Category: Nature

Today was a pleasant day, I went out cycling in Reeuwijk and took my camera. A small selection of the photos are in the photo album here called "Spring Day". Simple pleasures.

First of all it was the disillusionment that set in when confronted with the fact that farting cows are a major source of greenhouse gases. No longer could I gaze at a field of grazing cows in a contemplative mood – all I could think of was the fact that each cow would be letting slip 200 litres of methane per day.

Now comes the news that wood-burning pizza ovens are likely to fall foul of new environmental restrictions.

I predict that in less than 10 years time we’ll have an army of inspectors poking around our wood-burning fire in the living room complaining that it does not conform to some new batch of environmental laws. We’ll probably have to replace the thrill of a real fire with a flat-panel screen showing an endless loop video of flickering flames. It’s not the same, I tell you.

…is the realisation that I live in a manmade environment. The area where I live is almost the lowest point of the Netherlands – at least 6 metres below sea-level. One of these days, something is going to happen. Will I still be around to see it? I don’t know, but sometimes I think I should relocate to higher ground for my twilight years…

Addendum: I did relocate in March 2006 – to a point that is 19 metres above sea-level.

Another of life’s simple pleasures is the ability to get on my bicycle and cycle to Reeuwijk – a 15 minute journey. There you can guarantee to see a variety of wildlife. Today, for example, I saw at least ten pheasants rummaging around, and on the lakes was a variety of birds. Including this pair of Red-Crested Pochards…

One of life’s simple pleasures is sitting at the table at breakfast with a cup of coffee and watching the birds through the window…

So there I was, wide awake and waiting for the song thrush. And it did not disappoint – it started even earlier this morning, at 4:23 am. And then at 4:40am, Martin turns over in his sleep and starts to snore. Welcome to the new improved Dawn Chorus. Oh joy.

And how do I know? Because for the past three days a song thrush has decided that it will start its routine of singing its little heart out in the tree outisde our bedroom window. Trouble is, it starts at 4:30 am each day. So the dawn chorus is starting to tune up for the season. Soon the thrush will be followed by other birds and their counter-melodies.

I don’t really mind being woken up by birdsong – even if it is before dawn. At least it makes a change from Martin’s snoring. 

I think that Mount St. Helens is in league with the BBC. The latter is going to broadcast its fictional documentary: Supervolcano this coming weeked, and today Mount St. Helens lets us know it’s still around by emitting a large cloud of ash.

Supervolcano is about the caldera that is underneath Yellowstone National Park. Apparently it erupts every 600,000 years – and the last time was 640,000 years ago, so we’re a bit overdue. As far as I’m concerned I’m quite happy about that. This is one time where I don’t view punctuality as good manners.

We’ve had a cold snap and snow for the past couple of days. It’s the first time for several years that we’ve had it this cold. Expected to be -20 tonight. We went out for a walk in the neighbourhood today, and I took these photos.

Today’s Guardian carries a cheery little story about a German zoo’s attempts to get its penguins to breed. The problem is that the zoo recently discovered that three of their five penguin pairs are all male. So, do they have six gay penguins on their hands? Apparently, two of the all male pairs spent time last year sitting on a stone instead of an egg.

The zoo has imported four female penguins in an attempt to turn the males back to the straight and narrow, but so far with little success. German Gay and Lesbian groups have been up in arms about this naked attempt at heterosexual seduction, but I think they are over-reacting. The zoo’s spokeswoman is somewhat more pragmatic: "So far the males have scarcely thrown the females a single glance. The men have had the opportunity but haven’t done it. If the penguins really are gay then obviously they can stay gay."

It’s examples like this that really show up the ignorance of people who say "Being gay is unnatural". It’s been documented in over 450 species of animals besides our own. The research has been collected together into a book Biological Exuberance, by Bruce Bagemihl. It makes fascinating reading.

The "exuberance" of the title refers to the fact that sexuality has all sorts of forms in nature – matched only by the tireless efforts of thousands of researchers to document those forms. I was tickled by a recent entry in the Annals of Improbable Research titled: Egrets – I’ve had a few, which described N.G. McKilligan’s egret-filled research report “Promiscuity in the Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis)”, published in the journal The Auk, vol. 107, no. 2, April 1990, pp. 334-41.

Oh, and for those of you who don’t understand the "P-p-pick up a Penguin" title – it’s a reference to a long-running advert used in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s for a chocolate biscuit called a Penguin. This earworm is a very strong meme to most British people of my generation who were exposed to it.

Beautiful day today. Helped Martin in the garden – trimmed back the willows and cut up the branches. Then he went off in the car with some plants to do some work in a friend’s garden. I cycled over (about 13 km) through Reeuwijk to the friend’s house.

The lakes in Reeuwijk were looking good. Lots of waterfowl about: the inevitable ducks, coots and moorhens, of course. But I also saw large numbers of greylag and canada geese, and quite a few cormorants.