The Red Notebook

Note: Thanks to GrrlScientist for using this post on her Guardian Science blog, thereby quadrupling my daily readership count to at least four.

Lapwing, dipper, swallow, robin, curlew…

I’ve never drawn up a list of my top ten birds, but wheatears would very likely be on it.

A wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe), photographed during a spot of nature waiting on an Anglesey headland earlier this month.

They’re such smart creatures. Smart as in neat and well-groomed, I mean; I can’t comment on their intelligence. And it’s always a real treat to see one, because you’re usually on a nice walk somewhere in the hills or near the coast, kind of hoping you might spot the white flash of a wheatear’s rump.

I remember my first wheatear. I was a young boy. My parents had taken my sister and me for a walk near the seashore at Thurstaston on the Wirral. My mum, who was entirely responsible for my love of the natural world, pointed out the elegant bird on a nearby fence-post, explaining that it was called a wheatear because of the light stripe running above its eye and behind its ear. The stripe, she explained, was supposed to look like an ear of wheat. It’s a lovely reason for a lovely name.

It’s also total bollocks.

Years later, I found out where wheatears really got their name. It was on account of their distinctive white rumps: wheat-ears is apparently a corruption of white-arse!

Typical view of a fleeing wheatear (note the white arse)

I told my mum, of course. She claimed to be shocked, but I could tell she was secretly delighted.

More of my wheatear photos »

I love swallows. Check out my previous swallow posts if you don’t believe me.

This evening, a pair of them were feeding their young on the power-line outside my house, so I took a few photos. Here is a slideshow of the best ones (original photos here):

Swallows rock.

Around this time of year, I like nothing better than to stand outside at dusk and admire the small local population of bats as they flitter around my head. It really is a wonderful and surprisingly moving experience.

When I say ‘small local population’, I really do mean small. I seldom see more than two or three bats at any one time—unlike my friend Stense, who counted over 60 bats leaving the roost in her attic recently. Stense also has ospreys nesting outside her window. I am consumed with jealousy.

Yesterday evening, I naively decided to try to photograph the local bats as they hunted for insects above my back garden. Well, naive is probably the wrong word as I knew that my efforts were doomed to failure; I was really just being ridiculously optimistic. So I set my camera’s ISO and aperture to maximum and fired away, capturing dozens of photos of empty skies and blurred trees. Bats are fast little buggers.

But I did manage to capture a few images of blurs remotely resembling bats:

A bat flittering above my back garden last night.

Yes, I know the photos are crap, but I rather like their ethereal, crepuscular nature—which pretty much sums up bats, as far as I’m concerned.

A cliché yesterday:

Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

A Merry Christmas to one and all.

I show the following photograph, taken in Anglesey last month, for no other reason than I like it:

A flock of oystercatchers [Haematopus ostralegus]

Darwin’s wen

I have a bit of a soft spot (no pun intended) for Charles Darwin’s wen: that fleshy little bump slightly to the right of his nose—or to the left of his nose as you look at it. You must have noticed it. You were just too polite to point it out, that’s all.

One reason I have a soft spot for Darwin’s wen is that I have a similar wen in almost exactly the same location. In my case, you really might not have noticed it, because it is considerably less pronounced than Darwin’s. If it’s pronounced wens you’re interested in, it’s far more likely that your eye will have been drawn to the far more substantial wen on the left side of my forehead—although you’ll no doubt have been too polite to ask for a closer look. But I digress.

Wens are benign, little tumours which you should keep an eye on, just in case they decide to stop being benign. They can be removed through a simple operation under local anaesthetic, but I’ve held on to mine as I’m rather attached to them (and vice versa).

Darwin’s wen should be a cause of minor celebration. It is the one noticeable blemish breaking the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of his physiognomy. To put it another way, it is the one facial feature which can give us cast-iron proof that an image of the great man has been tampered with. If Darwin’s wen appears to the right of his nose (or to the left as we’re looking at him), all is well and good with the world. If, however, the wen appears on the wrong side of Darwin’s nose (i.e. his left side, our right), we are looking at a mirror image of the great man—an image which has no doubt been turned around by some graphic designer to make it fit more aesthetically into some artty-farty context or other.

I have previously written about how you can use Darwin’s buttons to spot when you’re dealing with his mirror image. But the wen provides an important indicator when it is not possible to discern Darwin’s buttons.

Take, for example, this poster from the recent Darwin exhibition, hanging in pride of place on this Darwin groupie’s study wall:

Wen graphic designers attack! Darwin mirrored!

Shame on you, Natural History Museum! We all realise that the hand was Photoshopped in (and we’ll let you off the fridge magnet howler), but was it really necessary to turn Darwin’s face round the wrong way?

The University of Cambridge Zoological Museum has a rather wonderful box of beetle specimens collected by Charles Darwin when he was at the university. The young Darwin had an inordinate fondness for beetles.

Darwin’s beetle collection

Darwin’s son, Sir Frances Darwin, donated his father’s beetles to the university. The collection was originally in a cabinet. Unfortunately, in the 1870′s, one G. R. Crotch began sorting some or all of the collection into boxes, all but one of which was later lost/misplaced.

• More of my photos of Darwin’s beetle collection
• View as slideshow
• Michael Barton’s photo of me taking the beetle photos

Charles Darwin to John Stevens Henslow (18-May-1832):

St Jago [modern-day Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands] is singularly barren & produces few plants or insects.—so that my hammer was my usual companion, & in its company most delightful hours I spent.—

On the coast I collected many marine animals chiefly gasteropodous (I think some new).— I examined pretty accurately a Caryophyllea & if my eyes were not bewitched former descriptions have not the slightest resemblance to the animal.— I took several specimens of an Octopus, which possessed a most marvellous power of changing its colours; equalling any chamaelion, & evidently accommodating the changes to the colour of the ground which it passed over.—yellowish green, dark brown & red were the prevailing colours: this fact appears to be new, as far as I can find out.

Darwin was hopelessly wrong about the colour-changing ability of octopuses being a new observation. But never mind: the good news is that one of Darwin’s St Jago octopuses is still alive and kicking preserved for posterity in Cambridge, and I have photos to prove it:

Darwin’s octopus

The accompanying label

It’s very difficult to take a half-decent photo of a swallow. Believe me, I’ve tried. They’re fast little blighters. But, this morning, I finally succeeded, by hiding behind the sheets on my washing line and firing away as a swallow fed its young on my back fence:

A swallow feeding its young in my garden this morning

As I returned home from work yesterday evening, I was delighted to see the local pied wagtail feeding four fledglings on my back lawn. I sat in the car for 15 minutes watching them as they stood begging for food in a cloud of gnats. They clearly hadn’t cottoned on yet to this fly-catching malarkey.

This afternoon, I managed to take some photos of the fledglings.

Pied wagtail fledgling [Motacilla alba]

More of my pied wagtail photos »

Charles Darwin aged 43, with his eldest child, William.

Browsing, as I often do, through Darwin Online yesterday, I came across this famous photograph of Charles Darwin with his eldest child, William. It is the only photograph that exists showing Darwin with a member of his family.

Looking at the picture, it suddenly dawned on me that this is the only photograph I can remember seeing in which Darwin appears to be smiling. It’s not exactly a toothy grin, but it’s certainly a smile: the smile of a contented and proud father, perhaps. It’s also a slightly enigmatic smile, not entirely unlike that of the Mona Lisa.

Reading the caption to the photo, something else dawned on me: Charles Darwin aged 43… That’s my age! This is what Charles Darwin looked like when he was the same age as me!

All I can say is that he scrubs up rather well. But I have more hair.

Martin Parr is one of my favourite photographers. He’s a great capturer of Britishness, and has taken many wonderful photographs in two places very dear to my heart: the Wirral peninsula where I was born and raised, and Hebden Bridge where I now live.

This Saturday’s Guardian magazine had a great set of Martin Parr photos. They also published them and some of his other photos online. One of the online-only photos grabbed my attention for obvious reasons:

Darwin’s beetle collection, Cambridge University Museum of Zoology.

One of the joys of summertime is watching the swallows feeding near my house. Old country folklore says that, the higher the swallows are flying, the better the weather. As usual, the folklore holds more than a grain of truth: when the weather is warm, the insects upon which the swallows feed are carried up into the air by thermal currents, forcing the swallows to follow suit.

Over the years, I have noticed other ways in which the weather influences swallows’ feeding habits. Last weekend, the weather was so cold and miserable that the insects stayed very near the ground, meaning that the swallows were flying at knee-height as they broke either side of me while I watched them from by back lawn. Earlier this week, during an uncharacteristically seasonal warm spell, they flew either side of my car chasing the insects in the shade of a local wood. One evening the summer before last, I watched them flying about the eaves of my house in pursuit of the craneflies that were basking in the residual heat radiating from my west-facing wall. On windy days, I look for them flying low on the leeward side of drystone walls, chasing the insects sheltering there. And on very, very wet days like today, they congregate underneath one of the sycamore trees in my garden, feasting on the insects sheltering from the rain.

Swallows feeding beneath the sycamore in my garden this morning

• Swallows preparing for migration
• Crane fly season

Female Orange-tip Butterfly [Anthocharis cardamines] sitting on one of its favourite food plants, Lady’s Smock / Cuckoo Flower [Cardamine pratensis]

Fantastic camouflage. As my partner Jen remarked, it looked just like a dollop of bird poo.

I love my macro lens!

Nunatak over at the Beagle Project blog throws down the gauntlet and demands photos of disturbingly handsome people ‘in fantastical and/or embarrassing fieldwork gear’.

Herewith my entry, taken floating just above the Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia in November, 2000:

Struth, Bruce! Cop a load of that natty FOCD T-shirt and Pommie sunburn!
(But kindly ignore the rather magnificent beer-gut.)

Steady on, ladies (and possibly gentlemen), I’m spoken for, I tell you!

your Great Barrier Reef, and your Galápagos Islands; a British wood in autumn really takes some beating:

A British wood earlier today.

If they were good enough for Darwin, I reckon they’ll do for me.

More photos from a British wood today »

See also: A British natural wonder.

Last week, I wrote:

For the first four years that I lived in this house, the garden was literally plagued by slugs: thousands and thousands of slugs. But, for the last two years, the number of slugs has dropped considerably. I’m not sure why this should be—a combination of an unusually dry summer last year, and more dilligent weeding by yours truly is my best guess…

Well, perhaps I might have to revise my reason-for-slug-dearth hypothesis. Look what I saw in the garden this afternoon:

A woodmouse eating a slug

OK, I admit it doesn’t seem likely that all my slugs have been eaten by mice, but I was pretty amazed to see a mouse eating a slug in the first place.

I was even more amazed to be able to get so close to this little chap. In fact, I managed to get so close that my macro lens couldn’t focus on him. That’s very close indeed. If you look very carefully at some of the other photos I took, you can just make out my reflection in his eye.

Yesterday, as I was trying to photograph bees on some unknown shrub in my garden, I noticed that none of the bees was actually entering the flowers of the shrub; the flowers were too small to accomodate the bees’ bodies. Instead, the bees appeared to be drinking nectar from the flowers by biting holes through the outside of the flowers. After a while, I noticed that some of the bees weren’t biting new holes, but were revisiting old ones.

Then I vaguely remembered reading about such behaviour somewhere in Darwin’s correspondence. A quick search later, and there it was. Darwin had written to the Gardeners’ Chronicle magazine to elaborate on earlier observations made by other readers:

Darwin, C. R. to Gardeners’ Chronicle, [16 Aug 1841]

Perhaps some of your readers may like to hear a few more particulars about the humble-bees which bore holes in flowers, and thus extract the nectar. This operation has been performed on a large scale in the Zoological Gardens […] I observed some plants of Marvel of Peru, and of Salvia coccinea, with holes in similar positions; […] I first noticed them a week since, when, from the brown colour of their edges, they appeared to have been made some time before. The beds of Stachys and Pentstemon are frequented by numerous humble-bees of many very different kinds; at one moment I saw between twenty and thirty round a bed of the latter flower; they fly very quickly from flower to flower, and always alight with their heads just over the little orifices, into which they most dexterously insert their proboscis, and in the case of the Pentstemon, first into the orifice on one side and then into the other, so that they thus extract the nectar on both sides of the germen. […]—C.