Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in temeres' LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
8:58 pm	Minority report Examples of speciesist twaddle aren't hard to come by. Last week it was Trevor Philips' turn, castigating the lack of diversity on television and its failure to represent minorities. I don't get to watch much telly these days, but unless it's changed radically in the last few years I'd say he was right. There aren't nearly enough programmes about minorities, and most of them are presented by the likes of Bill Oddie or David Attenborough. Philips, of course, is talking about ethnic diversity, whilst I'm referring to biodiversity, and given that television tends only to be watched by the one species that makes it, I'd concede that I was being gratuitously facetious were it not for a couple of things. The first is that when it comes to numbers, most non-human vertebrates really do count as minorities. Fish aside, most have global populations measured in thousands rather than millions, let alone the billions that humans have risen to. A statistic I recently saw that caught my eye: there are about one hundred and twenty million birds in Britain. 120,000,000. That's a lot, right? I mean, two for every person. Yes, but that 120 million is constituted of some 200 or so species. Humans outnumber every single one of them. Even feral pigeons. There are about 100,000 Black-tailed Godwits in the whole world. That many people would barely add up to an unremarkably sizable town. There are 20 Muslims in Britain alone for every Black-tailed Godwit on the planet. The second is that all human beings are pretty much identical, regardless of age, race, sex, orientation or whatever. This ought to be obvious, but it isn't. It can even be taken as an affront to our pride in ourselves as distinctive individuals. If, however, you were to consider any two randomly chosen humans placed alongside, say, an aardvark, and then pick the odd one out from the three on the basis of similarity, you would choose the aardvark. Every time. No human being looks even remotely like an aardvark. No human being bears anything more than a superficial resemblance to any other species, not even to chimps. When we compare humans with other species, ethnic and other minorities simply disappear. We are all the same species. But of course we do not normally compare ourselves with other species, but with each other. As intelligent social animals, we have had to evolve the capacity to identify individuals, and the affiliations of each individual. We have to know potential friends from potential foes, mating opportunities from mating rivals, close kin from distant kin. And from that capacity springs our potential to foster favourites and develop prejudices. We gloss over the injustices we perpetrate and call attention to those perpetrated against us. A surfeit of white faces on our TV screens is not so far removed from a surfeit of human bodies of any colour. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
8:31 pm	The C-word Tom Hampson of the Fabian Society thinks we should ban the word 'chav'. It reveals a "deep and revealing level of class hatred" and "middle-class hatred of the white working class - pure and simple". According to Hampson, "you cannot consider yourself of the left and use the word." Well, I do use the word, and I am white. And working class. And of the Left. Admittedly tucked away in that corner of the Left who think the Georgian guy with the tache had a positive attitude, even if he did go a bit over the top at times. 'Chav', for me, is a suitably concise epithet for a parochially minded, consciously anti-intellectual, media-saturated, celebrity-obsessed, vulgarly materialistic, selfish, myopic, status-centric segment of the white working class population. These people exist. Unfortunately. I only wish there were some equally pithy term for their middle class equivalents, but the nearest I can get is a bit of a mouthful, running to three words and five syllables. Besides, they don't all read the Daily Mail. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 14th, 2008
8:12 pm	It seems I have a virtue The best thing about me ( is apparently not the fact that I'm mortal... ) (Comment on this)
6:34 pm	Year List 08 - #123 A Sand Martin this morning, weaving its way over the sun-drenched fields behind the sea wall at Reculver. #123. Not that I was birding as such. I had my bins with me, but only as a contingency measure. Other contingencies of the morning included a very dowdy Lesser Whitethroat singing from the top of a tree, and three Dunlin still in summer plumage foraging around in some mud. Yes, I stopped and looked at them. But I wouldn't say I was birding. The flame has dimmed. This has happened before. I started birding in 1972, at the tender age of 9, continued with increasing obsessiveness through my teens when all my peers were far more interested in another kind of bird, and then burned out somewhere in the mid-80s. A trip to Spain pretty much killed my enthusiasm. Not because Spain was birdless, though. More the opposite. I saw so much there in a heady twelve days that once back in Britain, there seemed no point in going out. So several years of non-birding followed, but by the time I was working at a school in Ramsgate, the bug was back and I was spending almost every lunch hour in the cemetery up the road. And then paying it a visit after work. And then leaving home early in the morning to do a tour of the place before work. So maybe I've just hit the burn-out threshold again. Meanwhile I notice that the orache season is upon us. If you know what an orache is, you have my commiserations. If you don't then (unless you live in an orache-free part of the world) I'm willing to bet you've seen millions. Literally. You just haven't noticed them. Good for you. Oraches (Atriplex) and the closely-related - and very similar - goosefoots (Chenopodium) are nondescript plants that specialise in colonising disturbed ground. Places like waste ground (so called), building sites, and especially the edges of roads. Wherever there's a road without a pedestrian walkway, there is a narrow strip of mud between the tarmac and the verge, and that's where oraches flourish. They grow in strips about three inches wide and three hundred yards long. With their masses of triangular leaves, you could almost describe their foliage as luxuriant, only it's too covered in exhaust deposits and tyre-splash to warrant such a term. Oraches are grubby, mucky little plants, which might be why they go unnoticed. Together, Atriplex and Chenopodium run to about 20 UK species, which doesn't sound too daunting until you realise that (a) they all look pretty similar to begin with, and (b) the books describe them as 'variable', which is a gentle way of telling you that any one species is perfectly capable of looking like any of the others. That means identification entails getting up close and checking all the ID criteria for all the species that any one specimen might belong to. This can get quite interesting when half of the remaining road hauliers in the country are thundering past a few inches behind your back. Add to that the fact that orache and goosefoot flowers are minute and colourless (they tend to be wind pollinators) and that picking them stands to leave your fingers indelibly covered in soot, and you have a whole bunch of reasons not to take much interest in the bastards. They are the feral pigeons of the plant world. They make moss look interesting. Not that I'm in any way prejudiced, of course. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
8:18 pm	Huh? Sunday night at work means a slight change in listening for the first half of the shift. The Westminster Hour instead of The World Tonight; Something Understood rather than Today In Parliament; Thinking Allowed; the gloriously pointless Bells On Sunday; and a brief return to normality with Sailing By and the shipping forecast. Then it's over to the World Service for the Forum, which brings together a disparate trio of intellectuals (typically a writer, a philosopher and a scientist) to dissolve interdisciplinary boundaries and shift paradigms that have never been shifted before. This normally boils down to dingbat suggestions like achieving world peace by banning football. The Forum reneges on its promises in a way that Johnny Rotten could only have dreamed of. Anyway, last week's programme (not last night's) featured a Scandinavian philosopher (I forget his name, and it doesn't matter much) whose Big Idea was this: The last thing we want to find on Mars is life. His reasoning was this: 1: If there is or was life on Mars, our next-door neighbour in our very own solar system, then it is likely that life arises easily. 2: If life does arise easily, then it should be abundant throughout the galaxy, and we should have no trouble picking up alien radio signals. 3: So far we haven't heard a peep. The implication is, therefore, that there is something a - a filter, to use his own terminology - that stops intelligent radio-transmitting life from evolving and persisting for long periods of time. If that filter is not the development of life per se, then it must be something else. Perhaps intelligent species contain within themselves, by default, the seeds of their own destruction. Actually I can think of a couple more filters which I don't recall the discussion mentioning. Life might easily arise, but intelligence might not evolve half so readily (though the classic Sagan-Drake formula assumes that it will). Evolved intelligence might not lead inexorably to technological sophistication. It may even be - at the risk of getting Star Trekky - that radio might turn out to be a downright crude and primitive means of communication that no self-respecting technological species will touch with a bifurcated tentacle, and Earth is right now bathed in a torrent of interstellar chit-chat. We can pitch in once we get the physics right. Such diversions aside, I don't think the central thesis here is particularly difficult to understand. So why did the programme's anchor - a classical philosopher, so hardly a thicky* - get the poor guy to go through it twice, step by simple step? I've noticed this before on the radio. As soon as the subject of discussion leaves Earth and ventures into outer space, it is assumed, apparently as a default, to become very, very hard to get a grip on. It needs to be dumbed down to have any chance of being even faintly comprehensible. Why? Because it's science? As in OMG science my brane is too small? I doubt it. In this case, at least, it's not really science at all, more a philosophical conjecture and, as I said, not a tricky one. Perhaps because it's too far removed from day-to-day experience? Again, I find that unconvincing. The daily news is full of stories from way beyond our daily lives. I can draw a contrast with something that is in the news, all the time, and has a direct impact on the lives of everyone. Some things really are brain-aching to approach. Quantum physics is one. Another is global finance, and somehow we're expected to make sense of all this talk about credit crunches, sub-prime lending, interest rate cuts, the threat of stagflation, speculative investment, hedge funds and the rest of the kaboodle. Can I have that dumbed down, please. Because I can't help feeling it's important. ----- *My primary suspicion is that she was deliberately feigning incomprehension for the benefit of listeners. My secondary suspicion is that my primary suspicion could, after all, be nothing more than a forlorn hope. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
8:49 pm	Morr Meemidge A book-related meme doing the rounds, this one via sallymn - list 50 books that make up some kind of personal canon, or to carry the meme forward: "Not the books that I think are the best that I've ever read (or that have been read to me), or are, necessarily, my favorites, but the ones that changed how I thought, or that keep popping into my mind." These are listed in alphabetical order by author. When I started compiling the list at work (it was a slow machine for once) I began to wonder if I might manage as many as fifty titles. ( In the end, I had to cull. ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
7:57 pm	Shell company Sadly, not everything I find on my wildlifing forays can go on the Big List, most often because I can't put a name to it, but sometimes because it's not authentically wild, and other times because it happens to be dead. Or the remnants of something dead. Rotting corpses I tend to leave in situ, but some remnants are collectible. This could be my cue to reveal that I have a vast collection of feathers, shells and skeletal parts, but I don't. In fact, I have surprisingly little. Pride of place goes to the freshwater mussel shell that I yanked out of a Brecon lake during the long hot summer of 1976. It has stayed with me for the last 32 years and I intend to keep it for another 32 at least, assuming I live that long. There is also a Fulmar's skull, a single Ring-necked Parakeet feather stuck in an incense holder, a bit of flint encrusted with the calcareous tubes of the marine worm Pomatoceros, a couple of cuttle bones, a fossil scallop, a bit of sponge, a sea urchin (without spines), and not a lot else. On Sunday, however, I did manage to add something. It was high up on the beach, obviously washed up by the storms of several weeks ago. There were quite a few crab carapaces scattered about, but this was different, being covered in spines. The sight of it instantly rang a bell so I fished Barret and Yonge out of my backpack and riffled through the plates. Plate 16, in the colour section - Spiny Spider Crab. It was, to be honest, less than a full carapace, and by the time I got it home it was somewhat less than a full carapace, being very fragile, but about three quarters of it survived. It has a lovely polished texture, as though covered in gloss paint of a pale flesh-coloured hue, though the interior is chalky white and pitted. The pits match the position of the spines on the outside, and there seems to be a clear correlation between spine height and pit depth. Most of the spines are short conical points, some of them no more than bumps, and the overall effect is reminiscent of a cartoon planet covered in mountains. From what remains of the shell, I measure it at about 85mm from front to back and about 75mm across the widest part. The two longest spines, at the very front, are about a centimetre long. The living animal must be marvellous to see, though perhaps a bit perturbing if discovered accidentally. One thing I was delighted to discover, albeit with a mischievous bent, is that the scientific name for the Spiny Spider Crab is Maia squinado. So, should merrymaia and I cross paths again some time, I consider myself to have all due authority to address her as "Spiny". If she complains, I shall cite jealousy as my prime line of defence: she's named after a prime bit of wildlife and I'm not, which is clearly most unfair. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
7:55 pm	Underneath, the Arches And another one for the Big List this morning. A moth, and quite a big one, in the place where I tend to see most moths these days, namely the lavatories at work. The windows are open, the lights are on all night, and moths inevitably drift in. It seems to have been a good summer for moths, judging by the variety I've seen over the past few weeks. Since Skinner is a bit of a hefty tome to carry back and forth on a regular basis, and also since the cell controllers are unlikely to be impressed by me extending a fag break by working through the endless plates of geometrids, I've had to settle for trying to memorise the wing patterns as best as possible and then look them up as soon as I get home. It's a process that's led to far more misses than hits. But this morning, at the end of the shift, there was a very distinctive looking specimen huddled on the wall immediately below the urinal basins, so I had no choice but to crouch down as low as I could to get a decent look at it. And hope that no one came in for a piss before I'd clocked as much detail as I could. Of course, anyone from night shift would have sussed out the situation straight away. Oh f***, he's found another moth, they would sigh. But day-shifters might take some explaining to. Fortunately only Kosovan Bart, one of the night-time crew, came in, and only then as I was already halfway back to standing. It was a very distinctively patterned moth but that didn't necessarily mean it would leap out of the pages of Skinner. I'm getting used to absolutely unmistakable moths that turn out to be almost, but not quite, very like half a dozen different species. So a certain amount of pre-resignation has set in. I opened the plates in the middle of the geometrids, but I knew that this moth at least wasn't a geo, more likely a noctuid or maybe a notodont, and they're after the geos in Skinner, so it would make sense to flip through to the end of the geos and then start looking. But just on the off-chance, I went back to the beginning of the Geometridae and - bingo! There it was. It turns out to be a Buff Arches, a completely new species for me, though not uncommon which is hardly surprisingly since the larval foodplant is bramble, not exactly noted for its rarity. What's more, it's within the family Thyatiridae, which I'd never even heard of before. Skinner lists nine British thyatirids, four of them having the rather pretty name of lute-string. I'd never heard of them either until this morning. On one matter at least I can agree with Donald Rumsfeld - there are such things as unknown unknowns. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
8:46 pm	Wildlifing Yesterday I actually went on a deliberate wildlifey walk, for the first time in several weeks. The idea was to potter around the rock pools and learn a few seaweeds, so I got down to the beach to find the tide was up. Typical. But it was past its height and dropping fast so by the time I reached Foreness Point there was a fair amount of rock exposed. I didn't learn any new seaweeds. I only know half a dozen species, and one of them doesn't grow anywhere on Thanet that I'm aware of. Most of what I know comes from A-level biology field work, which is sinking further into the past by the year, and a lot of the names we learned for that were more like flags of convenience. Corallina, for instance, is only one of quite a few chalk-encrusted red frondy things. Still, there were other things to look at. Foreness Point is rather exposed so perhaps it's unsurprising that the rock pools weren't exactly brimming over with faunal diversity. I saw just one shrimp, one tiny crab that disappeared the moment I knelt down to get a better look at it, and no sea anemones or hermit crabs at all. Things have gone downhill from twenty years ago, when I could sit and watch hermit crabs scuttling around all over the place. It's not only the birds that are dying off. My suspicion is, though, that extending the sewage outfall can take at least some of the rap for the loss of littoral biodiversity, a reminder that 'environmental improvements' tends to mean improving the environment for one species only. Still, I did manage to get a lifer out of a pleasant if rather toe-wetting ramble on the rocks. Purple Top Shell, Gibbula umbilicalis, essentially a snail of a washed-out lime green with broad dark vaguely purple bands across. That's the shell, of course. The animal disappears as soon as you hoik it out of the water for a closer inspection. According to Barrett and Yonge, there ought to be tentacles on either side of the foot, so I put it back in and watched. After a minite or so, two slender antennae emerged, ringed with thin dark bands, and the top shell started to glide across the lump of chalk I'd dumped it on. And yes, there were tentacles coming off the foot, silk-thin filaments waving gently in the still water. I chided myself for not having taken a jar with me, otherwise I could have studied the animal from the underside. The other lifer of the day was also an invertebrate, but not a marine one. At the foot of the cliff, where the vegetated dune made an insect-rich heat trap, a dragonfly was hawking for prey. Big and blue, it was a male Emperor, Anax imperator. (Female Emperors are just female Emperors, not Empresses.) watervole might raise an eyebrow at learning that this was a new species for me, but it was. I've had several probables skimming past without stopping, but this was the first time I'd got a decent look at one. And very impressive it was too. Dragonflies seem to be yet another of those insects that a lot of people seem to be unduly afraid of. Do I really need to point out that they don't bite, don't sting, don't get caught up in your hair, don't really do anything worth worrying about? They deserve respect, but not fear. A Dragonfly History of the World would relegate humanity to a few depressing paragraphs on the final page. The dinosaurs would get a couple of chapters, but no more than that. They were, after all, just a passing phase. There was Sea Rocket on the dune, and Sea Bindweed, both new for this year's Big List. And a single specimen of Sea Holly, which is actually a carrot but thanks to convergent evolution has stiff, prickly holly-like leaves. There were also little solitary bees buzzing around over the sand, though I've no idea what species they were. The dune is definitely getting more diverse florally, with Catsear and other more terrestrial plants getting mixed in with the more obviously shoreline species like Sea Sandwort. I can remember a time when there was no dune at all. On the clifftops the Timothy grass was in flower, slender lavender cylinders poking up through the unmown vegetation. And - wonder of wonders - a single Small Tortoiseshell butterfly. Once one of the commonest butterflies, and usually the first of the year to put in an appearance. Now it seems to have turned into a hyper-rarity. That was yesterday. This morning I took the long way home, more for the exercise than anything else. By forsaking the delights of Minster sewage farm I made the 18 miles or so in just over two hours, which is pretty fast going for me. Various new plants for the year - Tufted Vetch, Sea Mayweed, Spiny Restharrow, Common Sea Lavender and others - though it amounted little more to floral trainspotting. The burnet moths were out at Reculver, all of them Narrow-bordered Five-spots as far as I could see (the ordinary Five-spot seems to be quite local, dependent on Greater Birds-foot Trefoil as a larval foodplant. I also glimpsed a single Marbled White butterfly from the sea wall. And some birds, since I have completely given up on them. 13 Little Egrets at the Coldharbour lagoon, along with a single Dunlin. The autumn wader passage should be getting underway about now, as the adults start leaving the Arctic breeding grounds to let the precocial juveniles feast on the fleeting banquet of tundra insects. I might even get a few year ticks, then, and boost my otherwise pathetic year list. At least this year's Big List has now (just) scraped past the 400 mark, two months ahead of schedule. Tomorrow I have to come straight home to be in time to put the rubbish out. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
8:45 pm	Say who? So there is a Dr Who quote meme doing the rounds. If you see this, quote from Who etc. I can think of several lines that particularly stuck, but not all that many - Who does seem to be a bit short of serious quality quotes. Never mind, here are some. All from memory, so they might be somewhat less than word perfect. "I'm just a mouth on legs." "I'm fairly sure that's Cromer." "I'm really glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words." "They say that people who fall from great heights are dead before they hit the ground. I don't believe that. Do you?" "Call yourself a Time Lord? A broken clock keeps better time than you. At least it's right twice a day." "One lump or two, Brigadier?" "Why Democrat?" "Er... Because they're so funny?" But my all-time favourite (though it only just pips the one that lil_shepherd beat me to) is: "We are en-tombed but we live on. This is on-ly the beg-in-ing. We shall pre-parrre, we shall grow strong-gerrr. When the time is right we shall e-merge and take our right-ful as the su-preme pow-er in the u-ni-verrrrrsssse!!" "And our lea-der shall be called Da-vid Cam-er-on..." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
8:59 pm	Fear of Flying Things New Man Dan has joined night shift. He's only new to night shift, not to the Company, and transferred over because we're getting a bit short-handed on nights. First we said goodbye to Foxy who lost both his elbows to RSI, mysteriously acquired in the course of a single shift. Then Scrap-pile failed to turn up after the bank holiday weekend, though Mrs Scrap-pile was in and sporting a shiner. There could have been any number of backstories to that but sometimes 2+2 does equal 4. So we were two ops down and needed at least one to make up. Hence New Man Dan. Last night I finally got to work with him, and found him to be a competent moulder with a good team attitude, and a pleasant chap if a bit too chatty for my curmudgeonly tastes. I also discovered that he's scared of moths. It began when he asked me if I'd seen the yellow butterfly flittering around the shop floor. I had, only it wasn't a butterfly but a moth, probably a Brimstone. He said he didn't like moths much, so I warned him about the hawk moths that are likely to start turning up in the canteen any time soon. Coming on for the size of a small bird, I said. A bit of an exaggeration, since even a Privet Hawk is still two inches max with a wingspan about twice that. He looked distinctly perturbed, and I shouldn't have been surprised: "I don't like moths much" is the standard face-saving way of saying "The buggers fricking petrify me." He's not the first. Some years back we had one guy on nights, originally from the East End so something of a hard man by wimpy Thanet standards. We were up in the canteen for tea break when a Poplar Hawk flew in and started buzzing around, headbutting the ceiling in a bout of macrolepidopteran belligerence. EastEnder coped with his fear in the only acceptable manner for a hard man, by starting to roll up a newspaper. Fortunately I managed to catch the moth and put it outside before he could splat it, at the same time trying not to be too disparaging about a six foot brick shithouse being intimidated by a nectar-drinking insect. And then there was Wayne, who was something of a gentle mild-mannered chap, but another brick shithouse and ex-Navy. He told me of a dead moth outside the locker room, again hinting that he didn't like moths much. So I went and looked, found a very dead hawk moth (another Poplar Hawk) and took it down to show Wayne. I can get a bit evangelical about wildlife, and here was an opportunity to wax on, enraptured, about the beauty and diversity of all things living. Even if this thing living happened to be dead. I didn't get the chance. Wayne saw me coming and ran away. Literally. Here was a man trained to go into action against the Warsaw Pact, and he was running away from a dead moth. On the one hand I sympathise. Phobias are irrational and, if not insuperable, then at least troublesome to grapple with. Far too troublesome if your chief priority is getting through your eight hours and then clocking off to go home. On the other hand, I only get angry (and saddened) if the coping mechanism extends to squashing an innocent and inoffensive creature into oblivion. Ignorance certainly has a part to play. On learning about hawk moths (he'd never heard of them) New Man Dan had a few anxious questions. "Do they bite?" was one of them. "Are any moths dangerous to people?" was another. No, and no, of course. Although honesty compelled me to point out that the hairs on some caterpillars can bring up a rash. Not that New Man Dan seems remotely bothered by caterpillars. They don't have wings. And his 'yellow butterfly' did turn out to be the Brimstone moth I'd suspected. I know that because it drifted back to our machine and landed on my chest, possibly attracted by my green shirt. I gently scooped it off onto my finger and showed it to New Man Dan, who to his credit didn't cringe or freeze up. "Some moths are quite pretty, really," he said, as I stepped clear of the work station to flick the Brimstone away. An encouraging assessment, if only half right. They're all pretty. You just have to look at them the right way. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
7:43 pm	The Alphabettispaghetti Music Meem The latest silly meme to do the rounds. 1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter. 2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter. 3. Post them to your journal with these instructions. altariel gave me the letter W. For wildlife, she said. For WTF, I'm tempted to reply. Not that there's any shortage of songs that begin with W, but they do seem to be so overwhelmingly bland. Or twee. Or both. That may well be true for every other letter of the alphabet, but W is the only one I've checked out. So the five are chosen are what I would call goodies, but probably far from the best. I'll remember them soon after posting this. 1: Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit Bom bom ba-dom-bom... Is this the most instantly recognisable opening bass line of all time? And it adeptly evokes some kind of surreal slow-mo plummet down a bottomless rabbit hole. This could be the perfect title track for the scariest Alice movie ever made. Preferably Through the Looking Glass. If ever a children's book was wasted on kids, it was that one. 2: Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman Another classic intro, this time a distinctly hymnic one, for a song that both reflects soul's roots in gospel and draws the oft-made comparison between romantic love and religious ecstasy (Madonna's Like A Prayer would be another well known example). It's also dead accurate from an evopsych angle, with a near-textbook description of what game theorists call an overcomitment strategy. Who says science ain't got no soul? 3: Crass, Where Next Columbus The opening track - arguably the only decent track - on side 2 of their Penis Envy album sees Crass in fine barnstorming form as it thunders into gear. Though even the mildest of metaphors can't help but patronise what is, in the end, nothing more than noise. Very structured noise, but noise nonetheless. Critics who said they couldn't play were completely off-beam - Crass were perfectly competent musicians, they just didn't bother with superfluous frills like tunes. If you doubt that, try comparing them with the punk bands who really were inept. I still have a copy of Fuck The World by Chaotic Discord that proves my point nicely. 4: Soft Cell, Where The Heart Is Out of the dark depths of the Thatcherian era came this much-needed celebration of what family values really mean to some people. A fitting anthem for the walking wounded, from one of the best albums of the 80s. 5: Louis Armstrong, What A Wonderful World It takes something special to move me to tears, let alone admit it, but the BBC pulled it off when they used this to close their TV production of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Arthur and Ford helplessly watching a lush and verdant Earth being despoiled by a clueless mob of telephone sanitisers. No doubt it wasn't written as a conservationist anthem, but it works very well as one, and it's high time we all buggered off back to Golgafrincham while the world's still got something wonderful in it. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
8:33 pm	Those Guardian foldy things I have to admit that I'm a bit ambivalent about the free nature-spotting 'foldies' that the Grauniad is giving away this week. The first one, on butterflies, wasn't too bad. All 59 British and Irish species were depicted, and arranged by family (which is why the Marbled White appeared amongst the browns), and it only took a minute to flip through and see that I have seen just under half of them, though not all in Britain. (The Camberwell Beauty was a quick fly-past on the top of Gibraltar, and it went by so quick I had to take someone else's word for it.) The moths one was bound to be less comprehensive, since there are some two and a half thousand British species, so they opted for a selection. Most of the usual suspects were included - Angleshades, Brimstone, Swallowtail, Silver Y, Cinnabar... my gut reaction is that most people will surely have seen all of these, but I try to keep Carl Sagan's wise words in mind and endeavour not to think with my gut. Many people won't even have heard of any of them. And there are hawk moths in there, of course. Seven species, no less. I have several criticisms. The selection itself is, on the whole, a decent one, apart from the questionable inclusion of the Death's-head Hawk (unless it's got a lot commoner in recent years, as it may have). Of the 40 species depicted, I have seen only 19 (a couple of them as larvae rather than imagines), but I haven't done that much mothing and I know my tally is execrable. More seriously, as with the butterflies, no scientific names are given. Furthermore, there is no arrangement by family. The seven hawks are scattered throughout the six pages of illustrations, for example. This is not petty pickiness, much less snobby elitism. The Linnaean system of classification is, at least for me, fundamental for identifying, appreciation - and even enjoying - what I see. Take identification. Related species are, unsurprisingly, often similar to each other in various respects, such as structure or behaviour. When I come across an unknown moth, I can usually tell at a glance whether it's a geometer, a noctuid, a sphingid (hawk moth), zygaenid, or 'one of the other ones'. First impressions can fail (the Cinnabar looks superficially like a zygaenid, when in fact it's in the Arctiidae), but it's usually a good way to get started on identification. The Grauniad's moths are carved up into 'night-flying' and 'day-flying' sections, which is only superficially useful, and it's not done accurately in any case - the Cinnabar is nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, not the day-flier implied in the guide. (I won't say what I think of the wild plant guide that arranges everything by flower colour.) Appreciation is also enhanced by a knowledge of taxonomic relationships. Taxonomy reflects evolutionary ancestry, and I can hardly look at anything without being aware of the evolutionary process that has made it what it is. Maybe that's just my own personal quirk, but such little that I know of Darwinism constantly informs me. I can't help but be aware that every feature of every bird, plant, insect or whatever is the result of gene frequencies determined by the pressures of natural selection. This morning, for instance, I heard a bumble-bee buzzing just above my head. Looking up, I realised that it was not a bumble-bee at all, but the hoverfly Volucella bombylans. Bombylans is an accomplished bumble-bee mimic. It looks like a bumble-bee. It even sounds like a bumble-bee. This type of mimicry - I think it's known as Muellerian mimicry, but the fact that I'm not sure only underlines what a rank amateur I am - is a strategy to avoid being eaten by birds. Birds avoid eating bumble-bees for the obvious reason, that of not wanting to be stung, and bombylans exploits that aversion by looking like something unpalatable. Furthermore, mimics like bombylans don't appear until after young birds have fledged and learned to avoid the bees that bombylans imitates - just as Darwinian theory would predict. (It's not quite that simple, though, because other hoverflies, decent bee or wasp mimics in their own right, are out in abundance before the birds' eggs even get laid). The enjoyment follows on from the identification and appreciation. I know what I'm looking at, or at least have a reasonable idea. I can, at least some of the time, make some informed guesses about why it is the way that it is. And together, they only add to the fun of seeing the things in the first place. And the good old Grauniad's gone and dispensed with all of that. I'm not entirely unsympathetic. These little foldies are clearly not aimed at people who have already got into wildlifing, let alone the serious naturalist. They're for dudes with a rudimentary but genuine interest in wildlife, and if they kindle a deeper level of interest then they'll have done something useful. I don't want to be churlish: the guides, as they are, are better than nothing, they're very prettily illustrated, and such information as they give seems to be broadly accurate, but they could have been better. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
8:57 pm	My kitchen and other habitats I seem to have got more than a little behind in posting here, and for no good reason. It's now more than a fortnight since I got this year's bird list up to 122 species with Turtle Dove, Cuckoo and Common Tern. That's a pretty pathetic total to have racked up by the middle of May, or indeed the second week of June. This year's Big List has now passed 350, though I don't know exactly what the 350th species was because I tend to be slack in updating it, forget things, remember them a week later. The 350th to go into the spreadsheet was the common arable weed Fat Hen, Chenopodium album, which I glimpsed in a field as I rode home from work this morning. But then later on, as I made my way down to the launderette, I noticed some Ground Elder running rampant (and Ground Elder either runs rampant or not at all) in a garden, reminding me that I had seen it in that same garden last time I did my laundry but hadn't put it on the list. So the 350th species of the year was probably Anthrenus verbasci, otherwise known as the Varied Carpet Beetle, which I found in my flat yesterday. Not on a varied carpet, but on the net curtains in the kitchen. Only the second one I've seen, which is odd because I would have thought they'd be pretty common, especially in a flat like mine where the carpets don't get much in the way of hoovering. On the other hand, they're tiny little things, very hard to spot. I suspect I have an atypically high tolerance of creepy-crawlies in my living space. Spiders I almost invariably welcome, unless they get disturbingly large. I'm used to seeing woodlice in the bathroom, though I wish I knew what species they were (not one of the easy ones), and there is a thriving colony of owl midges around the hand basin. Multiple generations of house moths have followed me around over the years, and I don't mind them because I don't have an expensive pashmina collection for them to ravage. I did once throw out a sock, retrieved from under the bed after many months of festering, because it had larvae crawling all over it, but that hardly counted as a skin-crawling yuk moment. Like all so-called pests, house moths are only a problem if they're numbers start spiralling out of control. A modest population is pretty harmless. How do other people feel? Do you mind sharing your home with other animals? Do you positively welcome them? What are your tolerance limits? (Even I would draw the line at rats.) I'm referring primarily to things that have taken up permanent residence, rather than wasps and moths and things that blunder in from time to time. It now occurs to me that I haven't put house moth on this year's list. Or owl midge. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
7:21 am	I might no longer be on speaking terms with communicator but credit where it's due, I can't really fault her on her three ways to reduce the number of abortions. My only disagreement would be a terminological one: she calls it radical feminism, I call it plain common sense. Let's hope that our illustrious elected representatives vote as commendably on this issue as they did on hybrid embryos yesterday. Talking of yesterday's vote, I may have misheard this, but I'm sure one of the dissenters came out with the following gem: "You don't have to be a Christian to believe that we are all God's creation." Possibly not, mate, but I'm pretty sure it helps. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
8:52 pm	Flummoxed by ferox I have a spider dying in my bathroom. At least, it seems to be dying, since it hasn't moved for the best part of 24 hours. When I first saw it the other night I was slightly startled, since it seemed enormous. A big, black, bloated eight-legged beastie clinging to the wall. But of course, being me, I immediately started wondering what species it was, and within a couple of minutes I was kneeling down with my nose almost touching it, trying to get a body length measurement without disturbing it. And as is so often the case with 'big' spiders, it rapidly shrunk once I got a ruler near it. I make it 12-13mm, or half an inch. Not that big at all, really. And an annoying length, since it's at the top end of the size range for Amaurobius similis but at the bottom end for the closely related A ferox. And as so often in the past, it's putting out all kinds of mixed messages. Since it's very dark (not black as such) all over, that suggests ferox rather than similis, and the unswollen pedipalps indicate a female, but female ferox has legs 'too dark to distinguish any annulations (at least according to Jones' Country Life Guide). The legs on this beastie are a dark brown with a hint of annulation, which would fit male ferox, but there is no conspicuous white tip to the pedipalps, which there ought to be if it's a male. Maybe it's not Amaurobius at all. Another possible candidate is Drassodes lapidosus, which is normally a tawny brown in colour but may be greyish. And it's sizable (I've seen some very large females) as well as not uncommon in houses - I once had one living under my wardrobe. And this specimen has quite a broad, conspicuously darker, foliate cardiac mark on the upperside of the abdomen, whereas Drassodes typically has a thin triangular mark if anything at all. I'm stumped. My eyesight is too far gone these days to pick out the eye pattern without a magnifying aid, and my hand lens is buried deep in a box somewhere (one of those things I keep meaning to dig out but never do). Besides, Jones doesn't have an eye distribution pattern for Amaurobius, though there is one for Drassodes. Roberts Volume I (the only volume I have) falls back on genitalia as seen under a microscope. I don't have one, and even if I did, I'm not prepared to killl a spider just to put a name to it. My best bet remains my first guess, Amaurobius ferox, but I really can't be sure enough to stick it on the Big List. So all I can do is leave the thing be, and presumably let it die in peace. Sometimes I envy the arachnophobes, they don't have to go through all this. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
8:26 pm	Different people have their sensitivities attuned to particular wavelengths. For some, not necessarily PoC, it's the faintest whiff of racism. For others it might be anything that might just possibly be misogyny or heteronormacy. For me, it's speciesism. I see it everywhere. And hear it, too, since it crops up on Radio 4 from time to time. ( Roll your eyes now while I get it out of my system. ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
8:55 pm	Year List 08, ##115-119 Behind the times again, but the year list has crept up a few more notches, thanks to a protracted long ride home on Friday morning that yielded Greenshank, Reed Warbler, Nightingale, Hobby and Common Sandpiper, bringing me up to 119 birds for this year. I spent a considerable amount of time in the Stonelees nature reserve, a compact but bijou patch of scrub next to Pegwell Bay, where I managed to draw a bead on one of the two singing Nightingales, found lots of Twayblade in flower (possibly the least exciting orchid in the world), carpets of forget-me-not (at least two species) and a moth that I eventually identified as Latticed Heath, which I think I might have seen before but can't be entirely sure. I also met Big Phil, who doesn't count as an addition to the Big List, but it was the first time I've seen him this year and it turns out that I am not the only one struggling to find the motivation to get out. As Phil said, echoing my own feelings, once he's out he enjoys it, but it takes an act of will to poke his nose out of the door. This year's Big List has now passed the 300 mark, mainly through lots of plants springing up everywhere but also some invertebrates. Actually there are lots of invertebrates, but most of them are flies that I can't identify. Or slugs, also beyond my ken, which is a pity because I found a lot of slugs lurking under logs in Stonelees. Perhaps I ought to get that field guide out of the library again and take some bloody notes from it (and maybe scan some of the plates, since I've now got a scanner). Some things at least I can put a name to without recourse to a book. Turning over the first of two adjacent logs (a legacy of hawthorn control - conservation often consists of cutting things down), I found swarms of woodlice, all of them the warty-backed charcoal-coloured Porcellio scaber. And under the second, just two woodlice, and a very fat contented specimen of Dysdera crocata. This rather sinister brick-red spider specialises in eating woodlice, and has the jaws to prove it. Not that I've ever been bitten by any of the specimens I've handled, but maybe that's because I'm not a woodlouse. FInding Dysdera reminded me of another spider I'd seen earlier in the week, and this time I did have to get the book out. Agalenatea redii, which I must have seen before since I've pencilled in a tick next to its name, but where or when I've long since forgotten. It does, however, have the useful diagnostic feature of not sitting in its web or skulking in a silken retreat, but of sitting on top of whatever stalk it has chosen to weave its web upon. The pill bug woodlouse Armadillidium vulgare has finally got onto the list, and the Blue-tailed Damselfly Ischnura elegans. Two butterflies glimpsed from the road clearly had orange tips to their white wings so they must have been the imaginatively named Orange Tip. Over the weekend I also managed to spot the Holly Blue and Speckled Wood butterflies. No sign whatsoever of the Small Tortoiseshell. This used to be one of the commonest spring butterflies, but now seems to have disappeared. In fact, I can't remember when I last saw one. Not for several years now. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
8:21 pm	Year List 08, #108-114 I seem to have fallen a bit behind on this year's list. Not that I've been doing much birding, but at this time of year anything more than the most token effort is likely to yield a year tick or two. And when I finally get around to updating the list, I find that Blackcap had somehow fallen under the radar along the way, so when I last posted I was on 108 rather than 107. Since then, I've managed to get a Tree Pipit (#109), which true to migrating Tree Pipit form would have gone entirely unnoticed if it hadn't called, making me glance up to see a little speck beetling across the sky. The Swifts arrived on May 1st (#110) and are now to be seen daily. This week I've had a Willow Warbler (#111) singing just outside the factory gate, Lessser Whitethroat (#112), House Martin (#113), and this morning a Whinchat (#114). Only a female, alas. Not that I've anything against female Whinchats - without them there would be no more Whinchats at all - but a spring male is such a smart bird, and so rarely seen in this corner of the country where they don't stop to breed. The Big List has passed the 250 mark, thanks to all these plants springing up all over the place. Some of them are even in flower, though many I'm getting simply on the leaves. This morning I indulged in a spot of shameless biophilia (not nearly as naughty as it sounds), walking the footpaths around the back of Broadstairs and Margate and enjoying all that I found. Which wasn't all that much to be honest, but simple souls like me don't take much pleasing. Fennel was springing up all over a patch of waste ground, and I couldn't resist running my fingers through its glossy ferny leaves and taking a deep whiff of aniseed. Butchers Broom is still in flower, I was vaguely surprised to notice, and playing host as it usually does to the sheet webs of Linyphia, the largest of the money spiders. I stumbled across a longhorn moth, with wings of chrome and fine white antennae three times the length of its body. No chance of putting a name to it, though, since it typically doesn't appear in Chinery. Probably one of the incurvariids, which fall within the largely neglected 'microlepidoptera'. There are loads of micro moths, and not all of them are dingy nondescripts. At work I had a macro moth, flittering above the unmown grass in front of the canteen at half past four in the morning, with the sky just beginning to pale. Its crimson hindwings caught my attention, and I was pretty certain it was a Cinnabar, but would it settle and let me have a decent look at it? Ha! If anyone cares to inspect the CCTV footage, they will see a fat bastard in frayed shorts stomping round in circles with his head down. That's me, chasing a moth. As one does during a semi-licit smoke break. Just as I'd given up on it, I noticed a thickly leafy specimen of Ragwort at the point where the moth last disappeared. Ragwort is the food plant of Cinnabar, and Cinnabars are largely nocturnal (which I didn't know then), unlike the vaguely similar burnet moths to which they are not, despite appearances, related. Another one for the Big List. Another two, in fact, since the Ragwort was also new. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
6:32 pm	Year List 08: #107 It's got dark by the time I leave for work in the evening so the birding opportunities are self-evidently limited. Unless the bird in question happens to be a Barn Owl sitting on a fence post. #107, and so far the only owl of the year. The habitat value of my flat has gone up a notch, in my own estimation if no one else's, with the discovery of the theridiid spider Steatoda grossa in residence. A male scuttling out from under the fridge, and a female under the bay window in the lounge. Since these two spots are at opposite ends of the flat, there are presumably a few more specimens hidden away somewhere in between. S grossa is widely distributed in houses in southern England, so I'm not surprised to find them. I'm more surprised that it's taken them so long to turn up. And no sign of the supposedly commoner S bipunctata at all. (Comment on this)