Pheasant nest

This is a photograph I took this morning of a pheasant's nest.  My dog found it about a week ago.  It is right next to the road behind a tussock of grass.  At first my dog wouldn't move from the spot, so I went to see what she'd found.  I couldn't see anything, so tried to drag her away, but she wouldn't budge, so I returned.  When I put my head over the tussock - it's on a bank about shoulder high - I got the fright of my life.  The pheasant gave out a screech and flew off into my face.  I saw some eggs, and knew what my dog was so interested in.

Anyway, for the next 3 days we walked past the nest.  My dog stops to have a sniff, but can't reach the nest, well she could, but doesn't.  She's very good at things like this.  Now that I know where it is I could just make out the tail of the pheasant, so we'd walk on.  However yesterday she wasn't on the nest.  I didn't think anything of it at the time, after all she has to feed herself.  But this morning she wasn't there again, so I decided to have a look.  It was full of eggs, but they were cold as I touched the top one.  So I imagine she has been killed.  The road is not busy, but it is just a few yards from a fairly busy road where drivers regularly drive at 60 mph, so no pheasant would stand a chance.  Pity about the eggs, but I don't know anything about pheasants.

I've been feeding a robin in the wood.  Again my dog found her nest on the ground - I was amazed where she's nested, but so far no-one else has found the nest.  We had about 10 days of solid rain and cold weather, so every day I'd drop off 6 mealworms for her.  Now we are back to having nice weather, and there are plenty of insects around, so she probably doesn't need my mealworms, but I'll carry on.  I usually get mealworms at this time of year for the insectivorous birds as we always have a bad patch of weather, and this just helps out a bit.

Direction of coiling (torsion) in snails

Just recently I've been getting a load of emails from students in the US using my snail page, I'm sure there are loads better pages around, so I don't know why they like mine. Perhaps it's the mating pics. Anyway I decided to clear something up, and that is how to tell the difference between dextral and sinistral coiling.  So I drew a diagram showing the difference as my written explanation wasn't very good.  And here it is.

I don't like the word sinistral as it comes from the same old word as sinister, and has negative meanings.  But is used for left-handed people, of which I am one.

Long absence

Sorry to anyone who has been following the drivel I write here.  I've just been so busy since Christmas that I haven't written anything here, but lots has been happening.
Santa brought me an iPad - lovely.

I discovered just why everyone is raving about Steig Larson's - don't know about the spelling there - Millenium Trilogy, and I've read the lot and seen one film.  They are definitely not the kind of books I normally read, but I found them riveting, and read them one after another.  They are so good that I imagine I will read them again sometime.

I also found out that it is poss. to download books from the local library on to the ipad - got the Millenium Trilogy that way.  Here in the UK they do not let you do this on to the Kindle, which is a shame as the Kindle is lighter and easier on the eye than a backlit screen.  Also the great boon of the Kindle is the battery life - the ipad cannot come anywhere near to competing with this.

However the ipad has apps galore.  I downloaded a really useful one recently called Slideshark.  It is great for giving talks when you need to show slides or short videos.  You can use it with Powerpoint presentations too.  So I didn't need to lug the vintage laptop along when I did a talk recently.

The bumblebees around here have been having a hard time with the weather.  We had an amazingly warm March, with temperatures over 20, then a foot of snow overnight and below zero.  So one afternoon it was over 20 and that very night we had a blizzard and woke up to frozen ponds and dead tomatoes in the greenhouse.  Luckily for the bumblebee queens that have survived - and there are many - the good weather made the fruit trees bloom early, so there is a lot of nectar and pollen around.

Also read a hilarious book by Dawn French called A Little bit Marvellous.  It is a very light book, and can be read in one sitting, but it is a really great way to pass what would otherwise be a few dull hours.  There are 2 very different teenagers in the book, and she has got them down to a T.  I am so glad I don't have to go through those agonies again.  When I look back on those years I was so influenced by fashion and fads, and what my peers thought of me.  I did and wore things that I really didn't like, but just went along with the herd.  I wish I'd had the strength of character to stick to what I liked.  Oh well, I suppose this is one of the few benefits of growing old.

Metellina segmentata or Meta segmentata, the Lesser garden spider, the Autumn spider

There is some confusion about the name of this spider, but that doesn't make it any less pretty.  It is supposed to be abundant, but this is the only one I have seen, although I imagine it is fairly well camouflaged, and it's web look a bit like the ordinary garden spider, so perhaps I have just missed it.

The photograph above is a close up of its eyes.  As spiders go it has fairly boring eyes as they are all pretty much the same size.

Lacewing larva and Ben Elton's Stark

Above and below are photographs of a green lacewing larva.  The white bits on its back are the sucked out husks of its prey - aphids or their close relatives the scale insect!  In the photograph above you can see one of its fearsome jaws.  The photograph below shows its rear end.  It was climbing up a clematis stem.  I didn't see any aphids on the clematis, but there is also a rose climbing up there too, and my roses do get their fair share of aphids.

I've become a great fan of Ben Elton's books after reading the First Casualty.  So I'm working my way back through his stuff.  I'm about half way through Stark.  The part I'm reading tells of a plot by some super-rich individuals operating as a cartel to sell off stocks, spook the market into crashing, to further spook the commodities market, and the sovereign wealth of countries.  The end result making everything cheaper for them to buy, and countries desperate for the money, so turning a blind eye into the cartel's purchase of some restricted materials - uranium for one.

This is just a part of the whole story, and I haven't finished the book yet, and dunno what the uranium is for.  It was written way back in 1989, but could have been written just a few years ago.  Scary stuff.

In the boom years of banking deals there were huge commissions made every time something was sold, and stuff was sliced and diced and resold again and again, as that became the most lucrative thing a banker could do - sell dodgy stuff to people who were using other people's money to buy the dodgy stuff.  With both seller and buyer creaming off a huge commission it was not in their best interests to enquire too deeply into just what they were buying/selling, and hey - they only hold it long enough to mix it with other dodgy stuff and resell it and rake in another whopping commission.

They must have known it couldn't go on forever, but the commission was paid as every deal was done, so why should they rock the boat?  And now the various governments who cannot possibly pay off the debt they've taken on on our behalf have decided the best way out is to debase the currencies thereby debasing the debt and inflating their way out of the hole.  In the process the industrious middle and working classes who have saved and worked all their life are watching - as yet passively - as their savings dwindle away to nothing, their pensions are chipped away at, taxes rise, services are cut or discontinued, and their very jobs and prospects of earning disappear. Revolutions have occurred for less.

Rant over.  I'm off to the snowy woods with a dog who doesn't care a fig for all this.  As long as food followed by a comfortable sleep, then a nice walk follow one another then all is right with the world.