Author: David Bradley

Marsh Harrier and more at RSPB Ouse Fen

Recently, there have been several Marsh Harriers (Circus aeruginosus) over the reedbed trail at RSPB Ouse Fen, reached from Needingworth in Cambridgeshire. It’s a little over 4 km from the Needingworth reserve car park to the far reaches of this trail but you do get to walk through the main RSPB reserve, which I’ve mentioned before and cross the Great River Ouse at a sluice bridge. I was lucky enough to see some of them, male and female, on a visit to the reserve in early May 2018. Also showing well were several warblers (Sedge Warbler, Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat), Common Tern (Sterna hirundo), Hobby (Falco subbuteo) hunting dragonflies and other airborne insects, a distant courting pair of Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), a couple of Kestrels (Falco tinnunculus), Oystercatcher (Haematopus ostralegus).

Pictured above is a male Marsh Harrier hunting over cow parsley at the far end of the reedbed trail. The water tower in the background of the shot is near the village of Over, I believe, although I cannot quite pinpoint it on the map.

Below is a Hobby one of several over the reserve, hunting dragonflies, the bird having migrated from its wintering in warmer climes. It’s relatively easy to photograph them as they reel around the vast fenland skies but as soon as they stoop on their prey they accelerate quickly, so feel quite privileged to have caught this one just as it’s about to grab its lunch.

Common Tern, one of a pair, although there were a few more around, hovering over one of the reed-lined waterways.

A pair of Cuckoos cavorting in the distance. I estimate I was about 500 metres away from them, but could clearly hear their call and got several more shots with a 600mm zoom. If you look closely, you can just see a male Reed Bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus) perched to the left of the pair. As far as I know, Cuckoos prefer warbler nests and presumably, the Reed Bunting’s eggs are safe from these brood parasites.

There have been several sightings of Cranes over the last few months, we’ve seen them at WWT Welney, RSPB Lakenheath, and RSPB Nene Washes, and now one, overhead, at Ouse Fen.

Pictured below is a female Marsh Harrier with identification tags on its wings. I contacted David at RSPB Lakenheath (he runs the Twitter account RSPBFens to find out more about the specimen.

“The RSPB have been wing tagging harriers but other organisations have also been tagging them,” he told me. “According to Simon, our local bird ringer, this bird was ringed (6A) west of Norwich as a female chick in June 2017.” It was seen locally throughout August to October and then seen on 7th January 2018 at Salceda Marshes, near Guarda, Pontevedra, Spain. It has been back and forth between Norfolk and Spain ever since, last update was for October 2021, Ilha da Xunqueira in Ponetevedra.

There were also some waterfowl but not many in this part of the reserve (Coot (2-3), Mallard (a couple of pairs), Tufted Duck (small flock, 7-8), Great Crested Grebe (one pair), Mute Swan (2 or 3), Pochard (1), Greylag Geese (two flocks of a dozen or so), Lesser Black-backed Gull, Black-headed Gull). Also, heard but not seen Yaffle (Green Woodpecker), Reed Warbler, Grasshopper Warbler, booming Bitterns.

Royal Wedding Dress Scandal

This week’s most important #FakeNews is about a wedding.

The truth is that Meghan Markle’s wedding dress didn’t cost 300 grand, it was a third of that and apparently she’s paying for it “herself”, anyway.

The disingenuous reference to the Grenfell tragedy in the fake news stories is scurrilous. Fact was the people who built that tower didn’t spend the requisite amount of money to use fire-retardant cladding!

It’s also worth pointing out that Princess Diana’s dress cost more nominally, but that was almost 40 years ago, inflation since then means that Ms Merkle’s dress should have cost 350 grand, if she’d wanted the equivalent of Harry’s mother.

To be frank, I’m not interested in royal weddings, but fake news and shameful “journalism” of this kind persists and is exactly the sort of lie that piles up and persuades people to vote for the likes of Trunt and Brexit…

Life Advice

In no particular order:

  1. Unplug and leave your phone and headphones at home
  2. Scamper, stroll or scramble up and down hills
  3. Dive into and swim in the sea, lake, river, swimming pool (pref outdoor)
  4. Take brisk (or leisurely) walks on beaches and get your feet wet
  5. Walk through the countryside
  6. Visit towns and cities
  7. Talk to people face to face
  8. Laugh a lot, cry occasionally
  9. Wash your hands properly
  10. Don’t blend fruit and veg and avoid smoothies (obesity-in-a-bottle)
  11. Seek help if you cannot avoid using your drug of choice in true moderation
  12. Don’t breathe the products of incineration nor mineral dusts
  13. Learn a musical instrument and/or join a choir/band
  14. Use the stairs (going up and down)
  15. Remember, but don’t dwell on the past
  16. Don’t worry (too much) about the future
  17. Live for the day, Carpe diem (Seize the fish)
  18. Take an interest
  19. Don’t get hung up on lists and data
  20. Don’t vote for fascists, they will nullify this advice
  21. Don’t give advice unless asked for it and even then don’t expect anyone to heed it

Reach Fair 2018

There are older traditions but Reach Fair stretches back a long way. It was in the year 1201 AD that the annual Reach Fair was inaugurated. The Burgesses of Cambridge were granted a Royal Charter by King John that year to hold such a fair. It begins at midday with a proclamation that bars inappropriate activity and heralds the activities and festivities that will take place. The proclamation is then followed by the throwing of coins for the children. Anyway, it still happens, they only cancelled it twice in the whole of its history and that was in the 17th Century when there was something of a skirmish taking place in this part of the world, the English Civil War.

It was a gloriously sunny and warm English countryside Bank Holiday Monday afternoon (a first this century?), so what better place to be without too much travelling? Amazing the number of friends who agreed with our plan!

More photos and the fun of the fair in the Sciencebase Flickr album.

The picturesque village of Reach (Reche) is on the edge of the Fens East of the university city of Cambridge at the North end of Devil’s Dyke (6th Century) and about 2.4 km West of Burwell. Reach was important in early Anglo-Saxon and Viking times with goods such as the chalky stone known as Clunch being loaded at its hythe (wharf) for transport into the fen waterway system from as early as 1100 AD. Reach Lode is a Roman canal, still visible and still navigable.

The village name has also been spelt Reche, derived from the Old English word raec and means “place on the raised strip of land”.

Dino’s Rise and Fall

For me as a kid, you couldn’t beat a good space book, if it was stars and planets and the almost science fiction world of the Space Shuttle (in the early 1970s it was still a dream). I say that but a good shark book would come close, or better still one that had dolphins and whales too. Then again, one with magnets and motors, circuits and pulleys might occupy my time and at least in my pre-teens I had a chance of playing with magnets, but not swimming with dolphins. But, if I remember rightly, those subjects were not the top of the list. Dinosaur books were the top of the list.

Landing on my desk today is Steve Brusatte’s latest tome and it goes by the rather enticing title of “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World“. What more could my pre-teen self want? Well, admittedly it is mostly words and far fewer pictures than I would’ve preferred at that age, but these days I can cope with lots of words. Brusatte is one of the world’s leading palaeontologists and he evolves the engrossing story of the rise and demise of the dinosaurs from the dominant place in life on earth to their end 66 million years ago.

Of course, Chapter 8 reminds us, to my delight and my current sciencey preoccupation, that the dinosaurs never really went away. Indeed, the descendants of the theropod dinosaurs of which Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps the most famous and infamous example, are alive and well to this day and flapping their feathered wings all around the world. All ~10,500 species of them…the birds.

Brusatte has discovered and named 15 new species of dinosaur and led groundbreaking (literally?) studies of the rise and fall of these animals.

Everyone emotes in emoji

Everyone uses emoji in their communications now, right? Maybe not. I suspect that a lot more people know about simple emoticons (smilies) than know what you’re suggesting when you post the eggplant (aubergine) emoji. Moreover, despite proclamations that emoji are somehow the modern version of hieroglyphics, they’re really not.

For a start, I’m not even sure that the Ancient Egyptians had aubergines…although they were cultivated in southern and eastern Asia in prehistory and the first recipe for them appeared in a document around 544 CE. But, more importantly, try saying the following phrase unravelled from ancient hieroglyphics with nothing but emoji and trapping each nuance and losing none of the subtlety and philosophy of the phrase:

Do not be proud because you are wise! Consult with the ignorant as with the learned!

RSPB Ouse Fen again

There were reports of a migrant Spoonbill on passage at RSPB Ouse Fen (Needingworth, Cambridgeshire). So, first day after the rains, I went looking. Didn’t see any Platalea leucorodia (had seen a pair at RSPB North Warren, Aldeburgh, in May 2017 though). However, the Whitethroats (Sylvia communis) were out in force (usually arrive 2-3 weeks after the other warblers) as were the European Green Woodpeckers (Picus viridis).

There were also lots of Chiffchaff, Blackcap, Willow Warbler (all seen and heard) and Reed and Garden Warblers (heard but not seen), a Wren, Jay, Little Grebe, Grey Heron, Robin, Long-tailed Tits, a couple of Buzzards (Buteo buteo).

I didn’t sight the Marsh Harrier one fellow walker had seen. But, there was also a Turtle Dove turring in a grove and a Cuckoo cuckooing somewhere on the patch. Saw neither. However, I did see a Cuckoo perched on an overhead wire on the drive home, just outside Rampton.

The Mute Swans and Coots are still on their nests, but the Canada and Greylag Geese are chugging around the lakes with goslings in their flotillas now. No terns, but several Swallows, a couple of Housemartins, and my first sighting of the year of a Swift (Apus apus)

Above photographs by David Bradley in order from top to bottom:

European Green Woodpecker
Chiffchaff
Canada Geese and goslings
Swift
Whitethroat
Coot
Mute Swan
Greylag Geese and goslings

Classic Chords #24 Chic Good Times

TL:DR – The Good Times chords for the chorus, according to Nile Rodgers himself when he plays it live, are Em7, E7sus4, Em11 at the seventh fret, and A13 at the fifth fret. That Em11 is an A7sus4 at the fifth fret on the original recording. The verses are Em7 and Asus4, A.

My band (C5) are busy rehearsing for upcoming pub gigs and a couple of parties. We often jam on the CHIC song Good Times just because it’s a classic to funk out to. But, a couple of weeks ago we made the decision to arrange it properly and add it to the band’s repertoire. Of course, being an uberfan of Nile Rodgers I wanted to get it just right. I thought I thought I had the four chords he uses…been jamming on them for years.

Simple.

Except it was not so simple.

All the online chords charts and tutorials online have something akin to that progression although they seem to jump from the Em7/E7sus4 to an Asus4 (I had that as a much jazzier and more fitting Dmaj7) and then an A13. In fact, attempting to get closer and closer to the harmonies Nile is playing you can hear that the Em7 and the E7sus4 are correct, as is the A13, but that bridging harmony is off by a note or two. Turns out he’s using an Em11 to get him from the main riff to the resolved chord on the fourth beat (and adding a few grace notes in between). Nile spells it out in detail in the video below, from 6’30”. At least that’s the case when he plays it live.  That Em11 is an A7sus4 at the fifth fret on the original recording. The verses are Em7 and Asus4, A.

In addition, as is well known to CHIC aficionados but not necessarily to some funk guitarists who strum across the width of the fretboard with each stroke or use the three high strings only, Nile rarely does that, he grabs triads with his pick and bounces from the higher notes in chunks to the bass notes, chunking and chopping in sixteenths with lots of left-hand muting and plenty of percussive gaps. It sounds like funk, but it’s jazz, man, jazz…

So, the chord chart should look really like the one you see above. If you’ve not been playing it like that, you’ve not been playing it right. Basically, cycles around all four chords in the choruses, but lays back a lot and shuttles between the Em and the A for the verses.

And, here’s a quick burst on my Tele, demo’d in my home studio:

This song has an almost 40-year history and was one of the first to be sampled and sampled and sampled again from Rapper’s Delight and on and on. No the wonder he calls his guitar The Hitmaker.

Here’s Nile explain how he plays Good Times and a whole bunch of other songs

If you enjoyed this Classic Chord, check out the series, which includes the proper chords for Tom Sawyer by Rush, The Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, Times Like These from Foo Fighters and many more.

Second mix of my demo, this time with a MIDI track of Nard’s bassline