Less is More!?

I recently read an article by a chap whose garden is full of feeders. This same person who has a friend in a London Tower Block ...

...the only greenery is a plane tree on the other side of the road. By regularly putting out food she has managed to support a few birds, including a robin. I may get more birds in 10 minutes than she gets in a day but she might well get more pleasure..

and I think that may be true, you can get a bit blase when you are surrounded by birds and take them a bit for grounded. Perhaps that is why birders are often more excited by a patch tick than something rarer elsewhere.

Anyway

A Cardiff University study has shown that artificial light affects the amount of food consumed by European robins, this was compared with the amount of food consumed by birds in natural light.

The study showed that artificially lit birds have different activity schedules to those in natural conditions and have the ability to regulate their body masses differently.

Alexandra Pollard a researcher at the Cardiff School of Biosciences (who undertook the research) said:

We have found that robins under artificial lighting conditions begin their daily activity far earlier than when under natural unlit conditions.

However, even though they are active for longer and have food available overnight, they lose a similar amount of body mass to unlit robins - something we did not expect to find.

We thought that if food was freely available the robins would consume as much as possible, to maximise their energy reserves, but they gradually consumed their freely available food over their longer activity period than those under natural conditions.

A Christmas Tradition

One of the traditions of Christmas is the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the Chapel of King's College Cambridge, this is broadcast live on Radio 4 at 3pm. Earlier in the month another carol service, Carols from King's, is recorded for television earlier in December and broadcast by BBC2 on Christmas Eve.

Normally overseas readers wouldn't be able to share in this BUT the BBC World Service will be broadcasting the Nine Lessons and Carols at 3pm GMT on December 24th. You should be able to listen to it on the internet (use previous link and click the listen live button) but you can check your cable provider here.

The carols and readings vary from year to year with the exception I'll guarantee this will be the first carol.

Oscar the dog comes back from his travels.

I heard about this on Radio 4 yesterday.

Oscar and his owner, Joanne Lefson, have just returned from the World Woof Tour.

The duo left Cape Town 8 months ago and started their journey in Botswana and in total visited 33 countries and covered 79,038km.

The tour was to raise international awareness about the joys of adopting and owning shelter dogs. It also highlighted the importance of animal sterilisation.

The journey was filmed and a documentary is being produced in Los Angeles telling the story from Oscar's perspective. There will also be a book.

To find outmore about Oscar.

Its Snowing AGAIN

I left home this morning wondering what the roads would be like, especially as I was using B roads, but they were nice and clear.

As I left work this evening there was rain in the air but as I moved up the M11 the rain turned to snow which got heavier. The drive was white when I arrived and when I looked out a minute a go the tracks I made had been covered.

Ye gods what would I be like if I lived in Canada!!!

What i've been reading.

Woke to find it had snowed again overnight. I do feel a bit of a wimp moaning about it when poor OC gets inches and inches of it for months on end!

My trip to London meant that I didn't need to leave so early, as a consequence I saw saw some repeats of a TV series madde in 1987 called The Charmer starring Nigel Havers.

For those of you who don't know the series is set in the 1930's, Havers plays Ralph Gorse a young conman who sets out to seduce widow Joan Plumleigh-Bruce of her money. Gorse enters her bed and takes her money and then runs off. Her would be beau, Donald Stimson, swears revenge and sets out to track Gorse down and see justiced. It's a good watch.

I noticed that the series was based on a book called Mr Stimson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton. I've never heard of Hamilton (he wrote a play called the Rope on which the Hitchcock film is based) but I noticed that the novel was the middle of a trilogy and I was intrigued as that would indicate the book was very different to the series. As i was ordering some stuff of Amazon and I could get the trilogy for under £7 I ordered it.

The trilogy gets decent reviews on Amazon even if at the time reviews were mixed. The first book The West pier sees Gorse just having left school, he is a nasty amoral piece of work and we see him charming pretty working class Esther and then running off with her life savings.

I hopped straight on to Mr Stimson and Mr Gorse. The TV programme is quite different to the book, the book is set in 1928 for a start and only the first episode or two bear much similarity to the book and even this is strange.

Yes Gorse sets out to "seduce" the older Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce but in the TV programme it is a sexual seduction in the book it is not - perhaps a reflection on the TV seriees being 1980's and the book 1950's? None of the characters are very nice (and I felt no sympathy for Plumleigh-Bruce as she was left short of £500) but Hamilton is a good enough writer that this isn't that important. A good editor would have cut 10-20 pages which is irrelevant but this is still a nice examination of the middle class in the 1920's.

Both these books are short approx 250 pages and I enjoyed both. The third is a novella and supposedly inferior stuff but I'll still read it.

This was a totally different type of book to what I normally read and I'll definitely check out his earlier stuff.

The Emperor's new Clothes

I really should be outside taking photos shouldn't I ? But it's icey and flipping freezing cold so I'm going to have a very lazy day instead.

The sixties gets a good press... The Beatles, the mini-skirt, The Rolling Stones, Twiggy oh and we won the World Cup.

Interestingly I was watching a programme on telly yesterday which claims that the sixties was an awful decade.

It claimed a number of modern societies ills could be traced back. The architecture was naff with modernism leading to massive sky scrapers which broke down communities and destroyed spirit. We bought in to the have it now pay for it tomorrow culture. The sixties saw a break down of moral standards, the sixties saw the growth of satire but this was pointed satire but just an attack on anything and this led to todays totally cynical culture.

The sixties are claimed to have helped liberate women. Did they? Did the pill free women sexually? Don't get me wrong i have no objection to the pill and sex outside of marriage but without a moral compass ? Then I wonder.

People say if you remember the sixties you weren't there but I suspect most people never took part. The "sixties" took place to certain people in a few treny locations - at least here in the UK.

Were the sixties great? Probably no better or worse than any other. What makes people think they are great to me is just an over reaction to the austerity of the fifties.

A week early

Well it looks pretty. Can it please all go by Monday though please.

i stuck the camera outside the front door for OC!!

Sisso the Swift

This is a really sweet story (thanks to Jan in Wales for the heads up).

Sisso the Swift damaged his wing seven months ago. He is now being cared for at the Ramat Gan Safari Park Animal Hospital in Israel

They've made a red tube-like vest made of bandages and gauze pads, Sisso has holes for his head, wings, feet and tail. This is attached by a string to the ceiling and Sisso is able to practice his flying and strengthen his injured wing at no risk.

Every hour staff feed him insects.

Read more and see some pics here.

Yuck - Snow

I always like to give OC an excuse for a big belly laugh