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TL:DR – Information about and photos of local Short-eared Owls.
I’ve discussed the Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus, previously. Beautiful bird that occasionally overwinters in the UK, having spent the summer months in Iceland, Russia, or Scandinavia.
We are lucky to see them hunting on the fens sometimes. These photos were taken in the hour before sunset at NT Burwell Fen. There were three shorties hunting.
We usually anticipate their arrival in October, November, but they can sometimes arrive earlier and will stay until early April. There were half a dozen at Burwell a couple of years ago and one of them with damage to its wing (it could still fly) stayed through the summer months.
Shorties will hunt over fens, grasslands, marshes, and other open habitats. In my experience, the best time to catch sight of them hunting is in the hour before sunset, but others report seeing them at any time during the day when the owls hunt small mammals such as voles, mice, and shrews.
The owl has a distinctive, buoyant, and “floppy” flight style, they usually follow a “flap-flap-glide” flight pattern, and will often perch on fence posts or bushes, looking out for moving prey. They will often perch quite close to birdwatchers and photographers.
Also see on the same trip to Burwell Fen – Peregrine (in flight over the Wicken side), several Common Kestrel, Barn Owl, and Common Buzzard.
TL:DR – Gravel pits that have been converted into nature reserves can offer some lovely scenery and the opportunity to see interesting and even rare wildlife.
There are lots of old gravelworks in our area some of which are earmarked as nature reserves as I’ve mentioned before, a couple of times, and some are used as fisheries. Where there’s water and reeds and trees there will most likely be birds regardless of the anglers or visitors.
Great White Egret perched on a half-submerged tree stump
On this almost sunny Friday morning, I headed to the fishery lakes adjacent to Meadow Lane, St Ives – known to some as Meadow Lane Pits. I was hoping to see and perhaps get photos of the five Smew, a type of diving duck, that had turned up there earlier in the week. Birders had reported three drakes (males) and two females, known among birders as “redheads” for their obviously different appearance to the males.
A female “redhead” Smew flanked by two drakes, an additional redhead and another drake were on the water nearby
I parked up and trekked around the muddy footpaths, trouser bottoms tucked unfashionably into my walking socks, to try and catch sight of the Smew. En route I saw (in no particular order) Tufted Duck, Black-headed Gull, Bullfinch, Starling, Blackbird, Gadwall, Little Egret, Goldeneye, Egyptian Goose, Wigeon, Great White Egret, Great Crested Grebe, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Grey Heron, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Coot, Cormorant, and at some point quite early on, one or two of the Smew, and then all five.
Great Crested Grebe in Winter plumage
Old gravel pits, particularly those that have been allowed to fill with water, can be nice spots for birdwatching for various reasons. First, there is the potential for habitat diversity. Gravel pits can develop a mix of habitat types, including open water, reedbeds, mudflats, and vegetated areas. This can attract a variety of bird species but it also cultivates large numbers of invertebrates as well as small mammals, amphibia, and fish which can all thrive there if given the chance.
Where old gravelpits have been managed there are often large areas that are not open to the public, so there can be far less disturbance to the wildlife in those areas and along the margins this spills over into the publicly accessible areas. As they mature, these old gravel pits often become tranquil areas of scenic beauty. Many are rather peaceful, hardly see any visitors, have attractive vegetation and in short, the overall combination of habitat diversity, food availability, and lack of disturbance make them excellent spots for a bit of peace and quiet and a spot of birdwatching.
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.
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, 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.
Shorelarks in flight, Holkham Gap
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blackcap overwintering in the UK
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.
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 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…
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.
TL:DR – Anecdote is not evidence, but I feel like I gained some benefit from taking a multivitamin supplement, it probably compensated for poor absorption of iron and perhaps other vitamins caused by one of my prescription medicines.
I’ve always been wary of taking vitamins and other supplements. There are good reasons not to do so, if you have a reasonably balanced diet. Excesses of some vitamins and minerals can lead to problems like kidney and liver damage, kidney stones, and some can interfere with the absorption and activity of prescription medicines.
However.
I have been feeling rather tired in recent months, becoming unaccustomedly exhausted after even light activity. I’m talking after a short walk, but sometimes even just after a shower. Was it long-COVID, was it my medication, was it just me getting older?
Mrs Sciencebase had an iron and vitamin supplement for an unrelated reason and suggested I try it, see if it would help.
Well, I took the recommended dose for a few days, not expecting to experience much improvement. Amazingly though, I felt a remarkable change in what people commonly refer to as “energy levels”. Activities that had started to become a tiring chore became a lot easier, I hopped on my bike and did a decent half an hour’s cycling without breaking a sweat, a couple of days after that I did an hour, at speed, and aside from being thirsty when I got back to base, I was fine.
I know anecdote is not evidence, but honestly, it seems like too much of a coincidence that I felt like I had recovered from apparent chronic exhaustion within three days or so of taking the supplement. Moreover, when I look at the side effects of one of my medications, it does suggest that tiredness and various other side effects are associated with reduced absorption of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). So, I’m sticking with the supplement for a while longer.
Intriguingly, the effects do not seem to have been wholly physical though. Most people have had a tough few years, but there has been significant family loss and stress here that happened in the middle of covid, is ongoing, and I have not been what you might call the happiest bunny in the warren, for a long tim, I must confess. Stuff that I usually really enjoy has not, on too many occasions, brought me much joy in recent months. I shrugged it off as being the grief and worry…but…a few days ago, I felt like the proverbial cloud had lifted, and even though it was a drizzly day, the sun seemed to be shining again.
Could this too have been a supplement fix? Well, there are many, many biochemical pathways that are linked to mental health, disturbance in some of those are known to be connected to depression. These various pathways need various micronutrients to work properly. Might I have been deficient in an essential biochemical component? Have I now replenished my supplies and rebooted those pathwats?
Perhaps the brain, when faced with deficiency, goes into some kind of lockdown to make you mope, reduce motivation, and so activity? And, when that lockdown is prolonged and deep, could it also begin to impinge on other pathways to the detriment of mental health. If so, I wonder if this is exacerbated in the wake of a double-dose of grief accompanied by a lot of not unwarranted stresses and anxieties.
I don’t know. Like I say, anecdote is not evidence. I’d rather not take the supplements for a prolonged period of time, so I will be having a chat with my doc at my annual review about my current medication. I will tell them that what I do know is that I’ve been taking a daily dose of micronutrients and feel physically much fitter than I have for a long time and mentally far brighter.
As a footnote, I shared this post on my Mastodon and a couple of people suggested that my experience may be due to my “taking control” or simply a placebo effect. Well, that is a possibility, of course. However, I’ve had symptoms for a long time that coincide with several mentioned on the documentation accompanying one of my medications and I feel that reversion to the mean/norm (basically, the placebo effect) was so sudden and coincided with taking the supplement that there must have been a physical effect of doing so rather than my spontaneously recovering…but, again, anecdote is not evidence, either way. One cannot do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on oneself.
As regulars to the Sciencebase site will know, I’ve been doing some ad hoc wilding of our garden for a few years now. Always hoping that blooming wildflowers would attract interesting invertebrates. There are therefore patches and pots that I’ve not managed with all sorts of odd things sprouting from them at different times of year. At the moment, there is a big tub, which used to be crocuses and daffodils that has a very tall and leafy plant growing in it at the moment, with pale-purple flowers in bloom (it’s November!).
Apple of Peru, usually only has one or two blossoms at a time
I used the ObsIdentify app to take a couple of photos and it turns out to Apple of Peru, Nicandra physalodes. The species is also known as the shoo-fly plant (it repels aphids and other flies and although toxic is sometimes rubbed on the skin as an insect repellant. It’s also known as the Apple of Sodom, presumably somehow that relates to its encapsulated poisonous fruit.
Apple of Peru blossom
As the name would suggest, Apple of Peru is a native to South America, self-seeds easily, and is sometimes grown as a decorative annual. I didn’t plant it, seeds from some outside source presumably landed in the tub and it’s grown where it fell. I think it’s meant to be in bloom from April to July, usually in tropical and sub-tropical climes rather than the temperate zone, so not entirely sure what it’s doing with open blossom now and setting fruit in the middle of November in England.
