David Bradley – Page 28

New Year in Norfolk 2023

TL:DR – New Year trip to North Norfolk – diary entry blog post.

As has been our habit for the last few years, we have eschewed the midnight festivities of New Year and escaped to the coast. This time, we straddled the New Year with three nights in a cosy cottage in Wells-next-the-Sea. We enjoyed the local hostelries in the evenings during our trip, but the main focus was to walk as far as we could manage each day (usually 7 or 8 miles) and to take in the birding and other sites of nature en route.

Pallid Harrier in flight over marsh edge at Warham, Norfolk, about 1200 metres from the camera — Record shot: Pallid Harrier in flight

Wells, Warham, Titchwell, and Holkham Gap were the main areas, beach, woodland, marsh, and nature reserve. A couple of Muntjac (one deceased), two or three Grey Squirrel, half a dozen Grey Seal, and 1001 dalmations and others dogs were the limited list of mammals we saw.

Red Kite with fishy prize — Red Kite, Holkham Gap

The birding list was much better as you’d expect, for starters, we saw a rare vagrant over the marsh at Warham east of Wells, a Pallid Harrier, along with a couple of Hen Harriers on the same marsh. It was dull and grey at that point and the low-light photos of the harriers are just my record shots.

The Pallid Harrier, Circus macrourus, is a migrant that breeds in Eastern Europe, Iran, and central Asia, wintering in India or Africa depending on its migratory wont. It is rare in Western Europe and the UK, but occasional vagrants are ticked here. That said, the species is now known to have bred in The Netherlands (2017) and Spain (2019). A changing world means a changing world for the birds too.

We saw dozens of other species (around 80). Many of those we had seen before, some many times, but one was rather special and we’d only seen it once before, in Poole Harbour in the autumn of 2022 – White-tailed Eagle. An immature specimen flew over us as we were heading back along the beach to Holkham Gap from the westward marsh end of the patch. The bird itself was heading to its roost on the marsh where it had been reported at roughly the same time for the previous couple of days. We don’t know at this point whether the bird we saw was one of the two we saw in Poole, these Isle of Wight reintroduction birds do cover a lot of ground on their travels.

Archive shot: Immature White-tailed Eagle in Poole Harbour

On a smaller scale, but much more numerous, we had some lovely views of visitors from The Arctic, Snow Buntings (30+), which are distant cousins of the Yellowhammers and Reed Buntings. We also saw Shorelarks (about 11) at Holkham Gap despite the best efforts of uncontrolled dog walkers to repeatedly scare the birds away.

Parial flock of 30+ Snow Bunting, Holkham Gap — Flock of Snow Bunting, Holkham Gap

Below is the, hopefully complete, list of birds we saw, we may have a few others that we may have glimpsed in passing but are not claiming for the list, Grey Partridge, Bullfinch, Whooper Swan, Sparrowhawk. There were no feeders at the RSPB Titchwell cafe area on this visit, so no sighting of Coal Tit on this visit.

Grey Plover in flight along the coast at RSPB Titchwell — Grey Plover

Avocet, Black-headed Gull, Bar-tailed Godwit, Black-tailed Godwit, Blackbird, Blue Tit, Brent Goose, Buzzard, Cetti’s Warbler, Chaffinch, Collared Done, Common Scoter, Coot, Cormorant, Curlew, Dunlin, Dunnock, Egyptian Geese, Goldcrest, Golden Plover, Goldeneye (F), Goldfinch, Great Black-backed Gull, Great Crested Grebe, Great Tit, Great White Egret, Grey Heron, Grey Plover, Greylag Goose, Hen Harrier (ringtailed: F or Juv), Herring Gull, House Sparrow, Jackdaw, Jay, Kestrel, Kingfisher, Knot, Lapwing, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Little Egret, Little Grebe, Long-tailed Tit, Magpie, Mallard, Marsh Harrier, Meadow Pipit, Moorhen, Mute Swan, Oystercatcher, Pallid Harrier (NFM 2023), Pheasant, Pink-footed Goose, Pintail, Pochard, Red Kite, Red-breasted Merganser (pair, twice to locations), Red-throated Diver, Redshank, Reed Bunting, Ringed Plover, Robin, Rook, Rough-legged Buzzard, Sanderling, Shelduck, Shore Lark, Shoveller, Skylark, Snow Bunting, Starling, Stock Dove, Stonechat, Teal, Tufted Duck, Turnstone, Water Rail, White-throated Diver, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon, Wren.

Ringtail Hen Harrier in flight at Warham, Norfolk, over the marsh bridge — Record shot: Ringtailed Hen Harrier

I fed this article paragraph by paragraph to an AI chat bot, ChatGPT, and have put together a post showing the call-and-response artificial conversation I had with the bot. I also followed up that article with a bit of discussion about AI and its role in human creativity and innovation. But, and here’s the clever bit, I didn’t provide my own thoughts, I asked the bot a question and it came up with an answer for me.

My natural highlights for 2022

TL:DR – A few natural highlights from a year that’s been rather miserable in too many ways for me, but peppered with music and photography and nature.

You can find the photos I took of these highlights littered around the Sciencebase website, in my Imaging Storm galleries, on my Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook.

Thousands of Pink-footed Geese, North Norfolk

Water Rails – RSPB Lakenheath

Frogs (20+) and frogspawn -in our garden wildlife pond

Cranes – RSPB Ouse Fen

Grasshopper Warbler – RSPB Ouse Fen

Otter on the river bank of the River Great Ouse or is it the Great River Ouse, ouse means river so could be the Great Ouse River too…

White Stork – Earith and Smithy Fen

Chiffchaff – bathing in our garden wildlife pond

Puffins, Shags, Razorbills etc –Farne Islands

Kittiwakes, Eider Ducks – Seahouses

American Black, Arctic and Sandwich Terns – Long Nanny, Northumberland

Hooded Crow – Northumberland

Wall butterfly – Seahouses

Lizard Orchid – Devil’s Dyke

Bee Orchid – WARG Field, Cottenham

Black Hairstreak and White Admiral butterflies – Monk’s Wood and Brampton Wood

Purple Emperor, Purple Hairstreak – Gamlingay Wood and Woodwalton Fen

Grizzled Skipper – Woodwalton Marsh

Chinese Water Deer – RSPB Ouse Fen

Adonis Blue and later Chalkhill Blue butterflies, also Green Hairstreak and Dark Green Fritillaries – Devil’s Dyke, Cambs

Marbled White – Edwards’ Wood, Dry Drayton

Small Blue butterflies – Trumpington Meadows

Brassy Longhorns again – Cottenham Lode

Discovering two previously unreported colonies of White-letter Hairstreak butterflies – Rampton Wood

Discovering a previously unreported colony of Purple Hairstreak butterflies – Rampton Wood

Encountering an irruption of Clouded Yellow butterflies – beyond RSPB Ouse Fen and two other patches of the same species elsewhere

Rosy Footman and Light Crimson Underwing moths – New Forest

New Forest Ponies – New Forest

Huge flock of Common Buzzard in a field on Soham Road

Numerous Convolvulus Hawk-moth – to tobacco plants in our garden

Sighting of Osprey and two White-tailed Eagles – Poole Harbour

Sika Deer, doe and fawn – Wareham

L-album Wainscot moth – Corfe Castle

December Moth at long last – to actinic light in our garden (64th new moth of the year for me.

It’s not only rock and roll

TL:DR – How consumers are duped into upgrading, again and again.

We were quite content with vinyl. Indeed, aside from the occasional warped record and friends who didn’t hold them properly by the edges, we loved our US import 45s, our double gatefold sleeve live rock albums and our picture discs. We put up with the crackles and pops and built our bedroom collections. We lent our vinyl to friends, despite their not understanding about sleeve liner orientation and they lent us theirs. We recorded them on to cassette when we couldn’t the latest and greatest and we made mixtapes, the playlisting of a Generation X. They even tried to stop us by telling us that “Home taping is killing music”…we replied vehemently that “Home taping is skill in music”!

It was all going so well, but they wanted more of our hard-earned cash. More than that, they wanted us to pay again for what we already had and so was born the CD. This little disc apparently couldn’t be scratched, it was pure digital sound, there was no warping…and for many no warmth. Although at the time we were yet to recognise this limitation. So, we bought the new-fangled CD players and collected, at much greater expense, all the CDs of the albums we already had on vinyl, filling already full shelves with yet more bejewelled plastic discs.

This would be it. The ultimate Hi-Fi. The last word in sound quality. Of course, it wasn’t. There were more jobs to be done and it was Jobs who did us! If we could be re-sold the digital version then we could almost certainly be resold a virtual version too and perhaps even just access rather than possession of that digital copy in the form of streaming. For the companies yet another financial bonanza, despite Napster and Kazaa and Bit Torrents, and so we thought we wouldn’t get fooled again, but we most certainly were.

But, where is the love, where is the warmth? The ease of endless streams of over-saturated, over-compressed sound files was, like a much-loved mixtape from the 1970s beginning to wear thin. We hankered after the warmth of the old analog world. We may have grown into digital men and women, but at heart we were always analog kids…and so we went hunting as we once did back in digital pre-history, seeking out black discs of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, VINYL! We wouldn’t be islands in their streaming river, we’d be 20th century boys and girls and proud of it.

It’s only rock and roll, but I like it, again and again, and again, deeper and down…

Part Two: Let there be light! How we were resold the warmth of the incandescent bulb by way of the fluorescent tube, the halogen bulb, the compact fluorescent tube, the LED lamp, and back to the squirrel-cage!

Just another notch

TL:DR – A thought experiment that could encode the whole of literature in a single notch in a metal rod.

An intriguing thought experiment explains how one might encode the whole of literature in a single fraction, a/b, and how that ratio might be made physical as a notch in a metal rod, whereby the length on the left of the notch is a and that on the right is b.

Screen grab from the video showing a pen drawing a notch with a ratio of a:b

How might that be done? Well, if we assume we’re using just the English alphabet, we could assign each letter a code, 001 for the letter a, 002 for the letter b, 003 for c, and so on. 000 could represent a space. Numbers beyond 026 would be the punctuation marks.

So, all of literature could be written out as a continuous sequence of those three-digit codes. There’d be a lot, obviously, there are billions and billions of letters across the whole history of the written word. But, it would be possible.

Now comes the clever bit. That number is a finite whole number, it doesn’t go on forever. So, if we put a zero followed by a decimal point at the beginning, we would have a decimal fraction. Any decimal fraction of limited length can be represented as a ratio of two whole numbers. They are rational unlike numbers such as pi or e, which are irrational and can never be calculated fully as they go on forever. Thus, we have that fraction, that ratio. All we need to do now is take out metal rod and put a notch in it at the point where that fraction is represented by the distance from one end to the notch over the distance from the other end to the notch.

It’s clever isn’t it? I imagine this idea has been invented several times before, but I think the first time I came across it was in a recent TikTok video here.

Anyway, that’s a theoretical system for encoding the whole of human literature with a single mark on a metal rod. But, would it work in practice? I suspect not. The encoded fraction that gives us the decimal fraction that represents all of literature will be absolutely enormous, many millions of digits in the numerator and the denominator, perhaps more, I cannot quite imagine how long the string of numbers would be…

As such marking a notch with such precision on a metal rod is going to require an incredibly accurate means of measuring marking the rod. I am guessing that with a rod just a metre long, the precision needed will come up against the quantum limit and at that limit it would be impossible to make such a mark because we couldn’t move the marker accurately and know precisely where it is on the rode. We might try a longer rod, but I suspect it would need to be incredibly long, perhaps even millions of kilometres, perhaps lightyears long to allow a notch to be made and at astronomical scales relativistic effects will come into play.

Then, there are the issues of fabricating a uniform and chemically pure rod that is stable, resists oxidation and degradation, that would theoretically be impossible too. On top of that we must take into account expansion and contraction that would take place with a rise and fall in temperature and the resulting distortions to the rod and the notch that might occur with such fluctuations.

It’s not looking good for encoding the whole of literature in this way. Perhaps we could start with a short children’s book as a preliminary test and see how well we could do that. Seeing as we seem to have gone done a weird rabbit hole, perhaps we could start with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

There is a twist in the tale though. You remember I mentioned how the irrational number pi cannot be represented by a fraction because it goes on forever, well a big chunk of pi could be sliced out of the irrational number and used to generate a ratio. If we searched pi for long enough we would actually find a slice that represented the a/b we were looking to represent all of literature in a single ratio.

Moreoever, because pi goes on forever, the whole of literature is encoded somewhere in pi already and it is repeated an infinite number of times. And, double moreover, the whole of the future of literature, all those books yet to be written are encoded somewhere in pi, but you have to find the right chunk to work on! In fact, somewhere in the eternity of pi all information that has existed and might one day exist is encoded in pi. At some point within the random digits of pi, we might even take out slice to explain life, the universe, and everything…imagine the meaning of life in pi, and it is not just 42.

A Blackcap in Winter

TL:DR – The Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla, is commonly a summer visitor to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa. But in recent years, some birds that spend their summers in the east of Europe and would normally head for the Iberian peninsula or North Africa in winter have reached the UK where they found winter food on bird feeders. There is now evidence that these birds that overwinter in the UK are not mingling with the Iberian or African overwinterers when they go back to their breeding grounds in east Europe.

UPDATE: As of 13th March 2023, the male Blackcap that overwintered since mid-December in our garden is still here. The outside temperature has gone from freezing to about 17 Celsius, but he is showing no signs of departing just yet. He enjoyed mistletoe berries, pyracanthus berries and now most of those have gone, he pecks at suet balls in a feeder right outside our living room window.

It’s no wonder this little fellow looks so grumpy perched next to the mistletoe growing on our rowan tree…most other Blackcaps will be enjoying a much balmier winter on the Iberian Peninsula or even in Africa. We have had Blackcaps in our garden in winter for several years now. Never see them in the garden in summer though. We had a male and a female last winter. So far this winter, just this solitary male.

In recent years, a lot of migrating Blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) have headed west from eastern Europe for the winter instead of turning south. Their compasses seem to have lost calibration, perhaps due to climate change, but other factors may be at play. The species seems to be affected by climate change, a decalibration of their internal compasses, and perhaps moreover by the British wont to stock garden bird feeders and put out fat balls, which is not such a common practice on the continental mainland.

When they head back to their mating grounds in the spring, they are marginalised by the southerners it seems and two distinct groupings are observed. This is an early process in speciation whereby in the long-term we might see a sub-species emerge that no longer mates with the other.

Whatever happened to that birding book you were writing Dave?

TL:DR – I compiled a sampler for a newbie birding book with ten chapters, but I am yet to write the remaining 90.

Back in August 2017, I was all hyped about putting together a new book. It come up with a title, Chasing Wild Geese, and the plan was to write a short piece about the hundred birds a novice birder might “tick” first in the UK. Each item would be illustrated with one of my photos of said bird.

Chasing Wild Geese, the gosling book cover — Chasing Wild Geese, the gosling feather book cover

I put together a taster, with the first ten written and formatted and even did a spoof bio page in the same style about yours truly.

I gave the cover a silly acronym: FEATHER. This stood for “Food Environment Aural Type Habitat Etymology Resemblance” and was a summary of the contents of each page.

I shared the sampler widely on social media and estimate that between six hundred and a thousand people downloaded the PDF file from my website. It’s still available if you’d like to take a look, here. I spoke to my publisher and ideas were batted back and forth. Ultimately though, the likely costs of producing a full-colour photographic book of this sort we agreed were likely to have been prohibitive at the time, so sadly, I put the Geese on the backburner and turned my attention to other writing, photography, and more songwriting.

In the meantime, there have been several similar books on the market from far more expert birders and better photographers than me, any one of which would easily have outsold the honking Geese. I do now have better photos of all the birds in the sampler, and at least a couple of hundred other birds that might have featured in a follow-up…maybe if I stop chasing it, it will come home to roost. We’ll see…

Graze for Mastodon

TL:DR – A few thoughts on Mastodon written just after the second big migration from the bird place.

If you’re active on social media and even just vaguely interested in tech stuff, then you will almost certainly have heard about the changes at twitter and how a lot of users of that platform have switched allegiance to another, Mastodon. I’ve written a Mastodon FAQ by way of introduction to the platform.

Mastodon was originally launched in 2016 and I seem to have a record of a login from August that year, but I joined “Mastodon.Social” properly in November 2019. I must admit I didn’t use it much until April 2022, and then again in late October 2022 after which I have been a lot more active there than on Twitter. You can find me on Mastodon here:

@[email protected]

Anyway, one of the things that people new to Mastodon often struggle with is how to take action on an update on one server/instance when they’re signed up with another. I’ve put together a Top 20 of popular servers/instances used by Sciencebase readers and others here.

Some features work between servers, but favouriting and boosting and other functions don’t. At least they didn’t until programmer Jared Zimmerman came up with Graze for Mastodon. This is an extension for the Chrome desktop browser that makes inter-server actions, like favouriting or boosting an update on a different server transparent. A Firefox version of Graze is on the way, apparently. Zimmerman is also looking at other features to make the desktop Mastodon experience even better.

I’m on Mastodon.Social as I said, but I like to visit the more sciencey servers and the photography ones and the music ones and a load of others…Graze makes it much simpler to engage with those.

Incidentally, Mastodons were megafauna in the family Mammutidae, but unlike the perhaps slightly better-known Mammoths, Mastodons were probably not woolly nor were they grazers, more likely browsers.

Starling Murmurations

TL:DR – Fundamentally, starlings murmurate because they enjoy it, it’s instinctive behaviour, but there will be reward feedback loops in their brains that drive the behaviour that’s almost beyond doubt. But, the phenomenon is in their instincts to help protect them from raptor predation.

I’ve talked about Starling murmurations several times before here. They are a fascinating, exciting, wonderful natural phenomenon with a lot to teach us about animal behaviour and perhaps even fluid flow! There are two spots on the outskirts of our village here in South Cambridgeshire where you might see a murmuration.

There is a reedbed in the balancing pond that supports drainage from one of the housing estates and then there’s a similar pond on the edge of the local recycling centre (rubbish dump). I’ve mentioned the Red Kites that frequent that site too in an update to an old article. It was while seeking out and finding 20+ Red Kites a couple of weeks ago that I noticed the Starling numbers were building on the same patch, with two to three flocks of several hundred birds swooping around the farmland that abutts the dump.

We walked there again yesterday so I could photograph the Red Kites again. We saw at least 20, along with a couple of hundred Redwing and dozens of Fieldfare, and a Buzzard harried by the Red Kites. There were a lot more Starlings, three fluxional flocks of several hundred each. At one point, hundreds were in the hedgerow when a raptor interrupted their chirruping and chatting and they whooshed into the air en masse and murmurated to distract and confuse the bird of prey.

I got a few photos one of which shows a large flock moving in unison. I estimate about 1500 birds in this photo and there were perhaps two other flocks of maybe about a half to two-thirds the size. I’d suggest that this patch has at least 3000 birds. It will be worth another visit towards dusk to see them bed down to roost among the reeds, also might be worth getting up at dawn to see them rise as a single mass from their roost. My estimate of 1500 in this photo was corroborated by a proper birder friend with far more experience of counting than I.