Nature Watch.

DLaurent

DLaurent

Well-known member
My dad bought a bird feeder from a car boot this morning. Must have timed it just right as within minutes of putting it out about 30 identical Blue Tits swarmed round it. I daren't tell him it's a Roving Tit Flock as he thought he'd got a bargain.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
For some reason a random single heron has turned up at the park where I go recently, never seen one there before. Spent half an hour the other day watching it diving down in the water and then getting out and drying its wings in the sun, amazing creature.

And the hoopoes have properly taken the place over now, there's tons of them now and they're spreading to other parks in the area. They first showed up during the first COVID lockdown, strangely.

Seriously considering buying some binoculars now.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
Benny B said:
For some reason a random single heron has turned up at the park where I go recently, never seen one there before. Spent half an hour the other day watching it diving down in the water and then getting out and drying its wings in the sun, amazing creature.
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call @luka
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
they’re just about to pop after first sprouting mid-December here

robust wee plants, in a month all back lane verges and hedgerows will be decked in yellow rivulets
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Out with the brood biking over the weekend and our youngest spotted what he initially assumed were a myriad of bird nests spread throughout an old apple orchard, subsequently subsumed into gardens. Beguiling in trees no doubt, with early spring buds adding provisional green hues to the mistletoe’s hosts, just not actual nests

Cue an afternoon‘s conversation all about nests, all of the respective and innumerable species in sea and on land. Layered and censored clearly due to their age, ie best to leave out the love nests their best mate’s Dad is known for, yet a great auntie Nest got a nod

Mistletoe exposed in forked branches made me think about femininity and nests, how caves, huts, Neolithic stone ‘nests’ as monumental constructions ie long houses morphing into memorialised chambered long mounds across millennia, to Iron Age roundhouses and even Ray Mears-esque ‘knowledge weighs nothing’ bivouacs

Move further forward to thatching, circles of broken bracken stomped high in the Dales as temp summer play nests, add ‘empty nests’ after my eldest started university - all seem assimilable to the technology of the nest, even the most defensively formidable fortification

The day moved on but my mind kept returning to nests, cue night shift psychosis and finding a chapter by Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’, with part of its juiciest segue borrowing heavily from a French natural historian Jules Michelet:

"a bird's tool is its own body, that is, its breast, with which it presses and tightens its materials until they have become absolutely pliant, well-blended and adapted to the general plan.” Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. The form of the nest is commanded by the inside. "On the inside," he continues, "the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle." The female, like a living tower, hollows out the house, while the male brings back from the outside all kinds of materials, sturdy twigs and other bits. By exercising an active pressure, the female makes this into a felt-like padding.

Michelet goes on: "The house is a bird's very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say, its suffering. The result is only obtained by constantly repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird's breast, its heart, surely with difficulty in breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations." (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pg. 101)
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Nests as dwelling, cue Tim Ingold on building, dwelling and living. Our next door neighbours are due their first born in a few months and you see the busying process, building up a tiny home-hub within a home, without jinxing too much by assigning colours before a healthy delivery - crib as home. Birds returning to roost as daylight dwindles, augury and flight

Aye, nests!
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Ah but I believe that's in terms of species diversity

Still, there are over 1,300 species of bats and fruit bats and long tongues bats alone account for over 2 billion individuals

WOW!
 
HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

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Little break in Cornwall this week. I woke up to find a herring gull tangled in a net atop a roof opposite, so my wife set a rescue in motion and I'm pleased to say it was successful, though the poor bird was flapping around and wearing itself out up there for hours.

Spotted 2 slow worms too, well, one and a half, the larger one had been partially eaten.
 
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