index) finger from the G-string to create what is technically a G major 9 (GM9) and then hammer-on back to the normal note of A on the G-string to give you the Dmaj. So far, so conventional. It’s a nice trick and it’s a nice sound, but it’s not the sophisticated discordancy we’ve all grown to love of the album version of the track.

On the album though that heavy intro is much more discordant and it looks like he’s playing an interesting chord at the fifth fret and shuttling between an open D-string for the root note and hammering-on to the fifth fret on the A string, essentially muting that D-string but keeping the top three strings ringing a note, keeping a Dm13 (D minor 13) as a Dm13 played at the fifth fret with two different slightly different fingerings. I doubt that open D string rings much as the hammering-on to the 5th fret of the A-string is happening.

For those who don’t know, foo fighters is term that was used by Allied pilots in WWII to refer to unidentified objects in the sky.

I recorded an approximation of the riff using the Dm13 and the AM9, thos chords…they’re almost jazz…but then Grohl’s guitar hero Alex Lifeson (more him in the Hemispheres and Limelight classic chords) uses a lot of what you might term jazz chords (as if chords are interested in genre, anyway!) I should do the chords from Rush’s Lakeside Park next given that it’s the 24th of May, a day on which everyone would gather.

Starling chick waiting to be fed

I’ve been walking past trees with lots of woodpecker holes recently and, as regular readers will know I’ve photographed the great spotted woodpeckers that are feeding chicks in the highest hole. Got some good shots of them flying in and out of the male with a load of grubs in its mouth ready to enter the nest.

It’s always feeding time in a bird’s nest whether that’s a hollow in a tree, a nest of twigs and feathers or a ground nest, which might be a simple depression on a sandbank or in a field.


Starling chicks (Sturnus vulgaris) are no different in their voracity for invertebrates. I was aware of parents flying in and out of a hole in a tree next to the woodpecker residence and caught sight of a chick poking its head above the proverbial parapet while its parent clacked and yacked on a nearby branch. It was only happy to fly in to nest to feed the chick(s) once I’d moved a few metres further away.




The common, or European, starling is a nosy bird with glossy black plumage that has something of a metallic sheen and shimmers with greens and puples in sunlight. It might also be speckled white at different times of the year. The legs are pink and the bill is black in winter and yellow in the summer.

Meanwhile, just been through my photos from Botswana, lots of birds, but no sight of a superb starling, which I remember being particularly fascinated by 25 years ago…just for the name alone.

Rejigging the mobile macro rig

On friday, I took up the challenge of extracting the read lens from an old CD drive to make a monster macro for my mobile (per the tip in Practical Photography magazine). My initial design had me boring a hole in a small, flat, Lego square, which was a perfect fit for the lens. The square then sat on top of the mobile phone camera’s lens so that the lower face is flush to the camera lens. I then built a platform from Lego over which I could perch small objects to photograph. I tried a silicon chip, a magpie’s feather, some coins and other bits and pieces. The first photos are all now in my macro photo gallery. With the camera in this position, i.e. screen down I had to use a remote control to click the shutter (Airdroid on my desktop did the job for those initial shots).


However, to make a more portable and usable version, I found a bigger Lego square and bored a hole in the centre with the same bradawl and posidrive screwdriver. Cleaned up the hole and popped the lens out of the original Lego and after a quick clean with a camera cloth, nudged it into this bigger square. The bigger square allowed me to use a hairtie borrowed from Mrs Sciencebase to fasten the lens to the phone still ensuring it is flush and centred on the camera’s lens. NB Hairties often have a little metal connector within, so if you follow my version 2.0 design, make sure that portion of the hairtie is not touching your phone’s screen.

Next, was to build a slightly different rig for the phone. Various flat pieces of Lego allowed me to get things set up so the camera would be almost the right height from the object below and now with the screen facing upwards I could control the camera more hands-on. To get the focusing distance close but not too close required the equivalent of three Lego “flats” including the platform. In fact, this wouldn’t focus at this height with my particular camera and CD lens, so I need to place a credit card, or in my case an amazon gift card under each end of the right to get the height just right to focus on an object below the platform, in the test shot, a tiny fly that had died on my windowsill.

I am sure you will find your own tweaks for such a rig, an alternative to Lego and perhaps even a better way to attach the lens to the camera lens. Small, flat objects at the precise centre of the image focus best as depth-of-field is very limited and optical abberations become apparent at the image edges. However, the quality as you have probably seen my now is quite remarkable and even top of the range professional macro lenses suffer from some optical abberation!

There is an added benefit to the hairtie approach in that it makes the monster macro mobile. If you have a steady enough hand or enough light for a fast shutter speed, you can get macro-style closeups of almost anything you can point your camera at.

The baby woodpecker’s divided red crown

Okay, here’s a question for evolutionary ornithologists…or basically anyone who knows the answer: Why do the chicks of great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major) have a bifurcated red crown? The mother’s head is completely black her red feathers being limited to the underside of her hind quarters (her so-called undertail coverts) , while the adult male has in addition a red patch on the nape of his neck.

I have photographed this family of D. major over the last few weeks coming and going at the nesting site in a tree near Rampton Pocket Park north of Cambridge, England. Saw the chick for the first time on the 20th May 2017.

The lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) and the green woodpecker (Picus viridis) both have red caps. The green, also known as a yaffle, has red bars below the eyes emanating from the rear of the beak, otherwise mostly green/greenish yellow.

First sighting of a D. major this year in Rampton was end of February. This one is nesting at the Cottenham end of Rampton Spinney, I’ve seen a pair there since but not photographed those again. The nesting pair of great spotted woodpeckers I’ve photographed more recently are in a tree on the edge of Giant’s Hill.

Close to the sedge (warbler)

UPDATE: Have a listen to this bird’s “song” via Xeno Canto here. The sound recording was made at Fen Drayton where there are several Sedge Warbles making a racket right now at the Guided Busway crossing to Swavesey Lake.

We often take a walk through RSPB North Warren, the bird and nature reserve immediately north of the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh. There is a fresh water marsh there with quite an array of little egrets, duck, geese and on a recent visit a pair of spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia). Heading from the hide nearest Maggi Hambling’s infamous sculpture Scallop to the hide opposite at dusk recently, we heard a loud warbling song and then spotted a tiny little bird, white eyeband, flitty flight in and out of a tangle of thorny bushes. He sat still and not too far away for me to get a few nice shots of him. It was, I believe, a sedge warbler (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus).


The RSPB website describes this species as “quite plump”, but to my eye it was a rather delicate bird with prominent creamy “eyebrows”. The sedge is a summer visitor to the UK and elsewhere, choosing to spend its winters in sub-Saharan Africa. It commonly picks insects from vegetation while perched or sometimes hovering, which we observed, but there was also a lot of “leap-catching”, in which the bird grabs flying insects as it flies between perches.

Do hares always poke their tongue out while urinating?

There is no punchline to that question, but I would like to know the answer…

This evening, Mrs Sciencebase spotted a couple of European hares (Lepus europaeus) cavorting among the local farmer’s crops that abutt the Les King Wood between the Fen Edge villages of Cottenham and Rampton a few miles north of Cambridge…I got relatively close with the zoom lens before they bounded off. They then settled down to more cavorting in the nearby rough hewn field wherein there was already another hare. There was more haresplay (one of the original pair lying down on its back like a dog waiting for a tummy rub) but there was no boxing before they scarpered again. As they made their departure a Reeves’s muntjac turned up and ambled along the opposite side of the field. More about her later…

Then heading back past the village recreation ground I glanced across and spotted yet another hare not 50 metres away. It didn’t see us and presumably didn’t catch the scent of us carnivores nor our dog. It was happily nibbling the grass and heading in our direction. Several times it hesitated, I assumed it must have spotted us, but it kept coming in closer. Then this: tongue out, urinating in full view of the camera. But even that brief interlude it was at least a dozen clicks of the camera shutter before it turned tail and bounded off to the opposite side of the rec. Incidentally, hares can run at more than 60 kmh…