36.2055 years in science communication
We had to skip our annual panto in 2020, but this year we’re bigger, bolder, and brassier than ever with Treasure Island! Oh yes we are! Here are a few of my snaps (in no particular order) from the orchestra pit where I’m playing guitar, as usual. Find out more about Cottenham Theatre Workshop.
Paid just our second visit of the year to Lackford Lakes Nature Reserve in the hope of seeing the Siskins that had been reported there this week. We stopped off at the ringing hut where two of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust team had netted various birds (Treecreeper, Blue, Great and Marsh Tits, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Robin, and others) and were carefully recording the recatches and ringing any new catches for their conservation efforts.
So, what did we see on the day? 46 species not in order of sighting but loosely grouped:
You may have noticed I wrote and recorded yet another song – it was originally entitled Footprints in the Sand. It was angst-ridden and full of random allusions and imagery, as is my wont. I added the word “No” to the title having used a photo of beach on which there were no footprints and I thought that would make it even more angst ridden, suggesting that the song’s protagonists were hankering after the beach but unable to be there for whatever reason.
As I mentioned earlier, the song started off in my usual way, simple chord progression over which I ad libbed a few words…I tightened the words up after I laid down a quick demo so I wouldn’t forget the tune I’d come up with. It started out as being about coping with grief following the death of a loved one. But, it somehow morphed into thinking about the kind of grief that migrants suffer in leaving their homeland in search of a better, safer life. Their attempts to reach foreign shores and to land on beaches from flimsy boats. There is also a kind of allusion to regrets migrants might feel in reaching that foreign shore.
Anyway, let me spell out what I think I thought I meant in the song, I’m reverse engineering it really, as many of the words arose spontaneously and from my subconscious.
The days are colder and the nights drawn in No barricades of comfort, now the aching will begin
After the clocks go back in October, my mother would often remark on how quickly it seemed “the nights are drawing in”. I made the phrase a finite point, the nights are “drawn in”, in perpetuity, you might say, it’s always going to be dark from now on. The warmth of the summer, a kind of psychological barricade definitely long gone and the pain of the cold, dark days now starting.
I'm running down an unlit corridor The pain can chase me, but I head out through an open door
This was a nightmare image of the fear of death, I think, and the possibility of somehow getting away from that pain and emerging into the light.
And you won't find a clearer path today If you turn your back on the future, try to run away
Basically, don’t dwell on the past, try to look to the future, but also live in the present, which brings us to the next couplet
And, there are times when you can plan your day But the tide will turn and wash your wishes away
Moving through grief it seems very hard to think of getting on with normal stuff, but you have to, but it’s worth remembering that your romantic dreams written with sticks and stones on the memory of a beach are always washed away by the rising tide.
But I can see the warning signs ahead They don't deter me, they draw me on instead
This sounds like being well aware of the psychological damage that might occur in the wake of trauma but being pulled along by it instead of finding a safe haven.
And I should say that we can choose a tougher path The path of least resistance was never going to last
I think this line in the pre-chorus is where the notion of it being about my grief morphed into something broader about migrants and people escaping. Always easier to stick to the well-worn track, but even they don’t offer an escape a tougher route has to be forged in some circumstances.
Now, we’re at the chorus:
Walk with me, I'll take you by the hand Can't promise anything like a promised land But, I’ll give you love, though nothing's planned Walk with me, leave just our footprints in the sand
Offering a helping hand, partnership, promising something but not necessarily the dream, maybe just a chance to walk in the sand, which would be a bit of a dream at the moment, to be honest.
The summer comes around and the days are long I thought I'd moved on but something feels so wrong
What if time isn’t a healer, what if there’s still pain long after the dark winter days when the summer clicks into view again? That was me worrying for my future self, I think.
And there you're kneeling with your head in your hands Still can't believe we found ourselves in this foreign land
An allusion to the despair felt by those hoping for a better life reaching that new world, but struggling when the reality is not what they thought they had promised themselves.
Like I said, angst-ridden and grim. But, else would you expect, I’ve written and recorded dozens of songs over the last few years and they’re almost always a bit depressing lyrically even if the tunes sometimes get a bit funky. Any questions? No? Good. I’ll let you have a listen to the song (also on Bandcamp) and you can comment at me on Twitter.
Incidentally, it struck me after recording that at least two of those lyrics are half-borrowed from a couple of other songs. “I can feel the warning signs” is in Half the World Away by Oasis, while “eyes cast down on the path of least resistance” is in A Farewell to Kings by Rush. You can check out this page for a very incomplete list of what I’d call my musical influences.
The days are colder and the nights drawn in
No barricades of comfort, now the aching will begin
I’m running down an unlit corridor
Pain can chase me, but I head out through an open door
And you won’t find a clearer path today
If you turn your back on the future, try to run away
And, there are times when you can plan your day
But the tide will turn and wash your wishes away
But I can see the warning signs ahead
They don’t deter me, they draw me on instead
And I should say that we can choose a tougher path
The path of least resistance was never going to last
Walk with me, I’ll take you by the hand
Can’t promise anything like a promised land
But, I’ll give you love, though nothing’s planned
Walk with me, leave just our footprints in the sand
The summer comes around and the days are long
I thought I’d moved on but something feels so wrong
And there you’re kneeling with your head in your hands
Still can’t believe we found ourselves in this foreign land
Though I could see the warning signs ahead
They didn’t stir me to turn away instead
And though I said that we should choose a tougher path
The path of least resistance was never at our backs
As usual, words, music, and production by David Bradley
Vocals, guitars, bass, keyboard, percussion mixing dB/
Available on Soundcloud to stream and on Bandcamp to stream or download
Started off in the usual way, simple chord progression over which I ad libbed a few words…the words tightened up and something that was originally perhaps about getting through grief but maybe not getting through it came out the other side as an allusion to migrant regrets…I think.
Back in the day, I ran numerous specialist websites. Long-time visitors to Sciencebase may well recall some of them: chemspy.com, sciencetext.com, reactivereports.com, and sciscoop.com
They are all now simply redirecting to Sciencebase itself. I had hoped to sell on those accounts via the domain registrar, but have decided to offer them to any reader who cares to take them on for a negotiable fee. Please get in touch via db@ sciencebase.com if you’re interested in acquiring any of those domains.
The Sprawler moth seems to spread its forelegs wide when it’s at rest on a chunk of wood. Its delicate patterning gives it something of a resemblance of a bark surface, perhaps. But, it is its scientific name that is a little curious and needs further explanation.
Lepidopterists originally referred to The Sprawler as Cassinia after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini who lived from 1625—1712. It was first cited by Hufnagel in 1766. But, why was it named after an astronomer? The answer lies in the behaviour of the moth’s larva, its caterpillar. When startled the little green beast rears up its spine-covered head as if gazing heavenwards. Why it does this is something of a mystery, but then much about insects remains mysterious. Perhaps the behaviour is enough to fool a predator into thinking the larva might bite back.
The Cassinia genus was dropped in recent times for the term Asteroscopus, which is a more generic term for a star gazer, one might say. The astero part from the Greek for star and scopus from the word for watching (see also telescope). So, the full scientific binomial for The Sprawler is Asteroscopus sphinx (Hufnagel, 1766).
UPDATE: I tested this approach on Sciencebase and another site and have come to the conclusion that such headline writing only matters in terms of click-through rate, that is improved, but initial hits don’t seem to be improved at least in the short term, so whether or not it has a beneficial SEO effect remains to be seen.
Headline writing for newspapers and magazines was always the preserve of the subbies, the sub-editors. A reporter, journalist, columnist or another writer would file their copy, it would be bashed into basic shape and length by an editor. Then, a subbie would tear into it, weeding out logical inconsistencies in the flow of text, trapping factual errors, adding puns, dismantling potentially libellous statements, checking the grammar and spelling, cutting it to length, adding extra puns, removing the byline, adding the byline back in, and then removing it again. Finally, adding a headline and perhaps a few extra puns, and strapline with plenty of puns.
Things have changed now that almost everything we read is online. Space constraints are no longer the issue. The issue is search engine optimisation, SEO, and converting eyeballs seeing a headline into clicks on that headline to open the page and get those eyeballs and click action on to the advertising within.
First, we had keyword stuffing, which was usually out of site and the headlines followed the traditional form for years. Next came clickbait, of which there are two flavours. One that baits the reader to click with a catchy enticement and keywords in which they’re interested. Another, a kind of bait and switch on a par with Rickrolling in which an attractive headline makes the eyeball to click conversion, but the content within isn’t what the headline suggested, bait and switch clickbait, you might call it.
Now, we are in a new golden age of headline writing, but sadly, the subbies aren’t happy as puns are out. There is no point in making parochial puns, idiotic idioms, or archaic cultural allusions when one’s vast new audience is international. Your native tongue and clever wordplay won’t work for every putative reader from those just starting to learning your language as a second, third, or fourth language and even for those in the upper echelons of multilinguistics.
So headlines these days have to be self-explanatory rather than self-indulgent. They have to make sense on a first read without anyone having to reach for a dictionary to interpret them. They have to be conversational, a dialogue between reader and writer are, in the age of social media, all-important, essential in fact. The writer must now recognise not that they are talking to a vast, abeyant audience of word worshippers, but rather talking one-to-one, direct in dialogue, with their reader. A singular reader is the audience even if there are millions of them (I wish).
A couple of excellent infographics published with an NPR article entitled “Write digital headlines both readers and Google will love” summarises brilliantly everything I am talking about here and more. It explains the modern penchant for long, conversational headlines of which we are all seeing more and more these days as well as the SEO-led nature of the URL for those headlines that take your eyeball, via your web browser or app, to the page in question.
As you can see, the title of this article is
Here's how to write a clickable headline without using clickbait
The web address, the URL, for it is not what you’d perhaps expect though. It’s not
https://sciencebase.com/heres-how-to-write-a-clickable-headline-without-using-clickbait
No. The URL is as follows, which is much more SEO ready for Google and other search engines
https://www.sciencebase.com/howto-write-clickbait-seo-headlines.html
Now, I’ve been a science writer, journalist, copywriter, editor for more than three decades. I hope I’ve learned a few things about the trade, in that time. But, I’m no high-faluting expert and maybe my interpretation of the NPR isn’t entirely accurate. You can read it for yourself and learn your own lessons.
The key points are that your new-form headlines should do the following:
From the SEO perspective the article’s URL should:
I am planning to use the techniques a little more with my own writing on sciencebase.com to see if I can draw the crowds a little more. There was a time when daily unique visitors to sciencebase numbered in their thousands, these days, that’s more like the monthly numbers. Of course, back then (1999 onwards) Sciencebase was one of very few science news sites and social media was not yet a reality. Indeed, when I first established Elemental Discoveries, which was the proto-sciencebase, it was *the* only popular science news website as far as I know. So, I have hopes, but they’re not high. We’ll see.
Also, for anyone who hit this page searching for SEO and was expecting a short-eared owl, you shouldn’t be disappointed. Here’s one I snapped earlier.
*Subbies are almost redundant now.
UPDATE: The Sprawler turned up in early November, bringing the total up to 36 new for the garden in 2021. No December moth yet, at the time of writing, sadly.
These Lepidoptera were all new for my back garden in Cottenham drawn to a 40 Watt ultraviolet “actinic” lamp on the night noted. Any of dubious ID I had confirmed from a photo by Sean Foote better known on Twitter as @MothIDUK to whom I am very grateful for the assistance and have put a tip in his tip jar.
The 35 species new for the garden in 2021 are as follows
7/3/21 – The Satellite
20/4/21 – Agonopterix purpurea* (To Myo lure)
10/5/21 – Esperia sulphurella
31/5/21 – Mottled Pug
2/6/21 – Brown Silver-line
4/6/21 – Hypena rostralis
4/6/21 – Buttoned Snout
6/6/21 – Aethes tesserana
6/6/21 – Red-belted Clearwing*
12/6/21 – Currant Clearwing*
13/6/21 – Yellow-legged Clearwing*
13/6/21 – Argyresthia curvella
14/6/21 – Red-tipped Clearwing*
16/6/21 – Orange-tailed Clearwing
24/6/21 – Hedya salicella
25/6/21 – Mompha ochraceella
4/7/21 – Aleimma loeflingiana
4/7/21 – Cnephasia agg.
11/7/21 – Plain Pug
15/7/21 – Dark Umber
19/7/21 – Raspberry Clearwing*
24/7/21 – Leek Moth
24/7/21 – Scarce Silver-lines
2/8/21 – Dewick’s Plusia (I’d only seen this moth previously in Greece)
4/8/21 – Helcystogramma rufescens
9/8/21 – Toadflax Brocade (Had larva in the garden in 2019)
19/8/21 – Yellow Belle
21/8/21 – Tawny-barred Angle
22/8/21 – Common Wave
23/8/21 – Udea lutealis
24/8/21 – Square-spot Rustic
1/9/21 – Aethes smeathmanniana
5/9/21 – Swammerdamia pyrella
19/9/21 – Beet Moth
10/10/21 – Acleris schalleriana
9/11/21 – The Sprawler
*Drawn to pheromone lure during the day, rather than actinic light at night. If non-target then pheromone is named
Numbers were very much down on my previous three seasons of trapping, never getting to more than a couple of hundred moths on any given lighting-up night and usually of 30-40 species on such nights. When I last counted (2/9/21) I’d seen about 4760 moths of 260 species. In 2019, I counted 12000 specimens and hadn’t lit up anywhere near as frequently in that year as I have during 2021. Early to mid-September got quite busy with a lot of Large Yellow Underwings and Setaceous Hebrew Characters etc.
The spring was cold and wet, summer was a bit of a washout too, but we had two or three warm spells in September.
A Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) flew into Berry Fen when we visited a couple of days ago to settle among the eight Little Egrets feeding there. In so doing it spooked two of the six Glossy Ibis that were feeding on the edge of a flooded area and they flew off to join four others of that species.
Apparently, there were fifteen additional Cattle Egret in a flock on the same patch the day after we visited, which is the largest recorded gathering of this species in Cambridgeshire. A county record, in other words. The bird is ostensibly an African species that has been extending its range over the last decade or two because of habitat opportunity and climate change.
UPDATE: There were a record 57 Cattle Egret at this site at the beginning of November. I have also now seen four at RSPB Ouse Fen on the Reedbed Trail side close to Over.
UPDATE: Four Spoonbills at Kingfisher Bridge Nature Reserve during November 2021. 15 February 2022: Spoonbill at Smithy Fen.
Back in the early 1990s when we visited Botswana and Zimbabwe we saw lots of egrets and then were very surprised to see one or two on the North Norfolk coast in subsequent years. Little Egrets are, almost 30 years later rather commonplace. Similarly, the Great White Egret is seen in many parts now and a sighting is no longer considered particularly notable. I heard that part of the reason is that there is an abundance of red swamp crayfish in the lakes of northern France which have provided a food source and hopping off point for this species. The presence of at least a couple of dozen Glossy Ibis on our patch during the last year or so, may similarly be due to individuals spreading their wings from a known breeding colony in Southern Spain. The experts may know more, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure.
Listen on BandCamp and SoundCloud
Having put together a song for Mrs Sciencebase that was about some of our shared experiences and made some kind of lyrical sense – The people we can be – I thought I’d go back to my usual unintelligible, stream-of-consciousness approach to lyric writing for my next song.
Basically, start a tune in demo form, ad lib some lyrics, burble a few of them incomprehensibly, write them down as best I can and then edit into a useable form for a proper recording. The only difference with this one is that I had a go at recording it using a Wikiloops instrumental backing track called Easy Come, Easy Go and the chorus morphed because of that to use that phrase rather than my allusion to repairing my head. In the end, I didn’t use the Wikiloops track and started from scratch with electric rather than acoustic guitar and built percussion and bass and then acoustic on top of my demo.
The title’s a bit of a cliche, but a little bit more understandable than the original and provides a stronger hook than what I’d thought of originally.
It’s on BandCamp and SoundCloud as usual.
Easy come, easy go
There’s a tension in the air
Always someone being so unkind
Never found the right time to make that repair
To my confounded state of mind
Didn’t see you out and about
You couldn’t bear to breathe the air
You’re clued up there is no doubt
But you missed your cue ’cause you just don’t care
And, I feel
That something is missing
The lonely aren’t kissing anyone
Just before the dawn, I will know
If it’s easy come, then it’s easy go
Did I mention it today?
They’re always looking for a fight?
Never found the peaceful way
To resolve the wrong from the right
And I feelThat someone is blessing
those second guessing everyone
Before the sunrise I will know
If it’s easy come, then it’s easy go
But, I feel
That we’re all missing
That we’re lonely and we’re messing with our heads
To think we really ought to know
That if it’s easy come, then it’s easy go
NB It was originally to be tacked on to my After the Lockdown album, but I’ve changed my mind about the three songs I’ve written since my mother’s death and they’re now part of a newly released Lifelines EP.
As usual, words and music by yours truly. Vocals, acoustic, electric, and bass guitars, percussion, production, mixing, and artwork too.