TL:DR – I disappointingly succumbed to a COVID-19 infection in February 2022.
So, mid-February 2022 I got a sniffle and a bit of a sore throat, like a common cold coming on. Did a lateral flow test and what do you know – positive for SARS-CoV-2, dammit. Ten days of isolation and an awful sore throat, an unsleepable sore throat, in fact, but thankfully no breathing problems. I’ve managed to take a couple of walks since and a bit of a bike ride, but they’re very stop and start, albeit managing about 3 miles. My lungs aren’t working at full capacity, I must admit, and I feel a bit post-viral.
I feel lucky and privileged to have been doubly vaccinated and also to have had a booster shot*, all of which was free at point of access on the NHS. I don’t know how well I would’ve fared if I hadn’t been vaccinated, but I doubt it would have been well given my underlying conditions. By coincidence, I have a free consultation with the doctor later this week to check lung function and other stuff. Hopefully, the doc will tweak my NHS-subsidised prescriptions a little and I’ll be on my way and good to go.
Thank you NHS.
*Not a jab, a shot, I hate that word “jab”.
Incidentally, despite proclamations by our government to suggest that the pandemic is behind us, I know more people who have the disease right now than the total number I knew who had it in the two years previously.
We ate the Spoonbill to extinction in the British Isles in the 17thC. But re-creating lost habitat, conservation work, and a reintroduction scheme is seeing their numbers crawling back.
North Norfolk is a good place to see them these days, but they’re also spreading their wings. Four have been present on one of our fenland nature reserves for weeks now, we saw them on a dull day back in the middle of winter. Kingfisher’s Bridge Nature Reserve.
Out of covid isolation at last, I thought I’d pay them another visit and was told by a birder (might have been a warden) that they weren’t around right now. Ten minutes later, two flew off the main lake and right over my head.
TL:DR – The LepiLED UV lamp is a rather useful, low-power and portable lure for use in citizen science with nocturnal Lepidoptera
UPDATE: Aug/Sep 22 – Have done a couple of trips with the LepiLED and a portable trap. First, to the New Forest and then to Corfe Castle. The first, August trip, was quite productive with a few decent moths and a couple that were new to me, such as Rosy Footman. Fewer moths on the September trip, as you’d expect, but again a couple of new ones, including L-album Wainscot and Tachystola acroxantha.
L-album Wainscot
UPDATE: Feb 22 – All set up and lit up on Friday evening at dusk just for a quick trial. The LepiLED is nice and bright and lasted several hours on the battery pack. However, the night was rather chilly, although the wind had dropped, there was very little visible invertebrate activity in the garden, sadly, and no moths seen. In previous years with fluorescent UV lamps, it has been the same, don’t tend to see any moths in February, activity picks up in mid-March.
Apparently, mothing became something of a lockdown hobby for nature fans who weren’t allowed to head out into their usual patch to watch birds, search for orchids, hug trees, etc. I can’t see I’ve heard much evidence that anyone who may have glanced at it as a hobby back in 2020 has kept up with it…let me know if you did and you have. Either way, I’ve been lighting up since July 2018 after being introduced to the idea by my good friend Rob that summer. It became something of an obsession and subsequent years and I’ve been keen to find ways to see new species each season. I’ve clocked and photographed well over 300 unique moth species in that time.
My German lepidopteral contact Gunnar Brehm of whom I’ve written a couple of times on here in the past has now supplied me with a LepiLED device. The device is basically a cluster of LED lights in a chunky protective canister made of ultraviolet-transparent borosilicate glass that is powered using a portable USB powerpack). It has three wavelength peaks for attracting nocturnal insects. Two peaks in the visible spectrum green (530 nanometres) and blue (450 nm), and a third, peak in the ultraviolet (365 nm). The associated research linked to the peak choice in the design can be found here.
Having spent the first four seasons (July 2018 onwards) of my scientific moth-trapping with conventional fluorescent UV tubes (the kind that are used, ironically, in bug zappers), I am very excited to have the opportunity to try a new approach with the lower power, tuned LepiLED device. The weather is not optimal at the moment, it’s very windy and we just had a squally hailstorm/snow shower. But, once I have set up the kit, I will start lighting up and report back to you with the countless specimens I see each evening as the moth season unfolds over the coming weeks.
I have now used an old actinic trap with its UV fluorescent tube removed to build a new rig for the LepiLED. As I mentioned, the lamp uses a USB power supply so should be portable, I can either hang it like it is in the above photo with a net sack added around the funnel (per Brehm’s field approach) to catch the moths or set it on the ground and use the box from the original trap with egg cartons as is traditional…I’ll try both at some point once the wind has died down and I’ve found a decent waterproof way to have the USB powerpack outside.
A little bit of pseudo-Americana about a hobo with delusions of grandeur hopping from town to town, state to state, narrowly avoiding being grabbed by the railroad bulls. It’s the Great Depression of the 1930s. He panders to his addictions and his dependencies, gambling, drinking, partaking of them unholy angels, until he comes to the end of the line.
You can listen to the piano-led piece on SoundCloud or BandCamp as usual, it’s the 8th addition to my Lifelines mini-album there.
The artwork is somewhat incongrous, it’s a modern, but old-style windpump at Wicken Fen. It’s not dissimilar to the windpumps you might have seen in Western movies set in New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas, the heartlands of the dustbowl. It’s the kind that would spin and creak as the stranger finally leaves town. The photo treatment is also incongruous, a faked daguerrotype that was popular 100 years before the dustbowl of the 1930s.
Originally, I’d thought of writing a song about the old hobos on the railroads and then bringing it up to date with reference to the derailed railways now being tourist hiking trails. I came up with the basicss with no tune to hand and then once again worked with @LillBirdToldMe to hone the lyrics to something apparently meaningful and stronger than what I started with by a country mile. I then pieced together a piano arrangement over which I could lay my vocal.
Just for the record, I’ve travelled in 23 of the 50 US states, worked in West Virginia, and although I’ve never hopped a freight train, I’ve driven along dusty blue highways, I know they’re roads and not railroads. It’s poetic licence…or should that be license?
Dustbowl
Kicking up the railroad dirt, I ride these metal wheels There’s plenty of times those dozy bulls come snapping at my heels They’ve got to let it go when I hop that old freight train Never going to mess with me in this old town again
Some unholy angel going to fix me up alright Heading for the county line making good time tonight I’m riding high in the lowdown, you know I’m on a roll? ’cause kicking back is easy on the blue highways of the dustbowl
Nickel and dime the journeys you can ride from stay to stay Cross that bridge when it gets here, just hopping on that plate The rolling stock’s for rolling as the years turn by and by No tears are shed for the lonely who find no place to die
Nickel and dime the journeys you can ride from state to state Cross that bridge when it gets here, just hopping off that plate The rolling stock’s for rolling as the years turn by and by No tears are shared for the lonely who find a place to die
The times they ain’t for changing, my fortune’s on the wind Can’t make no money doing nothing, for that’d be a sin I’m rattled by the railroad track from dusk to break of day I’ve no Bible, just a bottle to ease my soul away
Riding high in the lowdown, know I’m on a roll! ’cause kicking back is easy on the blue highways out of the dustbowl, of the dustbowl
Nickel and dime the journeys you can ride from stay to stay Cross that bridge when it gets here, just hopping off that plate The rolling stock’s for rolling as the years turn by and by No tears are shared for the lonely. The final place to die
Nickel and dime the journeys you can ride from stay to stay Cross that bridge when it gets here, just hopping on that plate The rolling stock’s for rolling as the years turn by and by No tears are shed for the lonely who find no place to die
Nickel and dime the journeys you can ride from stay to stay Cross that bridge when it gets here, just hopping off that plate The rolling stock’s for rolling as the years turn by and by No tears are shared for the lonely who find a place to die
I did think about hashtagging this post as #SpawnHub but…
As regular Sciencebase readers will know, I re-dug our garden pond in May 2019 (you can read about Operation Sciencebase Pond here, #PondLife). We’ve always seen frogs in the garden even when the pond was filled, but in 2020 there were at least nine using the refreshed pond. Spring of 2021, we had our first spawn in years, noted it on the 5th March, although there may have been some that appeared earlier and sunk.
On 21st February 2022, Matt was in the garden after dark and noticed two pairs of frogs and a dollop of spawn. I took a quick snap of one pair. I know it’s not a big deal, but it is rather gratifying to see new life beginning to emerge thanks to one’s small-scale efforts at wilding a garden. Lot’s or ram’s horn aquatic snails visible in the pond after dark too.
I recommend anyone who has the space (and you don’t need a lot, a Belfast sink or old tin bathtub in a backyard would do) to create a wildlife pond. I am planning my seeding for the garden already having said goodbye to our “digger” in January. I am also hoping to create a sloped edge from the pond that has a slight incline to allow a swamp-type area to develop away from the house. This will provide even greater, smallscape diversity and potentially attract other flora and fauna to the garden. Who knows what might turn up or self-seed.
You can track the nationwide progress of frog spawning here.
TL:DR – I had a whimsical idea that some winter species of moth might be drawn to the whiteness of snowdrop flowers in the dark and so help pollinate these plants. It’s unlikely to be true.
Snowdrops are often considered the heralds of Spring, the first floral buds to open in woodland, churchyard, and garden. Spotting the first snowdrops of the year is often a challenge that has become something of a citizen science climate marker in recent years. We sometimes have a clump of the generic type, if there is such a thing, that pops up in a patio pot around this time of year, but other people report earlier appearances. Of course, there are also strains that naturally flower early too, just to confuse the picture. There were certainly a lot around in early February in various places I was walking and snapping.
Anglesey Abbey snowdrops
Of course, many readers will know all too well that there are many different species and strains of the Galanthus plant. Mrs Sciencebase and I often take the short trip to the National Trust’s Anglesey Abbey in the spring. It is perhaps the nearest place where we might see more than a few of the different types of snowdrop, species, strains, cultivars. Indeed, there’s a cultivar of the common snowdrop Galanthus nivalis, named for the “Abbey”.
Snowdrops generally have a pair of linear leaves sprouting from a subterranean bulb and usually produce a single droopy white flower with a bell shape. There are also wonderfully delicate green markings familiar to anyone who has taken a close look at those flowers. These vary considerably between the different types of snowdrop.
Incidentally, the emergence of green shoots in spring is known as vernalisation from the Latin for spring, vernalis, from where we also get the phrase vernal equinox. But, of course, closely linked to the Latin for green, viridis, from where we get verdant. Anyway, verdant features aside, the flowers of the snowdrop are fairly unusual in that they are mostly white unlike so many other flowers. They also tend to appear well before the northern vernal equinox, which falls on the 20th or 21st March each year.
But, why white, why not red, purple, yellow, blue or indeed any of myriad colours we see in the flowers of other plant species. There are lots of yellow and violet ground cover plants in the spring that bloom before the leaf buds open on the trees. Well, fundamentally, as lovely as we might find flowers, they’re not really meant for us. They evolved over millions of years to attract pollinators, creatures that would assist in the process of transferring pollen from one flower to the receptive parts of another so that fertilisation might occur, seed be set and new plants emerge. Pollinators tend to be invertebrates, bees, famously, but wasps too, butterflies and moths, beetles, flies, and various other types of insect as well as other creatures in less common instances.
Snowdrops emerge when it is rather cold and the earth frozen or even snow encrusted. The name of the most well-known snowdrop species, Galanthus nivalis, means “milk flower of the snow”. In ancient times it was called the white violet by Theophrastus in the 4th Century BCE. The name is not to be confused with the white spring violets, the snowflakes (Leucojum), which resemble the snowdrops but are at least twice as tall and differ in leaf structure.
The time when snowdrops emerge is a time when there are few pollinating insects on the wing with the exception of the odd, exploratory queen bumblebee and perhaps an occasional peacock butterfly emerging early from winter hibernation. Of course, it is worth noting that snowdrops are not native species to the British Isles and in other regions where it is native, Europe and the Middle East, its mileage may vary in terms of pollination opportunities.
There is evidence that while snowdrops do attract bumblebees and flies that pollinate, their downward drooping flowers evolved that drooping posture perhaps to protect them from bad weather. The delicate green markings, it seems, did evolve later to guide pollinators to the business end of the flower. That said, the plants do need pollinators and they do have flowers for that very purpose.
So, going back to the whiter than white nature of those flowers. There is a hypothesis that the reason the snowdrop has such bright white flowers is to attract nocturnal pollinators. Certain species of night-flying moth that might be around in the earliest days of the spring might be attracted to a glowing white apparition shimmering in a moonlit churchyard or woodland and feed on the nectar. In so doing they would, as do many other pollinators, inadvertently pick up pollen on their bodies and transport it unwittingly from flower to flower. Unfortunately, this seems like an almost mythical hypothesis and at the time of writing I have not yet found much evidence to suggest that moths are attracted in this way or indeed that snowdrops glow in the dark at all!
Maybe they mistyped and were after OSRS, meaning Orbital Structural Reference System. They may have got it back to front and were after RES/OS, defined in the US Navy as Reserve-Out of Service.
Perhaps the visitors hit the s instead of the d and they were actually looking for something historical: Osred I of Northumbria (c. 697 – 716), king of Northumbria or perhaps Osred II of Northumbria, (789 to 790).
I thought perhaps that it was a given name as I found at least one Facebook account with Osres used before a surname…who knows?
Well, that was a nice birthday treat…just seen a DHL flight that seemed to be almost overhead, but was actually over Cambourne about 12 miles away. According to the Plane Finder flight tracker it is travelling from Brussels to Miami at an altitude of about 7 miles at 360 knots, so not delivering my presents. The vapour trail did not persist for long, dissipating within ten minutes or so.
The above is a cropped photo taken with a 600mm zoom on a 2/3-frame camera (zoom equivalent to 900mm, digital crop to 1800mm). Odd the perspective one has looking at the jet flying over. It seems so high, but it’s not as high (7 miles) as it is far away (12 miles) if one were to travel from here to the town over which it was flying when I took the photo. So camera to aeroplane distance is about 14 miles, using Pythagoras.
As I finish writing this post I can see the pilot has changed heading slightly and has just flown over the Lake District.
It’s been a while since I posted anything in my Classic Chords series, a selection of (in)famous guitar chords from the world of rock and pop that stand out from the crowd and seem iconic of the artist that used them whether Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, or this one, a B-minor (add 4) [B-D-F#-E). If it had an A in it you could call it a D6/9 as one chording website does, but I don’t think it does so a Bm(add4) it is or an E7-sus2.
This little box of a chord is archetypal Prince funk featuring in the classic…Kiss.
Here’s how it sounds on my Telecaster. I just want your extra time and your…chord:
I asked a “plot generator” website to come up with a story based on a couple of dozen words I input. This is what it came up with:
The sleet that rained like chatting lizards
Matt Trescothik was thinking about Jenny Slaughden again. Jenny was a kind juggler with dirty lips and ugly arms. Matt walked over to the window and reflected on his picturesque surroundings. He had always hated damp Wivenhoe with its energetic, excited estuaries. It was a place that encouraged his tendency to feel puzzled.
Then he saw something in the distance, or rather someone. It was the a kind figure of Jenny Slaughden. Matt gulped. He glanced at his own reflection. He was a deranged, splendid, wine drinker with hairy lips and ample arms. His friends saw him as a bulbous, bewildered brute. Once, he had even rescued a silent old man from a burning building.
But not even a deranged person who had once rescued a silent old man from a burning building, was prepared for what Jenny had in store today.
The sleet rained like chatting lizards, making Matt unstable. Matt grabbed a cursed hat that had been strewn nearby; he massaged it with his fingers. As Matt stepped outside and Jenny came closer, he could see the good smile on her face. Jenny gazed with the affection of 5729 intelligent damaged dogs. She said, in hushed tones, “I love you and I want work.”
Matt looked back, even more unstable and still fingering the cursed hat. “Jenny, I like your toes,” he replied. They looked at each other with ambivalent feelings, like two mighty, magnificent mice rampaging at a very greedy accident, which had jazz music playing in the background and two bold uncles sitting to the beat.
Matt studied Jenny’s dirty lips and ugly arms. Eventually, he took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” began Matt in apologetic tones, “but I don’t feel the same way, and I never will. I just don’t love you Jenny.” Jenny looked barmy, her emotions raw like a grisly, gloopy guitar.
Matt could actually hear Jenny’s emotions shatter into 5009 pieces. Then the kind juggler hurried away into the distance. Not even a glass of wine would calm Matt’s nerves tonight.
THE END
The site also generates reviews (auto praise) of your “story”
“I feel like I know Matt Trescothik. In a way, it feels as though I’ve always known him.” — The Daily Tale
“About as enjoyable as being hailed on whilst taking in washing that has been targeted by seagulls with the squits.” — Enid Kibbler
“Saying the sleet rained like chatting lizards is just the kind of literary device that makes this brilliant.” — Hit the Spoof
