signs of spring

signs of spring, (for Judy). L Punton, 2015, archival inkjet print on fabriano 

waxwing winter

Seen from my kitchen window, the same tree as in the last post, a few days later, and now host to a flock of waxwings. These unusual birds have been sighted often this winter with the berry crop in Scandinavia failing, forcing them to travel further afield.

postscript: thanks to Celine for pointing me towards this great piece of HD video footage.

nest building

It seems appropriate to be thinking of building nests right now (7 and a half weeks to go!) so I thought I'd post these images of nests created by bowerbirds. They're from National Geographic, and the images are by Tim Laman. They're quite extraordinary constructions which can really only be described as 'home decoration'. I would like to point out that in this species though, it's the male that likes to arrange the soft furnishings!

..I think I have a special fondness for this one with two cans of coke and some sweetie wrappers attempting to lure the female to his pad.

different timelines

I visited the small island of Staffa, (from the Old Norse for stave, or pillar island) off the west coast of Scotland yesterday, catching a small boat from the Isle of Mull. With only a relatively short time on the island, our two main aims were to walk down to Fingal’s cave and then walk to the other end of the island in the hope of seeing some puffins.

The remarkable geological formations on Staffa are justifiably renowned, having inspired artists, writers and musicians over the years, with Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture perhaps being the most famous work made in it’s honour. Others that have visited and found inspiration are Turner, August Strindberg, and Sir Walter Scott.

It’s great to find an important heritage site in the UK which you can freely enter without health & safety regulations compromising the experience, and walk right to the very back of the cave. Inside, a deep booming can be heard as the sound of the sea dramatically crashes at the cave end, resonating and echoing throughout.

Staffa is a relative lightweight in terms of Geological age – a mere 55-58 million years compared to it’s aged neighbour Iona which weighs in at a hefty 2800 million years (composed, as it is, of Lewisian gneiss with Torridonian sandstone), and Staffa’s dramatic forms are created from volcanic basalt which appears to thrust from the sea in regular columns that are predominantly hexagonal in shape. There are three layers of rock: the base is composed of tuff, the second layer is columnar basalt, and the top, which forms the roof of Fingal’s cave is amorphous basalt. In the columnar layer, the cooling surface of the mass of hot lava cracked in a hexagonal pattern in a similar way to how drying mud cracks as it shrinks, and these cracks gradually extended down into the mass of lava as it cooled and shrank to form the columns, which were subsequently exposed by erosion.

Once we viewed the cave, we headed up to the other end of the island to see if we might catch a glimpse of some puffins. An extraordinary thing happened. I sat down on the cliff edge and within 15-20 seconds, a puffin flew straight towards me and landed in a hole around three feet from where I was sitting. In its beak were a couple of tiny sand eels, and after a minute in the hole, it flew out to, presumably, catch more food. Needless to say, the swiftness of the experience meant that I didn’t catch it on camera – but then on this instance a camera would have impinged upon the experience itself. Some things are more precious because of their fleetingness.

flown

The fledgelings have flown this morning, so I can have a closer look at the nest now. It's actually very solid and there's no way this construction would have been dislodged. The outer is made mainly of soft, sphagnum moss, but there's some man made fibre in there too - most noticeably blue packing string!

almost fledgelings

A very short clip of some thrushes in their nest in my back garden - short because the mother soon noticed me and made her displeasure known even although the clip was made with the camera at maximum zoom and I was pretty far back. The annoying sound is the autofocus on the camera working overtime. The nest is unusually low (4 - 5 feet from the ground) and urban foxes regularly visit the garden, so I'm hoping they'll be ok.