Grey Heron with nesting material (Photo:Tim Jones)
Quite a cold afternoon’s walk today; but the sun was up, the golfers were out, and so too were our local herons. I snapped this one just before sunset. He’s a Grey Heron (Aredea cinerea) and common in the UK. (I keep an eye out for the Blue Heron and super-rare Purple Heron, that occasionally visit the UK, but have seen neither.)
Herons nest in colonies, and this one looked like it contained three birds: two adults flying back and forth to the nest, and a smaller ‘second winter’ juvenile that stayed put (the one on the left of the pair in these shots).
Grey Heron (Photo:Tim Jones)
I was surprised to see nest-building this time of year, but the hardy heron’s extended breeding season sees them happily dropping eggs in late February. That’s not to say the smaller bird here is a chick – they leave the nest by 10 weeks, and this one’s plumage is too mature. I’m guessing it just wasn’t his/her shift for twig collection.
Grey Heron (Photo:Tim Jones)
They’re fantastic birds to watch. Very noisy and, to my eyes, especially dinosaury. I also like the retracted neck position adopted for steady flight; it’s like their head goes along for the ride in upper-deck business class. It’s also one way to tell herons apart from cranes.
Grey Heron flying with retracted neck (Photo:Tim Jones)
The Heron’s nest is a large flat platform of twigs in the top of a tree. The males do most of the collecting, the females most of the building.
These last two shots of the nest show an adult bird on the right, and what I suspect is a ‘second winter’ juvenile on the left (tell me if you think differently). Despite the stance, there was no feeding going on here.
It’s days like this that justify carrying heavy cameras and lenses around on the off-chance something might show up. Next phase is to return with the tripod and get some HD movies of these guys. Watch this space!
What do they say? It’s never too late and you’re never too old? I finally made it to Disneyland (Anaheim) last week.
There we were: doing all the rides – some several times, eating food that’s bad for us, buying stuff we don’t need. I so want to take the Star Tours sim home with me.
It’s a hard experience to knock. Except, looking round, aren’t the Disney icons a bit thin on the ground, especially that icon of icons – Mickey Mouse. Where’s the guy off the TV with his big mouse head, big mouse eyes and ears, flowing tailcoats? Okay, between whipping round Space Mountain and transfering the contents of the flume into my fleece, our accessibility to roaming mice is limited; but I’m still half disappointed (half thankful too) we’ve avoided a mugging by the world’s cutest rodent – me with my ‘1st Visit’ badge an’ all.
Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse (Photo:Tim Jones at Disneyland, Anaheim)
Then at the end of the day, as we sit munching Mickey surrogate pretzels, the mouse himself finally shows on the Parade float; and with that box ticked, we head home to live happily ever after.
Hurtling down LA’s great big freeway, I can only mull, through waves of incipient indigestion, the definitive paper on ‘the impact of twelve hours of corn dogs, ice cream and churros on the human body under intermittent acceleration to 3g’. Shelving that due to data-weakness in cotton candy (with a recommendation for further work), I move to the important question of why exactly is Mickey Mouse so very popular? Some thirty years ago, evolutionary biologist and sometime Disney scholar Stephen J Gould asked the very same question.
Gould’s essay, Mickey Mouse meets Konrad Lorenz, originaly pubished in the May 1979 issue of Natural History, and reappearing as ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse‘ (link to pdf) in the Panda’s Thumb collection of essays, is a light-hearted yet sound scientific analysis of how Disney artists changed Mickey’s features over the years to make him more innately appealing to us. Perhaps not knowingly, but in biological terms they’d neotenized him, migrating his more adult features to the juvenile forms we see, and are programmed to endear, in human children. It’s one of my favourite pieces of science communication and a recommended read.
Disneyland (Photo:Tim Jones)
Animals, real or caricatured, score high on the cute scale if they have: (a) a large eye size compared to head-length, (b) a large head size to body-length, and (c) a large cranium (Gould measured a ‘cranial vault’ ratio for this, only meaningful for Mickey in profile, but equating to what Lorenz describes as “predominance of the brain capsule”). They display short, thick, extremities – like stubby legs (Disney achieved the illusion by putting Mickey in shorts), and a short snout (in cartoonland, only villains sport pointy snouts – think the weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
Applied to animals, they suggest our attitude, affection, concern, and the general way we treat species will be influenced by how closely each resembles a human child – how juvenile they appear. Conservationists call it ‘survival of the cutest’ – whereby public conservation support favours attractive species over more deserving cases under a greater threat of extinction. It’s the reason pandas and badgers get more sympathy than the Purple Burrowing Frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis), or the Helmeted Hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil) – to pull a couple of real lookers from the IUCN Red List; the former is ‘endangered’, the latter a ‘near threatened’ species.
Even favoured species like dolphins fall off the radar once a variant moves away from a norm we can easily anthropomorphise. Compare the Ganges (endangered) and Yangtze (critically endangered, possibly extinct) river dolphins with their slightly odd-looking extended beaks, with the familiar smiley Common Short-Beaked dolphin (‘Least Concern’ on the IUCN list).
Purple Burrowing Frog
Helmeted Hornbill. Not such a pretty boy (Wikicommons)
I’m bringing badgers into this because of their prominence in the UK news at the moment, where the government has introduced a controversial culling policy to reduce Bovine TB, which badgers carry. Controversy centres on the effectiveness of culling (by shooting at feed lures) over other controls like vaccination, and a general point on how transparently science or politics based the decisions have been. In terms of its conservation status, the Eurasian Badger (Meles meles) is classified by the IUCN as a ‘least concern’ species.
Eurasian Badger
Taking nothing away from the arguments, it’s interesting to test the badger against Gould’s cuteness criteria to see how looks might be influencing popular support. I got the idea from this Guardian piece that’s against the culling, but suggesting that with respect to “one of Britain’s best-loved animals”…”our attachment to badgers may be irrational” (as is culling, in that author’s view).
Off the blocks things don’t look so good, Mr Badger being a fully paid-up member of your actual weasel family an’ all. But he’s not stoatish, and from various photos on the web (my preferred methodology short of taking callipers to roadkill), I score him an apparent head to body ratio of five (20%), falling to four (25%) when he bunches up like they do. Not even up with Mickey’s early Steamboat Willie incarnation at 35%, but still in the ballpark.
Compared to Mickey’s eye to head ratio of 27% to 42% over his career, our badger comes in at unbecoming ratios as low as 7% (measured up the snout, nose to ear) to at best 15% (measured in profile). But look again. What we really see in a badger’s face isn’t its beady little weasel eyes, but that glorious stripe (think pandas eyes). Calculated on stripe width at the eye, the ratios triple, up to a far cuter 35% for the profile. On the stubby legs criterion the badger is home and dry; it’s hard to even make them out under the fur – a bit like Disney hiding Mickey’s spindles under baggy shorts. The snout is an enigma though, and there’s no getting round it. Does the apparent integration of snout, cranium and neck into a continuous cone soften the effect? Or maybe we see tufty ears and forgive the pointy nose? On balance though, based on the numbers but with some reservations, I’m going to give the badger his cute badge.
California Ground Squirrel. Fillng his face – incidentally – improves his cute ratios
I’m not sure the Germans would agree though. A more oblique cuteness indicator mentioned by Gould, but one I like if only for its reminder of that mouthful of letters Germans use for squirrel – Eichhörnchen – is the wider association of the German diminutive form with certain animals and not others. So there’s also Rotkehlchen for Robin and Kaninchen for rabbit – all officially cute animals. I wonder if the trend follows in other countries using a diminutive suffix? Anyways, the Germans have nicht so honored the badger, who’s a plain simple Dachs (the origin of Dachshund, no less). I’m making my own stories up now, but have just too many Germans been bitten by (rabid or otherwise) Dachs? Is the Dachs ‘one of Germany’s best-loved animals’ ? Guinea pigs are off the cute scale, but Peruvians don’t lose sleep over serving them up for lunch.
And what do North Americans make of their badger, with it’s somewhat skunky appearance? (To my eyes, the American badger is actually flatter faced and all-round cuter) And before I diss. skunks too far, remember Pepé Le Pew? – not a million miles off Mickey on the cute ratios. I don’t know how far Gould and Lorenz factored in cultural variables like these; could be an interesting research topic.
Pepé Le Pew. Even skunks can be cute (Copyright: Warner Bros.)
To wrap up then. On badgers, I suspect some folks do support them just because they’re cute, but I’m also sure many look rationally at the bigger picture. Aside from Gould’s criteria, perhaps we should just ask ourselves if, under similar circumstances, we’d put the same effort into saving the poor old Purple Burrowing Frog?
At end though, any improved awareness of factors that influence our thoughts and actions, but are outside our immediate consciousness, is valuable. That’s what Gould is doing. I’m just relaying the message and expanding it a bit.
I also like badgers. And gibbons.
References
Mickey Mouse meets Konrad Lorenz. Natural History 1979, 88 (May): 30-36.
At the Planetary Society Blog, HERE, Melissa Rice tests the appearance of NASA’s now defunct Mars rover Spirit against the same Gould cuteness criteria discussed in the post. Fantastic!
Tonight I joined the 2011 Darwin Lecture, with Sir David Attenborough speaking on ‘Alfred Russel Wallace and the Birds of Paradise’, organised and hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine in association with the Linnean Society of London.
Sir David Attenborough (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fresh back from a trip to Borneo – no less, the spritely 85-year-old was introduced by Professor Parveen Kumar, President of the Royal Society of Medicine, and Dr Vaughan Southgate, President of the Linnean Society.
Be it via the TV or lecture theatre, David Attenborough plays to full houses all the time, and this November evening was no exception.
His account of Wallace’s ocean voyage to the Malay Archipelago and pioneering observations of that unique group of theatrical show-offs: the Birds-of-paradise, made for an informative and fun evening – all the merrier thanks to a generous ration of film clips showing the birds’ unlikely courtship rituals.
But the real take-home for me was Attenborough’s poignant re-telling of the Wallace-Darwin story: How the two independently arrived at that world-changing idea for the origin of species – natural selection – whereby only the better-adapted offspring of animals survive and pass on their qualities to a new generation.
Sir David Attenborough (Photo:Tim Jones)Male Great Bird-of-paradise (Wikicommons)
Darwin had for years been working on his own version of natural selection from the comfortable surroundings of his home Down House, but had held back from publishing.
Then in 1858, Darwin receives a letter from Wallace, incapacitated with Malaria and holed-up in a shack on the Mollucas Islands of the Malay Archipelago. In it, he asks Darwin for an opinion on some ideas he’s had on the introduction of new species: ideas very similar to Darwin’s own.
Sir David Attenborough (Photo:Tim Jones)
Wallace’s communication is a bombshell. Yet for Darwin, the fear Wallace might publish first, pipping him at the post, is nothing compared to his horror of being branded a thief. So, after consultation with his scientific confidants, including Joseph Hooker but necessarily excluding the remote Wallace – Darwin’s camp decide a joint announcement of their common idea should be made at the Linnean Society in London, in the form of two short essays comprising Wallace’s note and a summary of Darwin’s work.
Sir David Attenborough (Photo:Tim Jones)
All goes to plan at the Linnean, and in due course Darwin publishes the full text of the ‘Origin of Species’ – with all the turbulent aftermath that comes with it. Wallace is comfortable with events, and pleased by the new associations he sees himself making in Darwin’s circle. He remains abroad, observing his beloved Birds-of-paradise .
Sir David Attenborough, Dr Vaughan Southgate (Photo:Tim Jones)
Darwin, Attenborough said, made known his view that Wallace was capable – had he enjoyed Darwin’s own means – of producing the ‘Origin’ himself. Wallace on the other hand was more than grateful that the painstaking task of collation, supporting work, and documentation demanded of the masterwork had fallen to Darwin. In the lingo of the day, they’d reached a gentlemanly solution with no ill feelings all round.
Sir David Attenborough. At the end of his lecture he received a framed memento of the event and an award from the Society for the History of Natural History. (Photo:Tim Jones)
Wallace produced much original work based on his observations of bird populations in the Malay Archipelago, which he captured in his book of the same name (The Malay Archipelago). Specifically, he identified the so-called ‘Wallace-Line‘ that runs between the islands of Bali and Lombok, separating two geographic regions whose animals Wallace found to be distinct and associated with either Australian or Asian origins. What he’d observed, without recognising it as such, was a product of moving land masses – or plate tectonics.
Related video:
David Attenborough talks about his fascination with birds of paradise (Nature Video)
Figure 1 - Sand Martin approaches from rear of convoyFigure 2 - Sand Martin passes over second duck in convoy
When I lived in the Midlands of the UK, away from the bussle of London’s controlled airspace, one of my pleasures on an evening was to hire a light aircraft at my local airfield and tootle off for an hour or so practicing maneoveurs and generally enjoying the sunset – all very peaceful.
Except, one evening when I was out tootling above the Cotswolds; like a flash, an RAF Tornado jet whooshed from under me, matching my track but far exceeding my speed, and all uncomfortably close – a disappearing dot before I could blink.
In fact, he was probably a good 500 ft below me and certainly had on-board radar – so nothing actually dangerous going on. (There’s a popular myth – that may be true – that on such occasions the military use light aircraft for practice interception.)
Anyhow, it made an impression on me, and today the memory returned unbidden with these two photographs snapped at the Rick Pond in Hampton Court Park. They show a Sand Martin in a low-level, high speed pass over a convoy of ducklings – as bemused, no doubt, as I was 4000 feet above the Cotswolds (Figs 1 & 2).
Low-flying Sand Martin (Riparia riparia) with Mallards
I’d been trying to catch the Martins’ aerobatic fly-catching with no success, and started snapping the ducks more as a gesture of resigned failure. I only spotted the Martin when I downloaded the flash card.
This type of ‘buzzing’ seems to be in the Sand Martin’s nature. People on the bank get similar treatment – the bird coming from behind, passing within inches of heads, as if honing their own targeting systems.
I’d left the camera in rapid fire mode of 8 fps, so the time interval between the two photographs is known. If we also know the length of a duck, we can calculate the Martin’s speed, in ducks per second – or more tedious conventional units. So:
Assuming SML = 0.3m (Standard Mallard Length)
Time between pictures at 8 f.p.s = 0.125 s
Ducks passed between frames = 5.75 (use the grid to measure; one duck = 2 grid squares)
Meet the new arrivals. At a pool close to where I live in the south of England, I’ve been following the progress of these cygnets since their birth five weeks ago; the picture and the video were taken about a week after hatching.
The same breeding pair has built a nest in the same spot for the last four years: sometimes they get lucky – othertimes it looks like they go through the motions – or maybe the youngsters get dispatched by predators before I see them.
And for sure, it’s not all sweetness and light. Since I shot the video, one of the cygnets has developed a problem with its neck.
Swans , and particularly cygnets in their first year, are vulnerable to a host of threats: from natural predators like herons, crows, magpies and foxes;
to a bunch of man-made hazards including: being shot at, getting caught up with fishing tackle, lead poisoning, being attacked by pet dogs, crashing into electricity pylons, and getting run down by cars. Even well-meaning but misguided feeding can be injurious – mouldy bread is poisonous to swans.
When I visited the brood on 30th May, when the cygnets were about three weeks old, I noticed one of their number struggling to keep its head up. That might be caused by an injury, but it’s also a known symptom of lead poisoning.
Cygnets on 30th May, one is having trouble holding its head upLead fishing sinker weights are banned in the UK
As Doreen Graham of the Scottish Society for the Protection of Animals said in this 2007 BBC report : “Lead poisoning is quite easy to identify in a swan because they cannot lift their heads and their heads are resting on their backs”. There was a particularly bad spate of lead poisoning during the 1960s, although since then, with a ban on lead fishing weights, or sinkers, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) believes the problem has diminished.
Lead shotgun pellets are the other likely culprit. There are bans or restrictions on the use of lead shot throughout the UK, with detail variations across the devolved constituencies; but there’s always the danger of legacy poisoning from old pellets lying in the reeds or on the pool bed.
All swans rest their heads and necks at times – it’s how they rest and sleep; but this one’s doing it most of the time, standing out from the group:
The other cygnets appear to sense the difference, taking the occasional peck at their handicapped sibling:
While the parents appear indifferent:
Fast forward to 8th June, when the cygnets are a month old, and at first sight there’s an improvement: it’s all heads-up in this convoy. But on closer inspection, number 4 from the left isn’t quite right:
Cygnets on 8th June
and in this pre-roost preening session, there’s clearly still a problem:
As twilight deepens, the female swan, or pen, climbs into the nest, followed by the cygnets:
It’s easy to make up stories, but here a parent appears to attend the neck of one of the cygnets (I can’t confirm it’s ‘the’ cygnet):
And they settle for the night:
For now, the afflicted cygnet appears to be growing at a normal rate and, despite some earlier sniping by siblings, appears to be accepted by the group. I’ll be keeping an eye on this family over the coming weeks and update the blog with any developments.
UPDATE 8 July
Happy ending. Here’s the whole crew on 19th June – 11 days after the pics above. All six cygnets holding their heads up high. I’ve only just got round to updating, but if they’ve got this far they’re probably going to make the distance. Whatever was wrong with the afflicted cygnet seems to have worked itself through/out. (Not that these guys aren’t still in a warzone.)
Forget the turkey – RATS are the Christmas treat for this ravenous reynard.
Fox with freshly caught rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
I caught this juvenile fox in the garden this Christmas Eve morning enjoying a little pre-lunch entertainment courtesy of an unfortunate rodent. Very similar to watching a cat play with a mouse. Here’s the series:
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)Spot the rat competition (Photo:Tim Jones)Amazing throw: rat is the blur at high right (Photo: Tim Jones)Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
What ? (Photo:Tim Jones)
Update 30/12/12 Foxy Fame
Our star is currently promoting the forthcoming production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone by the Playing Up Theatre Company at the Rondo Theatre in Bath during February, where the Sly Fox has apparently developed a taste for chickens.
Of related interest…
Post by Ed Yong here at DISCOVER on how foxes might be using magnetism to help catch prey.
I got up yesterday morning at what for me is quite an early hour – 6.30ish. So with no CSI on the box at that time, I chose the healthy option and went for a walk in the park. Where I took this picture:
Spider web with water droplets (Photo: Tim Jones)
That’s only kind of true. What I actually took was this picture:
Zoom out. Spider web with water droplets (Photo: Tim Jones)
and only later discovered the fine structure of water droplets clinging to the spider’s thread when I got home and fired up the computer.
A beautiful and fascinating sight. But, as per usual, the deeper beauty is in the science behind WHY droplets deposit in such regular patterns.
One Google later, I’d found this relevant study described in a Nature News piece (full research paper doi:10.1038/nature08729 behind pay-wall; also as per usual…).
The News piece describes work by Lei Jiang from the Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences on the hackled orbweaver spider Uloborus walckenaerius. The authors found that if you get in close enough, spiders’ silk appears not as a simple thread but is covered in puffs of minute nanoscale fibres. When the puffs get wet they contract into tight beads or knots connected by thinner pieces of silk, necklace fashion. Additional water migrates and accumulates on the rough surface of the knots in preference to the smoother connecting silk, forming the uniform droplets we see. The research also inspired thoughts around practical offshoots, like the possibility of a man-made equivalent for the manufacture of highly water absorbent materials.
I didn’t see any ‘puffs’, but I’m pretty pleased with the resolution I achieved with a good but relatively straightforward camera. That said, I’m feeling the need to get some of that spider silk under the microscope.
Here’s one more picture taken on the same day, of a single strand of web stretching between two trees; would you believe a distance of over 20ft?
The water is clearing from one portion, and the dry filament is just visible in the close-up view. In the technical jargon, we can say the ratio of droplet size to silk diameter is ‘amazing’.
And if you’re wondering where the spider/s were all this time? Me too. For the arachnophiles, here’s one I took earlier.
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collection of essays, is a light-hearted yet sound scientific analysis of how Disney artists changed Mickey’s features over the years to make him more innately appealing to us. Perhaps not knowingly, but in biological terms they’d 
