Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Nature

  • Mole Crickets

    And talking about Moles, our neighbour this morning said that he had another infestation of Mole Crickets in his garden. This could be bad news if the little buggers tunnel through to our garden as well.
     
    The last time they did that was back in 2000. I had noticed that the lawn was starting to show bald patches, which I found surprising, because it didn’t get that much wear and tear. Then, one day, I noticed something moving in the grass. Grabbing a jam jar, I trapped it. Holding it up for inspection, it turned out to be a large (8 cm) insect of some kind, which I had never seen before.
     
    Looking it up in the section on pests in my gardening encyclopaedia drew a blank, so I took the jar and its contents off to the local garden centre for identification. Oh, said the man, it’s a “veenmol”. Having established that he knew what it was, I asked for something that would exterminate the beasts (having a suspicion that the damage to my lawn was more than could be accomplished by a single specimen). He then did that thing that I have come to dread in any interaction with a tradesman – he sucked his teeth. It’s a sound that usually translates to delay and/or serious expense. Ah, he explained, we used to have poison for it, but the manufacturers have taken it off the market, and anyway they’re difficult to get rid of. Upon seeing the rolling of my eyes, he did offer to check if another garden centre in Gouda had any of the necessary material. Yes, I said, anything to prevent the lawn from becoming Yul Brynner. Luckily, a telephone call established that the garden centre on the other side of town had some remaining stocks, so off I cycled and snapped up the last three packs of poison in the known universe.
     
    I sprinkled the pellets on the lawn, and then followed a gruesome week of veenmol hunting with my jam jar. Every day would reveal more of the damn things surfacing on to the lawn in mortal agony (die, damn you, die! – an apposite quote from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, I kept thinking, as I would find another one and pop it into the swiftly filling jar).
     
    Curious to know what veenmol was in English, I consulted the dictionary, and found it meant “mole cricket”. I went onto the Internet to look for “mole cricket” on the Web, and was rewarded by a number of sites explaining that these rare, and delightful, creatures were a protected species in the UK. Ha!, not in my garden, they’re not, I thought grimly, sprinkling my pellets, and humming Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.
     
    That time I managed to get rid of them, but it sounds now as though They’re Baacckk! I shall be keeping a careful eye on the lawn in the next few weeks…

  • Not If, But When

    The National Geographic carried a prescient story about what would happen if a category 5 hurricane hit New Orleans in one of its issues last year…

  • A’ima Bridge, Baghdad

    And across the world from New Orleans, another human disaster. This time not from the forces of Nature, but the forces of human nature. Once again, I’ll leave the words to someone better qualified than I: Salam Pax.

  • Katrina – The Aftermath

    I don’t have the words to write about what Katrina has done to New Orleans and the surrounding area. Instead, I’ll leave the eulogy to New Orleans in the hands of Howell Raines, writing in today’s Guardian.

  • Katrina

    Reading about the expected effects of hurricane Katrina on New Orleans is a sobering experience. It’s not just the 160mph winds, of course, it’s the fact that New Orleans lies two metres below sea level, and if the sea defenses are breached, the scale of the disaster could be taken to a whole other level. Living, as I do, six metres below sea level makes one somewhat sensitive about these things…

    Update: This article, written in 2001, may be a prediction of events about to unfold…

  • So, You Want a Dog?

    We’re starting to think seriously about moving East. Not all that far – still within the Netherlands – but near to the Dutch/German border in Gelderland. As part of the deal, Martin has let it be known that if we do end up in the countryside, then he wants to get a dog. Knowing my luck, he’ll get one that looks like this.

  • What’s Your Earliest Memory?

    Mine is lying in my pram on a hot summer’s day in the garden of a house in the country. I was given a piece of bread and butter to eat – but the butter had turned rancid in the heat. I clearly remember thinking I don’t like the taste of this.
     
    All perfectly ordinary stuff. But then you come across people like Freeman Dyson who says:
    My strong suit was always mathematics. I was not driven to become a scientist by a craving to understand the mysteries of nature. I just enjoyed calculating and fell in love with numbers. I remember vividly one episode from early childhood. I do not know how old I was. I know only that I was young enough to be put down for an afternoon nap in my crib. The crib had mahogany sidepieces so that I couldn’t climb out. I didn’t feel like sleeping, so I spent the time calculating.
     
    I added one plus a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth and so on, and I discovered that if you go on adding like this forever you end up with two. Then I tried adding one plus a third plus a ninth and so on, and discovered that if you go on adding like this forever you end up with one and a half. Then I tried one plus a quarter and so on, and ended up with one and a third. I had discovered infinite series. I don’t think I talked about this. It was just a game.
    That’s scary…

  • Naked Mole Rats

    Articles on naked mole rats remind me of London buses – you wait for ages without anything happening, and then a whole convoy turns up at once.
     
    First it was Afarensis, who referred to a story in Science Daily about naked mole rats. He returned to the subject the following day with a particularly scary picture of the beast in question.
     
    And now Carl Zimmer, over at the Loom, has weighed in with a typically fascinating post about the possible parallels between their evolution and our own.

  • The Sky at Night

    When I was growing up and started getting interested in Astronomy, I always tried to watch The Sky At Night – the BBC’s TV programme devoted to Astronomy. The monthly programme began in 1957 and has been going ever since, and it has always been presented by one of Britain’s great eccentrics: Sir Patrick Moore. I suspect that he’s going to pop his clogs before he will retire.
     
    I’ve just discovered that you can watch some of the Sky At Night programmes online. Terrific. Excuse me while I snuggle down in a comfy armchair with a cup of cocoa and choccy biccies just like I used to do as a boy when I watched it.
     
    Update: There’s a rumour that Sir Patrick has indeed announced his retirement…

  • Perseid Watching

    Well, I had some luck in attempting to watch the Perseid meteor shower last night. There was some cloud (see pictures) but fortunately it was interspersed with clear spells. There trouble is that, as you can see from the pictures, light pollution here in the Randstad is pretty awful, so it’s difficult to see any but the brightest stars. I had great difficulty in seeing the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.
     
    I was attempting to photograph meteors, but despite taking over 100 shots, for every single one, the camera was pointing in the wrong place.
     
    There were metors every few minutes – one was quite spectacular, streaking across a quarter of the sky, and leaving a trail that was visible for a few seconds. There were also a few non-Perseid meteors, as well as the usual collection of planes and satellites. Mars, rising in the East, was also very prominent.
     
    So, all in all, not bad; but I would have liked to have captured a Perseid on film. 
     

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  • Europe Feels the Heat?

    Once again, I think I’m living in some parallel universe to the rest of the world. I keep on coming across news stories that talk about "Heatwaves" and "Droughts" in Europe. Here’s another one. As I write this, it’s pissing with rain outside my window (as it has been for most of the summer), and temperatures, apart from four days in June, have been more akin to winter than summer. Perhaps there’s a Netherlands somewhere else where everybody is sheltering from the noonday heat. It certainly ain’t where I am at the moment.

  • Perseid Meteors Peak Tonight

    For some people, the "Glorious Twelfth" signifies the start of the season when they can blast the shit out of grouse with their shotguns. For me, however, it signifies the peak of the Perseids meteor shower. While we’ve been having abysmal weather recently, I can but hope that the cloud cover will not be 100% tonight as it has been for the past n months. If the night is clear, then I’ll be out there, watching the skies… 

  • A Balanced Scorecard for the Climate

    Over the last few years, the concept of the "balanced scorecard" as a means of rating the performance of a business has become all the rage. Now, the World Wildlife Fund has taken that to the next logical stage by publishing the results of a balanced scorecard for the G8 countries in respect of their performance on climate change. It accompanies the figures with an easy-to-grasp graphic of a powermeter marked into red, yellow and green zones.
     
    It will come as no surprise to learn that the US has the powermeter graphic shown as firmly in the red zone for all but one of the measures in the scorecard.
     
    The document is worth reading and is available here.
     
    (hat tip to the WorldChanging blog)

  • Permafrost Melting

    A somewhat worrying story in the Guardian today about the fact that the world’s largest peat-bog (bigger than France and Germany combined) has begun to melt for the first time since it was formed 11,000 years ago.
     
    The concern is that, as it melts, it will release methane (a greenhouse gas), and so accelerate the rate of global warming. Definitely time to think about moving to higher ground, I feel.

  • Twisty’s Unusual Afternoon

    Twisty Faster has a blog, I Blame the Patriarchy, that can usually be relied upon to take an ironic, if not occasionally dyspeptic, view of life.
     
    Being a self-confessed spinster aunt, she has not herself experienced the ‘joys’ of childbirth. Recently, however, she was privileged (if that is the word) to be present at the birth of her niece – an experience that clearly took her somewhat aback.
     
    There clearly is no Intelligent Designer – unless he is a mysogynistic psychopath, or she a masochist. If I were a woman, I don’t think I’d want to put myself through childbirth.
     
    As Stephen Fry is reputed to have said: When I was born, I remember looking back up at my mother and saying, "that’s the last time I’m going up in one of those." 

  • Down on the Farm

    Martin and I paid a visit to two friends at their farm in Flevoland yesterday. A pleasant day out. Here’s some shots from their garden.
     

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  • Frog Blog

    I’m trying to stop thinking too much about recent events in London and so I bring you a photograph of a life form spotted in the garden of friends on Sunday.
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  • Redback Spider Sex

    The Scientific Indian has a wonderful entry on the sex-life of the Redback spider. Nature is endlessly surprising.
    Speaking as a male of the species, I’m glad that the sex life of homo sapiens is somewhat less stressful.

  • Phew, What a Scorcher!

    We’re having something of a heatwave in The Netherlands at the moment. I think it was something like 30 degrees Centigrade today. Instead of going to the gym, I decided to take the camera and go for a cycle ride in the country instead. You can see some of the results here in the photos called "Summer Day in Reeuwijk". If you want to see better quality versions of the photos, then go to my Flickr space and browse the Nature set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcoupe/sets/436835/ 

  • I See The Moon…

    …the Moon Sees Me.

    I grew up hearing the recording of The Stargazers’ 1954 recording of this song being played on a shellac 78 – alas, I no longer have it. I was reminded of the old song today when I read about the fact that now is a good time to marvel in one of nature’s illusions – the moon is getting bigger!