And if you’re feeling especially generous you can keep me in beer and sweeties.
Otherwise, I'll have to go out to work.
(And the dog gets it.)
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Not a headline you can get today but from October 1 at the end of the old century:
“Scotland again! Yipee! I did not seem to have suffered after a day’s gruelling drive up from the Midlands, including 45 minutes waiting for the police to clear a horse-box from the M80. God, I hate horse-boxes — even more now. I was up at seven and on the beach at Auchmithie with the yellowhammers, stonechats and rock pipits. A visit to Montrose Basin later in the day produced pink-footed geese and a couple of barnacles.
“But all of this, no matter how unusual further south, was more or less expected. The highlight of the day belonged to Fishtown of Usan, a scrubby, maltreated place at the end of a road from Montrose. I had parked the car and started on the mud track down to the little bay. Immediately small birds flew across my path into bushes. What where they? A little searching produced house sparrows, then more yellowhammers. Still I was hopeful of more.
“Finally a different sparrow revealed itself – a tree sparrow, then one more and another. I had only seen them once this year on the feeders at Rutland Water. The colony at Upton Warren seemed to have gone. So, this was a welcome surprise.”
Of course I do. Religiously. Don’t you? From my trusty old laptop my Documents and Pictures folders are squirreled away with SOS Online. And I even download this site to my hard drive. But I’m also a big believer in testing any backup. Can I recreate my data from it? Could I recreate this blog elsewhere?
After a bit of messing with config.php, thepokerbird.info looked like it was doing just that. Right now it shouldn’t show this post because its database is usually a couple of weeks behind the production version. That’s fine. I just wanted proof of concept.
Or is it fine? more…
Snapping at the heels of pets as slaves, which I fully expect the government to ignore, Labour has dangerous dogs in its sights at least. Compulsory insurance for all pooches may be their answer. I’m sure we’ll get the usual whining about “the small minority” of irresponsible owners.
Not such a small minority that dog shit, for instance, isn’t a daily problem. So far the only solution to that appears to be more…
Further to my ignorance about the highest tides, a lively debate has ensued on BirdForum. Maybe not the ideal platform but here’s our understanding as I understand it.
Several factors determine the tide’s height. Yes, proximity of the Sun is one. Newton’s calculation for gravity, by which the Sun (or the Moon) pulls Earth’s oceans, has the pull grow as the distance shrinks between two bodies. It grows proportional to the square of this distance. So, more…
For non-urbanised passerines the best spot in town, bar Weston Big Wood, which is not really in town. From the Royal Inn a few minutes amble along the top path usually nets me pheasant… OK, it’s not a passerine but I’m always amused that one chooses to live up there. Great spotted woodpecker, jay, coal tit, goldcrest (but not alas the firecrest that others have been seeing this winter), nuthatch and my favourite, more…
For ever? It seems I’m a good two tag lines out of date. They’ve been “a million voices for nature” since and are now “nature’s voice”, which I do prefer. The being for people business seemed to play to the baser instincts of hom sap.
“What’s in it for me, guv?” the cynical ear would hear. But, in my more enlightened moments, I consider that more…
Nor no mud neither. That’s what happens when the Earth gets too close to the Sun. Actually, I’ve never understood this. We’re only 147 million kilometres distant around the beginning of January, compared with 152 million in July. Since the highest tides occur when the Sun and Moon line up, shouldn’t the very highest occur when the Sun is closest?
But no. apparently they happen more…
Also like many small Australian towns, Narrogin had its resident flock of galahs. Sometimes a place would have corellas and sometimes, in the east, cockatoos; but galahs it was for Narrogin. Come the evening and time to roost, the birds would make the fact obvious with mass screeching flights. I’d wonder if there would be any rest that night but, like model citizens and unlike human beings, the flocks would quieten to silence as darkness grew.
A road the other side of Narrogin’s defunct station was Galah Central. A few corpses more…
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