Dancing Mad God

West Point

Posted on December 25, 2014 by admin

Our first stop was West Point Island, in the Falklands. The landscape was very familiar for Scottish tourists:

The main attraction was the colony of black-browed albatrosses and rockhopper penguins. The first sign that we were approaching was the increase in air traffic:

Soon we found ourselves up close (so close that it was hard to avoid getting an albatross wing in the face) with hundreds of these fellows:

The albatrosses were brooding:

Though some were still courting or renewing their vows:

The rockhoppers tended to be literally overshadowed by the albatrosses, which build raised nests, with unfortunate consequences for the penguins’ hygiene:

At their best however, they are very well turned-out:

And they have their own families to look after:

The social life of the colony is pretty raucous:

There were plenty of other birds around too. Magellanic Oystercatchers were eyecatching:

As was the Long-tail Meadowlark:

The Striated Caracara is a falcon, but fills the ecological role of a crow on the Falklands, hopping around in search of worms or carrion:

There were lots of geese, many with goslings in tow:

The Falkland Thrush:

We had our first encounter of the trip with Magellanic Penguins. One thing which I hadn’t properly appreciated about penguins is that most of them live around the latitude of the Falklands rather than in Antarctica; the sight of them standing and lying around in green fields was at first rather surprising:

Our last surprise before we went back aboard the Fram was a small gang of dolphins (Peale’s Dolphins, I think), playing just off the beach:

Posted in Falkland Islands, Nature, Travel | 1 Comment

Overboard

Posted on December 25, 2014 by admin

For some of us, the main attraction of the sea days was peering over the back of the boat, and enjoying the bird life. In the Beagle Channel, we had flocks of South American Terns; at the speed which they move, photographs tend to become mere abstract shapes:

The most assiduous ship-followers were the impressively-beaked Giant Petrels, which glided past us almost within touching distance. Northern Giant Petrel with a red nose:

And the Southern Giant Petrel with a green nose. The dark plumage shows this is a juvenile:

The other most common companion was the Cape Petrel, which has lovely chequered wings from above:

Further south, we started to get fulmars:

And the lovely little prions, which I’d never heard of. They flutter all over the Southern Ocean like swifts:

The most elegant were of course the albatrosses. The most commonly-seen were the Black-browed Albatrosses (of which much more soon):

We also had the Grey-headed Albatross:

Light-mantled Sooty Albatross:

And the biggest of all, the Wandering Albatross:

The most ridiculously beautiful, however, must be the Snow Petrel:

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Life on Fram

Posted on December 25, 2014 by admin

On the first of December, we boarded the MV Fram and set off down the Beagle Channel. There’s a fair bit of shipping on this route going to Ushuia and the Chilean naval base at Puerto Williams, set against a background of atmospheric clouds and the end of the Andes.

The ship is a good size, with seven decks and around 250 passengers; this makes it quite stable in rough seas (though we had good weather all through the trip), and with space (physical and social!) to spread out in.

The largest group of the passengers were British (David Attenborough factor?), followed by the usual West European and North American suspects. There were also about 30 Chinese people on this trip (mostly Hong Kongers). For some reason this was the only sign on the ship which was in Chinese as well as English:

Our cabin came with a porthole:

And TV with an airline-style entertainment system, which we usually used to keep tabs on our progress:

As well as the passengers, there were about 80 crew of various types. The expedition team, who also looked after us when we landed (mainly fending off fur seals), gave lectures on the sea days (seven days sailing between the various destinations), which mostly dealt with the wildlife and history of the places where we landed. They were all well attended, but the star performer was Steffen Biersack, who managed to keep everyone entertained on the subject of rocks.

We saw very little of the actual sailors, but we did get to visit the bridge to inspect the equipment and interrogate the captain; everyone’s main concern was “How do you spot the icebergs?” The last, multi-talented group, who did the cooking, cleaning, and drove the little boats which we used for landings, were almost all Filipino, and managed to keep smiling despite very long days. Vegetarian food was hit and miss (probably not a priority with Hurtigruten’s target market), but the range of puddings made up for that.

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Tierra del Fuego

Posted on December 23, 2014 by admin

Our hours between flight and boat before and after the voyage were spent being taken around the environs of Ushuaia. The second of these trips involved spending three hours in a bus with misted-up windows, peering out at a spectrum of precipitation from rain to snow, and that’s as much fun as it got. Better was the first, to the Tierra del Fuego national park.

We stopped at various lakes and channels, most looking over into Chile:

Apart from a glimpse of a beaver, the most exciting animal on view was the South American Grey Fox, which it turns out is not actually a fox. These spend most of their time these days waiting patiently beside the campsites for scraps:

Birds included variations on some more familar species. Black-necked Swan:

Austral Thrush:

Rufous-collared Sparrow (not a true sparrow):

Posted in Argentina, Nature | Comments Off

Buenos Aires

Posted on December 23, 2014 by admin

We started and finished our trip in Buenos Aires, which was a fine repository of amusing signs. Starting with the most puerile:

This last was in a pleasant surprise: a nature reserve right next to the city centre, but which was inhabited by a range of (to our eyes) pleasantly exotic wildlife. A southern crested caracara:

And what seems to be a chalk-browed mockingbird: The most interesting area of the city itself ran from the centre to the San Telmo district, where there where attractively dilapidated buildings:

Touristy sites included El Ateneo, a theatre which has been converted into a bookshop (complete with cafe on stage and reading rooms in the boxes):

There were some intriguing exhibits in the Museum of Latin-American Art:

And the most famous spot is probably the Recoleta Cemetery. There were still some surprising names:

Surprising architecture:

And surprising residents — this one a boxer:

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Sexy Austrian Birds

Posted on August 16, 2014 by admin

The area around Neusiedl turned out to be a good spot for birds, especially raptors. Most were a bit far off for pictures, but a few were more cooperative.

Best picture was of this swallow, which I haven’t identified any more specifically: short tail, red throat and possibly brownish upper side…. ?

Prettiest bird, although not shown to its best advantage here, the European Bee-eater:

Biggest: white storks! There were several of these, finding goodies in the field:

On to the raptors, I think this little beauty is a Eurasian hobby:

And most exciting was this, possibly Eurasian buzzard, which drifted along in front of me and grabbed something just when my camera decided not to focus properly:

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Neighbours

Posted on July 27, 2014 by admin

Over the last few months, we’ve been watching a group of raptors, possibly kestrels, living among our local tower blocks. Some seem to have left on their migration, but two remain. One with lunch:

Looks like a juvenile:

The local magpies are not pleased:

one

two

three

four

and eventually five magpies mobbed this one.

In the local hills, possibly a buzzard:

and a splendid little chap, which seems to be the rather rare Rosalia longicorn :

Posted in Home, Nature | Comments Off

Reading List

Posted on July 11, 2014 by admin

This year, I vaguely thought that it would be nice to read a book a week. Fortunately I spend a lot of time on the trams of Bratislava, which have become my reading room, and (including Audible books) I managed 36 to the end of June:

11 which I would class as ‘general literature’:

I Was Jack Mortimer — Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Charmed Life — Diana Wynne Jones
The Rehearsal — Eleanor Catton
Giving up the Ghost — Hilary Mantel
Breakfast of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut
Waiting for Sunrise — William Boyd
Espedair Street — Iain Banks
Umbrella — Will Self
The Swimming Pool Library — Alan Hollinghurst
The Crow Road — Iain Banks
All Over Creation — Ruth Ozeki

Of these, “Umbrella” stood out for me as one which I would like to read again. This was one of the audio books, and its seamless shifts between different time periods worked very well, thought somewhat disorientatingly, in the format. The difficulty of pausing and moving back encourages you to take each section as it comes and reinterpret it later, rather than stopping to figure everything out.

6 science fiction:

Blue Remembered Earth — Alastair Reynolds
Excession — Iain M. Banks
Inversions — Iain M. Banks
Look to Windward — Iain M. Banks
Against a Dark Background — Iain M. Banks
Light — M. John Harrison

I’ve been reading through the Culture books in (publication) order, and am increasingly enjoying them: there’s more humour than in the earlier books to balance the grotesqueries. M. John Harrison is my SF discovery of the year: bonkers, disturbing, but moving, and any space opera which includes the Circus of Pathet Lao has to be special.

3 general non-fiction:

Forgotten Footprints — John Harrison
Charles Dickens — Claire Tomalin
Help! — Oliver Burkeman

‘Forgotten Footprints’ I read because I was looking for M. John Harrison, and found a book which I’d bought earlier but not read about Antarctic exploration. The writing style is a bit grating (the author is very pleased with John Harrison), but it’s good background for the holiday.

Help! was the surprise discovery, from which I took more notes than for probably all the other books together:

“in Britain, people are three times richer than they were in 1950, but barely any happier”.

“there’s a slight negative correlation between a happy outlook on life and longevity”.

“People underestimate how much they will allow the threat of embarrassment to govern their future choices”.

“the healthiest ration of happy to sad feelings is 2.9:1”.

“if it’s familiar, it hasn’t eaten you yet”.

“in terms of your subjective experience of how time passes … if you’re 40 … your life is 71 per cent over”.

“Paraplegics and lottery winners, a year after become paraplegic or winning the lottery, report broadly similar happiness levels to those they felt prior to their life-changing experience”.

and quoting Schopenhauer:

“there are people who are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art… The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality”.

1 work book:

Big Questions in ELT — Scott Thornbury

Top thought for understanding students: “In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go through the stage of being a half-wit”.

The largest group, 15, consists of books which I’ve done for Distributed Proofreaders:

Three Years in Western China — Alexander Hosie
Kinship and Social Organisation — W. H. R. Rivers
The Exiles of Faloo — Barry Pain
Rise of the Russian Empire — Hector H. Munro
The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays — Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers
Plays — Thomas Dekker
Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall — Robert Hawker
Mission to Siam, and Hué — George Finlayson
Mothwise — Knut Hamsun
Bohemia under Hapsburg Misrule — Thomas Capek
Louis Spohr’s Autobiography — Louis Spohr
Garden Cities of To-Morrow — Ebenezer Howard
Twos and Threes — G. B. Stern
Conquest — Marie Stopes
Radiant Motherhood — Marie Stopes

Part of the fun of DPing is that I read books which are not great lost classics, but which show sides of the past which one would otherwise pay little attention to; the Victorian travel books in particular fall into this category. “Conquest” is a stunningly bad play, but it’s good to know what Marie Stopes wrote for fun. “Twos and Threes” is really rather good, however.

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Summer

Posted on July 6, 2014 by admin

Today I went on an international journey, walking over the Morava river bridge to Austria. The Slovak side of the border has a playground with outdoor exercise equipment, while the Austrians have this:

and this:

According to Wikipedia (which may for once be wildly inaccurate), there are 10-20 pairs of red kites in Slovakia, and a splendidly precise “0-2” Austrian pairs; this looks to me like half of one of those:

The Austrian side also has views back in to Slovakia. Devin castle:

Back in the Carpathians, I wasn’t sure whether this was a slow worm or a snake, so I took great care of both of us when moving him from the path:

Posted in Nature, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Spring

Posted on April 21, 2014 by admin

Bratislava is well into its springtime, which in this case at least means wild mood swings from the weather gods. Recently it’s gone a bit wet and wintry, but still with a few sunny days.

The city itself is doing some spring cleaning, dismantling the old bridge: