35.8104 years in science communication
News and views about photography, cameras, social media, as well as pointers to Dave Bradley’s photographic output. You can also find me on Imaging Storm, Instagram and Flickr as “sciencebase”
Swifts, swallows, and housemartins (Delichon urbica) never seem to stop their flight once they arrive at our shores in the spring. Today, there was a whole flock of housemartins gathering on overhead wires in Aldreth, Cambridgeshire, to preen and perhaps make their plans for the long and perillous return journey to sub-Saharan Africa. Their summer of breeding and feeding in the British Isles and the European mainland nearing an end.
Apparently, magpies (Pica pica) are invoked in Christian allegory because they look like a composite of a white dove and a black raven…they were alleged to have perched on the prow of The Ark during the Biblical flood and to have cackled and laughed whilst the world drowned…
Then there’s the nursery rhyme, made famous for British children of the 1970s by the ITV rival to Blue Peter, Magpie. The theme tune for the show perhaps usurped earlier, traditional versions of the nursery rhyme from our collective psyche.
One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret, Never to be told. Eight for a wish, Nine for a kiss, Ten for a bird, You must not miss.
There are versions that begin:
One for sorrow, Two for mirth, Three for a funeral And four for birth
and
One for sorrow, Two for mirth Three for a funeral, Four for birth Five for heaven Six for hell Seven for the devil, his own self
Why the magpie gets such a raw deal in mythology and folkore is perhaps down to the sound it makes, the cackling laughter, and perhaps also because it ties together white and black, day and night, good and bad, light and shade…either way it’s just a bird, a corvid, or crow, albeit a clever one.
Listen:
I tried the Prisma app when it first launched, a year or so ago, but then quickly forgot about it. A few friends have been playing with the app recently though and producing some nice filtered photos, so I thought I’d have another play. I picked a recent closeup of a greylag gosling I snapped in Milton Country Park north of Cambridge.
It seemed to be the perfect sort of shot to apply the various mosaics and filters that go by the quite esoteric names of Thota Vaikuntam, Wave (Hokusai-like), Mononoke, Mondrian, Femme (Picasso-like), The Scream (Munch-like), Roy (Lichtenstein-like), Heisenberg (ink sketch) etc. Top left in the contact sheet is my original photo, the others are various Prisma treatments picked to taste from the first few and applied with 100% of the processed image showing rather than blending with the original
Although this is a mobile app I ran an Android emulator known as Blue Stacks on my Windows 10 desktop machine and loaded the app in that to make it easier to pick and choose and to save files rather than messing around with the tiny mobile phone screen and shuttling files using the cloud. Montage was made with “paint.net” and my “dB” logo applied, as ever with Paintshop Pro. having mentioned a hack for uploading photos to Instagram from a Windows desktop machine, Blue Stacks is another alternative, run Instagram as an app within BlueStacks.
The Heisenberg filter, emulates an ink pen sketch and is styled for that TV programme, Breaking Bad
If you’re watching a sunset or a sunrise, occasionally you might see a green flash or green rays from the edge of the sun just as it disappears from view or begins to peek over the horizon. This a purely atmospheric, optical phenomenon, nothing to do with surface activity on the sun. By pure chance I seem to have caught a bit whilst photographing a sunset on the North Norfolk coast recently (one of the only places in the UK where, in the middle of summer, the sun both rises and sets over the sea on the “east coast”. I don’t remember noticing the green flash whilst taking the photos, it’s only now in scanning through the files that I spotted it.
Earthsky has as interesting explanation of the phenomenon:
The green flash is the result of looking at the sun through a greater and greater thickness of atmosphere as you look lower and lower in the sky. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs the yellow and orange colors in white sunlight, and air molecules scatter the violet light. That leaves the red and blue-green light to travel directly toward you. Near the horizon, the sun's light is highly bent or refracted. It's as though there are two suns — a red one and a blue-green one — partially covering each other. The red one is always closest to the horizon, so when it sets or before it rises, you see only the blue-green disk — the green flash.
UPDATE: It’s definitely not a dolphin in Cottenham.
Who else has noticed the large “fish” leaning head down against the back of the legs of the serviceman featured in Cottenham’s War Memorial? Friend of the blog Patrick Coughlan certainly has and he wonders what it’s all about..
According to one web site it perhaps alludes to the designer’s naval past. However, another suggests that it’s not a fish, but a dolphin, a mammal frequently associated with the Grey Funnel Line (the Royal Navy) and marine regiments. Indeed, Cottenham’s war memorial is similar to the one in St John’s Churchyard, Stokesay, Shropshire, which has a large dolphin at the serviceman’s back. Locals there say it is indeed an allusion to the sea but perhaps also to the mythology of dolphins bearing dead heroes in the afterlife.
UPDATE: If you don’t want to or cannot use the hack described below, then simply install a plugin or browser extension that acts as a user-agent switcher. Such an extension basically lets your browser pretend it is an Android phone, an iPhone or indeed any other type of browser. I tried uploading to Instagram with this user-agent switcher extension installed under Chrome and it seemed to work fine.
You have been able to access your Instagram account from a desktop browser for quite some time but you cannot post a photo without a workaround. The workaround is quite straightforward. You simply log into Instagram on your desktop browser, switch to developer mode (right-click “inspect” in Chrome) and choose a mobile device view. Full instructions are here.
I just tried it successfully with my recent kingfisher photo…seems to have worked. Saves me having Instagram running on my phone as it drains the battery really quickly even with the app supposedly “inactive”.
The common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) I wrote about earlier in the year seems not to have taken up long-term residence where I photographed a female in January 2017. Mrs Sciencebase and myself saw others at WWT Welney, as one might expect. But despite watching and occasionally searching, even at a local nature site called Kingfisher Bridge, we didn’t see another until a trip to the National Trust site at Wicken Fen.
Over the pond at the Roger Clarke hide there was a family – male, female and three fledglings. Mrs Sciencebase saw all five while I was staring through a zoom lens and photographing the male who alighted on a branch very close to the hide.
I was hoping to find a current piece of scientific research about kingfishers to share. There was something last year about the kingfisher and other piscivores and tracking the foods they eat, but that wasn’t as interesting as scientific research that suggests that “kingfishers prey upon the most accessible types of prey.” Not quite the earth-shattering breakthrough I was hoping for, basically tells us that kingfishers minimize their energy expenditure when foraging…well, don’t we all?
The common kingfisher’s scientific binomial (the monicker most people call an animal’s “Latin name”) is Alcedo atthis. The word Alcedo is indeed Latin for kingfisher and is derived from the Greek word for kingfisher “halcyon”.
Atthis was the name of a beautiful young woman who in mythology lived on Lesbos and was a favourite of Saphos.
Back at the end of February I spotted a woodpecker high in a tree in our local woodland; great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major). Of course, for me, woodpeckers are more often heard and not seen, the headbanging of this species and the mocking laughter of the green woodpecker or yaffle (Picus viridis). As the weeks went by there was more mocking laughter in the woods as if the yaffles were scoffing at the fact that I couldn’t get a shot at them. I caught one in flight elsewhere, but then gave up on trying to get a photo of greens having spotted a GSWP heading in and out of a high hole in a tree.
Eventually, I saw a chick, saw it grow, saw both parents (Dad with his red nape, Mother with her completely black and white upper body). Coming and going, bring caterpillars and beetles and taking away faecal sacs. Seems there was only one chick to nurture, whereas there are, it seems, usually half a dozen. Anyway, when it fledged, I missed the departure, but did see what looked like a mini-me GSWP a few days later. That was the end of May.
Now, a few weeks later, there’s a lot of noise in a different part of the woodland, holes in trees and the occasional sighting of a green woodpecker chick, and another out of the hole, and then the next morning three or four calling in yet another location. No adults seem to be around, although the books say they do continue to feed them for a couple of weeks after fledging. It’s intriguing. Where are the adults? Do they simply stay away until humans and canines are gone, but if they’re so shy, why do the chicks make such a lot of noise and remain fairly obvious in some of the trees?
The Cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) can be found throughout Britain, anywhere that its larval foodplants, ragwort and groundsel grow, except northern Scotland. Indeed, the species was introduced into New Zealand, Australia and North America to control poisonous ragwort.
The moth is named for the red mineral cinnabar, mercury sulfide, because of the red patches on its predominantly black forewings and its hindwings , edged with black. Like many other brightly coloured moths, it is unpalatable to its would-be predators.
As children, if my sister Sue and I were eating particularly enthusiastically, our Dad would often refer to us as a couple of gannets. I therefore grew up assuming that these seabirds were voracious consumers of sausage rolls and butterfly cakes. They’re not, obviously, their staple diet is fish and rather than eating like pigs, as it were, they are quite graceful divers who plunge into the sea to take their submarine prey.
The name gannet is derived from Old English ganot meaning “strong or masculine”, and that word in turns comes from the same Old Germanic root as our word for a male goose “gander”. Both male and female have some interesting adaptations for their seafood diet. Primarily, they do not possess external nostrils. Instead their nostrils are inside the mouth. Secondly their face and chest is lined with air sacs that act like bubble wrap to cushion the impact when they dive into the water. Their quite prominent eyes are positioned well forward on the face for binocular vision, which allows them to judge distances accurately.
I suspect that the lenses in their eyes either correct for refraction across the air-water boundary or else their brains carry a neural network that calculates the necessary correction as they dive into the water so that they know where the fish they’re targeting actually are rather than where they appear to be from the bird’s eye view in the air above.
The birds photographed here are just a few of the quarter of a million or more nesting on the beautiful but smelly and noisy Bempton Cliffs on the North Sea coast of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.