Birds

Hunting the Elusive Ouzel!

I have been intrigued by ring ouzels since I read Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, when I was about twelve. He was so excited about a bird I had never heard of, let alone seen. He said they were rare but reported flocks of 20, getting a friend to shoot four, just to be sure — times were different then! We too have hunted them high and low, but without a gun.

We’ve sought them in Scotland at 3600 ft, going twice to Cairngorm and braving the elements — on one occasion getting the most transient glimpse of a one scruffy, windswept pair as we left the car park at a lower level. On both occasion we also didn’t see a ptarmigan!

This autumn we have redoubled our efforts — searching in the Elan Valley in Wales which is reputed to be on their migration path. Above is Bill’s photo. We should perhaps re-name them the car-park bird — this one popped into view within 3 minutes of stopping the car!

In 1768 Gilbert White was looking for Ring Ousels in Selbourne, near Southampton. I think this eccentric Georgian clergyman was the first to realise that these spring and autumn visitors to his parish were migrating. He knew they bred in the north of England and worked out that they passed his way, feeding on ivy berries in the spring and returned, en route for warmer climes in autumn when they fed on haws. It is the rowan berries that persuade them to stop over in the Elan valley. Sadly we only saw one bird but he was rather fine!

Addendum (for Paula — see comments ): Here is an image of a fine Hoodie for you! They are fantastic characters!

hooded crow
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Travel

Orford Ness revisited.

Last time I stayed at the Jolly Sailor it was a rickety building standing on a higgledy-piggledy quay in a disorder of scruffy little fishing boats pulled up onto the mud, amid tangled ropes and lobster pots.

When we revisited it recently it had moved into another century and appeared to have moved inland and had sprouted a large car park, albeit below sea level, the whole protected by a sea wall. There were no fishermen, nor even firefighters, singing sea shanties and playing fiddles in the heaving public bar. I felt sure it was the same pub as the bar seemed right. No one could help me. No one remembered.

The mere was familiar but it was blowing a gale and the rigging of the little pleasure boats shrieked like a manic celestial harp or a skein of hysterical geese. From the sea wall we could see the castle and the church so we went to investigate.

The 12th century castle looks new due to recent rendering with tinted lime mortar to protect its crumbling stonework. “The ramparts have been reduced to lurching waves of grassy ditch and hummock,” said the Readers Digest book in the bar.

The pretty village is manicured and painted with Farrow and Ball Sardine but that is where the fishiness ends.

Gone is the smoker’s shack by the water where kippers, pigeons, oysters and eels hung, filling the air with a delicious miasma. There is a very clean deli on the new quay but it was closed.

Exploring the churchyard,

I warm to the little man who guards the mediaeval font in St Bartholomew’s church, Orford.

I missed the singing and the good humour of my last visit, but not the food poisoning from the smokery on the mud!

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photography

New Camera!

My camera had a fall last month and was fatally injured. I took it to the mender who shook his head but all, it seemed, was not lost — due to the surprising perspicacity of a camera manufacturer who is not British (that may be something to do with it) all the new versions of my camera, which was quite old when I was given it, are interchangeable. So my expensive lenses all fit a newer (still not quite new) camera body. Not only that but all the controls are the same which is nothing short of a miracle!

I have been out testing my new-to-me Nikon D3300.

These girls, picketing the sea wall at Frampton marsh, were not impressed.

Nor were the lowest highland cattle in Europe — below the sea-wall at Surfleet, way below sea level!

Always a challenge –white flowers or butterflies. Convulvulus on what we used to call wasteland.

Ultimate test — Kettering station with its back to bright sunlight. Amazing — you can still see the people to whom I can now give an alibi — must check that the camera time and date is accurate!

Distant, fluttering yellow wagtail
Here it is relaxing in the garden.

Seems okay to me!

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Friendship, Medical Education

Reunion at the Athenaeum!

50 years – passed in the blink of an eye – and here we are all together again! Well not quite all, some of my old medical school contemporaries didn’t make it.   The Royal Free School of Medicine for Women (and the odd privileged man) has a far-reaching diaspora encompassing the whole globe, not to mention the afterlife. 

We remembered with affection our fallen comrades and exchanged news of the beautiful ones (those with perfect teeth and not a hint of a wrinkle) who still work in the USA, and those trapped by new lives, love and family in the Antipodes.  We welcomed back the returners, those who have spent a career in the sunshine and understand politics and poverty in a way that we never will.

Meeting people that you once knew well after a gap of 50 years is a daunting experience – you can’t take you eyes off them – trying to fit the image in your memory over the features that confront you.  Why has everyone shrunk? Perhaps the younger generations are not just getting bigger and bigger – perhaps it’s not just old girls that get osteoporosis. 

It is marvellous to realise how superficial I was when I was young, and I am sure I was not alone. How wrong we can be about how people will turn out.  Medicine changes people as does the illness and trauma we survive.  The shy become confident, the brash are moderated — they were perhaps always kind. Those intimidating cool dudes warm a little and the differences that we felt singled us out, and were never mentioned then, are now freely admitted and laughed about…  “I’d never have guessed that about you!”

We had a wonderful meal together and talked until our heads buzzed in the heart and heat of London, in the Athenaeum, a club selective for achievement, not background.  A suitable venue, as our chairman reminded us, to re-unite students selected by the doyennes of the Royal Free.  Selected by different criteria from other medical schools – perhaps primarily for vocation and the suspicion of as yet unfulfilled potential.  We owe them a debt of gratitude.

Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine (photo by Holysp via Wikipedia)
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nature

Testing Time for Baby Bunnies!

Peeping out from the edge of our yard, this baby rabbit can hear the incessant screeches of the young buzzard, calling from the top of the oak tree behind the house.

The parent birds circle overhead looking for prey to shut up the chick who is probably almost as big as they are by now. They see the little rabbits and if they get desperate enough they will swoop low around the house and carry one off in their talons but they prefer to hunt in the fields and woods at a safer distance from human habitation.

So these little chaps can dash about in relative safety, exploring underneath the cars by the house, annoying the house sparrows and occasionally meeting a mirror image. Sniffing as they go.

They are nesting under our wood pile and are in for a shock as Ali and Dan are coming soon with the dogs and suddenly everything will be smelling a lot scarier!

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Health and safety

Fractured Femur or Burned Alive?

Back in Wales and we’ll have a peaceful few days before we get stuck into all the chores.

6am on the first morning and all hell breaks out — smoke detectors all over the house are screaming hysterically!

The moment we are both risen and have worked out which way to run — they all stop.

Wild fires have not reached this soggy part the planet, we inspect the alarms — all bleep obediently when we push the little button — one gives a tiny red flicker — we change its battery.

Next night they all go off again at 2am, — I lift my head and groan, Bill goes and switches off the circuit. 5am they really up the angst. Because they can no longer whisper to each other through their wires they are shouting to each other instead — first one bip-bip-bip, then another.

We’ll give them a little rest — there is no way of working out which ones have flat batteries and which do not — we will replace them all, except that some are radio-active, automatons that don’t need batteries at all –fancy that!

Willy Price, local battery mogul feels obliged to give us the official warning, “You know you are much more likely to break your neck replacing these than you are to be incinerated in your own home.”

We know it’s true but we pay the £47 anyway. We replace them all — even the one at the top of the stairwell, from the top of the twelve foot ladder propped on a wooden block and wedged with the atlas that doesn’t show Ukraine. I drop this smoke detector from the top of the ladder and it bounces on the wooden floor below, Bill leaves his post, steadying the ladder, and with unaccustomed expletives gives chase.

It is retrieved, brushed down and replaced with a submissive little bleep. That’ll teach it.

We reconnect the power. That afternoon there are several other little bleeps then all is quiet.

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Butterflies, Health and safety, Neurophysiology

Summer (Black and) Blues!

Yesterday, buoyed up by recent success but frustrated by even more recent dull weather, the sun came out and we made haste to Royston in search of rare butterflies. It was very hot! Too hot really for a couple of septuaginta-tresgenarians (this might not be quite right but I’m concussed — I’ll come to that later!). It was also very hilly but the butterflies were fantastic.

Common Blue
Common Blue, underwing — there were swarms of them.
Brown Argus — Bill’s picture.

It is tiny but they were flitting around all over the chalk downs, more ‘ups’ at our age. So good was the butterfly watching that we decided to stay on after lunch — it was hotter and there were swarms of blue butterflies but only one possible Adonis Blue and it flew away before Bill could snap it — my camera is sadly at the menders — I dropped it and it is hurt.

By now I was all behind and had to rush into town before the shops shut — gosh it was hot!

During the night I didn’t feel at all well — why do we say that? I felt bad!

I got up to visit the bathroom — feeling very queezy. Next thing I know, I’m waking up somewhere I don’t immediately recognise — something diaphanous is waving above me — have I died?

I call out weakly, Bill is already up, he awoke with the crash but headed in the wrong direction. I call out again and am shortly found — head in the shower, huge bump on my forehead– how did it get here? I’m lying on my back. Turns out I am not dead. My knee hurts and is a funny colour but my shoulder decides not to make a fuss despite the huge contusion — it is biding it’s time.

I am picked up and put back to bed — I can make this last until lunchtime!

After a light lunch I rally to look at the Holly Blue in the garden.

Diagnosis? Was probably asleep all the time but fell off the loo when I slipped back into deep, REM sleep (do they still call it that) when I fell off my perch. It’s a miracle I’ve made it to 73!

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Butterflies

Summer Blues?

Last month we were on the chalk hills of Gloucestershire — butterfly hunting, and not without success!

Large blue butterfly
Another large blue on Daneway Banks SSSI in the Cotswolds

Daneway banks are famous for the butterflies. Their steep chalk grassland is peppered with clumps of wild marjoram and thyme. It was a sunny day and there was a helpful and knowledgeable volunteer from the Butterfly Conservancy to point us in the right direction!

No Brown Argus spotted, not for lack of trying, but there were cavorting Marbled Whites a plenty.

Marbles white butterfly on marjoram
Mating marbled whites

And several Essex skippers, similar to small skippers but with black tipped antennae and a black stripe parallel to the leading edge of the forewing.

Essex Skipper

It was very hot and cooling off in the dappled shade of a nearby woodland we found my favourite butterfly — the silver washed fritillary.

Silver washed fritillary

Next week, if the weather cheers up, we are off to hunt the Adonis Blue and the Brown Argus.

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Butterflies, Ecology, Hill Farming

Back on the Farm and a Moral Dilemma!

The hot dry spring was just what our thistles yearned for — they grew and grew. While our neighbours sheep gather in the shade it is time for us to deal with the thistle plague.

I was told by those who know:

Cut in June, they will grow back soon,

Cut in July they will surely die.

So we held our nerve, but once into July we have waged war on the thistles, Bill pulling the topper behind the quad bike and cutting every accessible thistle. 10 acres of thistles — not bad for a septuagenarian with no previous farming experience! It’s wonderfully adaptable, the human race.

All this time I have been busy managing and hiding in my cool office doing important paper work. But now the rains have started, waves of torrential rain coming in from the west, and the family are due next week so we are running out of time. Its all hands to the scythe and the sickle in the corners and the precipices where the quad bike cannot reach.

But wait!

There is a problem. In the sunny periods, between the showers, the butterflies and bees and hoverflies and beetles and flies come out as well as us. Finding most of the thistles gone without trace because once cut the sheep gobble them up, this profusion of insects settles on what is left.

The thistle beds are teaming with insect life, buzzing and fluttering and slurping up the nectar.

Just by the barn we saw about 20 pristine new small tortoiseshell, meadow brown and comma butterflies.

Small Tortoiseshell and friends on thistle.

One look at this beauty and guess what? We have decided to leave the edges for a while to give the butterflies a chance to mate and lay their eggs. Oh dear, the caterpillars feed on nettles — we’ll have to leave them as well!

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Uncategorized

A Glimpse of 16th Century Cirencester

This chap looks bemused as well he might — an erstwhile Abbot of Cirencester whose image was smashed and buried in the ruins of his once rich and powerful Abbey — his name forgotten.

This was the Dissolution of the Monasteries which was not just about getting rid of King Henry VIII’s infertile wife. Like everything else it had a lot to do with money, and the reformation and getting rid of rich and decadent priests. It was a re-organisation — a re-directing of resources into education and defence — sound familiar?

Cirencester was a town doing well — wealth and opportunity based on farming and the wool trade. One man who benefitted from the demise of the Abbey was John Coxwell.

John Coxwell (1516-1618) pictured here at the age of 98!

John was a local entrepreneur, from humble beginnings he was surprisingly socially mobile, rising to the gentry, he had made a lot of money in the wool trade and bought much of the Abbey land. Like many driven men he had a robust constitution living until he was 101.

This was not the rule.

One young man’s three young wives lost in childbirth.

What you needed in those days was a good doctor.

Richard Masters, physician to Queen Elizabeth I and richly rewarded for good service with Abbey land and this silver gilt chalice the Boleyn Cup. He has a certain je ne sais quoi, don’t you think. He was a generous man and made many bequests in the town and gave his cup to the magnificent Parish Church of John Baptist.

Nothing like a grateful patient!

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