Guess who sent me a postcard...

SQUEE!!!



:) :) :)

Not being very verbal today (uncharacteristically for me). But, Elizabeth, if i haven't said it already (and i probably have), you are awesome...

As well as the painting, there is also a rather nice looking sticker of an Anime style, androgynous goth character in a top hat and what looks like an ink stamp of a heron on the other side (which i haven't scanned in, because, obviously, my "real world" address is on it). And impressively neat handwriting, in my opinion... apart from a capital G which looked a lot like a Y, and really confused me for a bit... but i think that may be one of those transatlantic language issues...

So, for Beth, another squirrel from the other day:



(this one caught my eye because it was a kind of reddish colour, although that doesn't actually come out too well in the photograph... nowhere near as red as a real red squirrel, of course, but noticeably redder, especially on its tail, than most of the other grey squirrels around)

and a crow, in fact the closest i have managed to get a photo of one from:



(note that it has a white spot just about visible on its breast - as i've noted before, a lot of crows around Birmingham seem to have some white on them. Also, i'm quite pleased with the pose on top of the pine (fir?) tree there.)

Hmmmm. Beth is probably going to think i have some strange association between her and wildlife photography in my head...

Anyway, that postcard made my day :)

(LOADS of stuff i've been reading and wanting to post about, particularly on the feminism/sexuality/queer theory side of things, but i seem to be stuck in "read everything, but can't write anything" mode ATM. Oh well, that generally lasts a few days to a week, so hopefully some more posts soon...)

For Elizabeth

So, while i was offline, the very very awesome Elizabeth McClung (if you haven't heard of her, GO READ HER BLOG. NOW.) and her partner Linda had a weekend where they asked readers to go out and send photos of the places they had been to (which is a really crap description, cos i'm not being very good with words tonight, but go here...)

At the time i couldn't get online, so i didn't know about, but coincidentally, on the same weekend i ended up going on a ridiculously epic walk (of about, er, 8 hours), the intent of which was to break in a new pair of boots*, but which was considerably over the top for that purpose, and resulted in more like the boots breaking in my feet. Which, come to think of it, was a somewhat Elizabeth-ish thing to do, so maybe i was slightly channeling her in some way...

* I always wear steel toe-cap boots. The fact that i started wearing them after having a relationship with a partially sighted powerchair user is, er, entirely coincidental... ;)

Anyway, on the walk i discovered an old village churchyard, and in it was this gravestone featuring a rather gothic crip angel:



[photo shows a kinda Victorian/Gothic style family monument, consisting of a winged, female-looking angel bowing down on one knee, on top of a large block of stone with the family's names on it, in a graveyard with other, plainer gravestones and ivy-covered trees in the background. The angel's left arm is broken off at the elbow, and her right hand is broken off at the wrist. She's also missing part of her left wing. One of the names just visible at the bottom of the gravestone is "Elizabeth".)

Unfortunately, altho i saw several crows, i didn't get photos of any of them, since i clearly don't have Elizabeth's rapport with them - in fact, all members of the Corvidae seem to be extremely opposed to having their photographs taken, at least by me, as, almost without exception, they seem to let me get as close as i want without a camera in my hand, but as soon as i get it out, they fly off. (I wanted to get one of a magpie i saw today that was entirely missing its tail feathers, which is surely disabled by magpie standards, but it was even more camera-wary than they usually are. The only crow i have managed to photograph is this one.)

I did, however, get some photos of squirrels, including this rather demonic-looking one:



and this one, which i'm quite pleased with in terms of both pose and composition:



Of course, none of this compares with the photos of the place Elizabeth herself went the other day, but... well, she is sending me a postcard from Japan from Canada (er... i think you know what i mean), so i had to do something in return...

(Boo to Blogger for not letting me upload my pics last night. They're here now...)

The swifts are here! [photos]

Staying with my family over the weekend of my and my brother's birthdays, one of the things we did was to go for our customary-when-I-visit walk round one of the local resrvoirs, which is also a bit of a nature reserve, and attracts a lot of species of easily-watchable birds. (Things are... somewhat complicated between me and my family, but one of the "safe" subjects on which we all have at-least-apparently-genuine common ground is nature in general, and wildlife (which in the UK usually pretty much equals bird) watching in particular.) There we saw the first swifts of 2008...

I always get really excited when the swifts arrive - they only come to Britain from Africa when the weather is warm enough for them to tolerate (about a month after the slightly hardier swallows and house martins), and thus they symbolise for me the passing of winter and the return of tolerable-for-me weather, and in a wider sense the return of hope to my life... especially this year, when after having felt truly hopeless for a long time, something like a return of hope looks like it might actually be happening. (The coming of the swifts also usually roughly coincides with my birthday, which makes me idly wonder about things like if it's possible for the time of year you are born to influence the relationship between your emotional cycles and the natural cycles of the year, and whether that might actually explain some of the appeal of (at least Western-style) astrology. In passing, i've also noticed that a *lot* of people in the Green movement seem to be spring births...)

There's also something intensely passionate and poetic about groups of swifts to me - screaming and wheeling effortlessly around the sky like little black scythes, often seeming to ride in on storm winds like the advance guard of some kind of conquering or liberating army in some great cosmic struggle between the Warm (freedom, life, hope) and the Cold (captivity, death, despair). The vanguard of Summer. (I've tried dozens of times to write a haiku about them, as that poetic form is supposed to be focused on the change of seasons, but i can never get the number of syllables right..)

I tried to take a few photos of them, tho with the speed at which they move, their small size and distance, I was pretty much shooting from the hip, and not really expecting to actually get any photos, certainly not any decent ones, so I was pleasantly surprised that a couple of my shots actually had swifts in them - the best (cropped to the extreme top left corner of the original photograph) being this one:




original (actually with 2 swifts in it!):



(some much, much better images of swifts can be seen here...)

(Another odd thing about swifts: they were given the generic name Apus because they were believed at one time to have no feet, and never to land but to spend their whole lives in the air. They do have feet, but they are very small and they have difficulty walking on them, and cannot take off from the ground, so they only land on high objects to nest. They do actually both sleep and have sex while in flight. :o )

Reservoirs tend to be the sort of places where migratory birds gather when they first arrive in the country, a few days before being seen elsewhere, so hopefully in a couple of days I'll see them shrieking and wheeling around the streets of Birmingham. I didn't actually hear them screech yesterday, which meant i didn't quite feel the full excitement that that cry always creates in me. I fully expect to be jumping up and down with the hair on my arms standing on end in joy when i hear it...

Also seen: some prints in the mud of a drained stretch of canal (I think they're probably badger prints, tho i'm not 100% sure), here with house keys for scale:



and a slightly wider scale image, showing a faint 3rd print nearer the bank:



(The weird thing is that the animal seemingly stepped out into the mud with only the 2 feet on the left side of its body...)

and various other birds, including geese:



and, in town the next day, a heron:



This heron seemed totally unafraid of humans - I first saw some other people taking photos of something behind a canal boat that was going past, then the heron landing on the bank behind the boat, with a big fish in its beak (of course, it had swallowed it by the time i could turn my camera on), and itlet me stand and take snaps of it for a good 5 minutes, only flying off when a slightly aggressive-looking swan came too near (although it's blurry, i quite like this pic of it flying off)...





(spot the town from its "iconic" building, if you've ever been there ;) )

I have a whole load of other planned wildlife-photography posts that i never got round to/felt up to doing, going back to last summer/autumn... if anyone appreciates these kind of posts as opposed to (or as well as) the more serious/political ones, i might post some of them over the next month or so...

White Crow

I've seen quite a few crows around Birmingham with some white in their plumage - typically one or two wing feathers, but several (especially in the Cannon Hill Park/Rea Valley Walk area) with enough to look mottled with white or almost piebald. This one, which i saw in the Hall Green/Shirley area, had more white on it than any i'd previously seen...

(Apologies for the blurriness of the pics, which is due to the crow being about 100m away, the closest i could get before it flew away)





(It also looks more grey than white in the pics (at least on this monitor); it looked more white to me when i was taking the photo...)

I'm not sure if there's any advantage or disadvantage to white feathers on a crow; possibly it might make it more conspicuous and more of a target to predators, but i'm not sure what would eat a crow in a big city anyway. I imagine that living in relatively predator-free urban environments enables animals to survive with a lot of conditions that would make them more vulnerable to predators in the wild (that would certainly account for the number of disabled pigeons i see, limping about with multiple toes or even whole feet missing). It's cool to see intraspecific biodiversity in species other than humans, anyway...

(Another odd thing about crows in Birmingham is that i see them pretty frequently gathering in large flocks (50+) - rooks and jackdaws usually do that, but crows tend to be solitary, hence the saying "a crow in a flock is probably a rook, a rook on its own is probably a crow". These are definitely carrion crows (Corvus corone), tho... must be another adaptation-to-urban-environment thing...)

Spiders!

(This is my first attempt at uploading images to this blog. Hope it works... if it doesn't, i'll probably delete the post and try again later...)

One of the things that there were absolutely loads of at Climate Camp were spiders, of many species ranging from tiny to reasonably spectacular (like the first one pictured here). Quite a few small ones took up residence in my tent (not entirely sure why, there can't have been much chance of catching any insects in there). Anyway, i got to practice my close-up photography on some of the bigger ones...

(I'm not sure what species either of these are - possibly Andrea can identify them?)

This one was found by a friend in her tent - being somewhat arachnophobic, she asked me to remove it for her. In the photo it's in a white plastic bowl. It was really a quite spectacular specimen, among the larger spiders i've seen (outside of a tropical vivarium) and unlike any other spider i've seen in the UK (as we were only a mile from Heathrow Airport, i'm thinking perhaps it might have stowed away on a plane or something...) If anything, its colours looked brighter in real life than they do in the photo. As you can see, a couple of its legs look like they have been lost and partially regrown. Its head/body length was about 20-25mm...

This one was an orb-web spider a lot more like the common British garden spider, but a different colour. It had spun a web on the wooden frame of the men's straw bale urinals, presumably hoping to catch flies attracted by the smell... size probably about 10-12mm...

I'm really pleased with these photos especially considering i only have a very cheap, bog-standard (Kodak EasyShare C433 to be exact) digital compact camera. Probably more wildlife and landscape pics to come...