Microcosmic

On Monday I went for my patch walk on the dullest, muddiest, coldest day - seemingly uninspiring, dreary and wildlife-free. I thought it seemed SO uninspiring that I'd try, as an exercise, to elevate it into something less mundane, simply by making the effort to turn it into something creative. So here is my poem... Mud and Magic Slanted sleat threads white as it dwindles earthwards The weakling fuit of a drab sky The mudded rivulet of a track rises gently raising my steps Quag and ruck swap places with mire and bog I climb the spine of a buried giant, the Back​filled landfill, now grassy ridge on former midden As a bullfinch schoolboy-whistles A kestrel is animated by my approach, turning it from Standing sentinel still to flightly air-snipping shears Faint shapes of distant Pennine foothill are mist masked A Guassian blur applied to the mast on Winter Hill A bramble scraped attrition of mud-sticky path takes me to the Moss bearded wall at the entrance to R...

Take part of a fern, zoom in - it looks like the whole fern. Take a part of that, zoom in again - it still looks like a fern. It displays 'self-similarity' - a part looks like a miniature version of the whole. Welcome to wonderful world of fractals. As a small child I remember seeing a small twig lying on the ground. I held it up to the sky and squinted a bit. "I'm a giant", I thought, “I'm holding up a tree.” I'd seen my first example "self-similarity" After that, I didn't give it a lot of thought - until now. Objects are  self-similar - if a part looks like a  miniature version the whole. It’s something that occurs a lot in nature – ferns, trees, clouds, rocks, crystals, coastlines, rivers, blood vessels. Copies of the whole repeated at a smaller and smaller scale. These are a kind of fractal and it's something I’ve been looking out for on the patch (not that I’ve seen a lot of coastlines!). You could call fractals the...

Water droplets make everything photogenic! After the rain this wavy hair grass looks to be decorated with Christmas decorations For me no two walks are the same. One day I might be tangled up in thinking - the mind spinning around on a carousel of chatter. Thoughts about the future - plans, to do's, worries, or thoughts about the past - memories, regrets, mental traces of bygones. The very next day, I might be taking the very same route but with the fog of thinking having lifted. To call this mind stuff a 'fog' might seem odd after all we identify so closely with our thoughts - they seem to define who we are. But it gets in the way - our window on the world gets misted up. While we are lost in thought we are not present. Freedom from the needy 'think me!' of thoughts grants us the gift of noticing. Nature beckons us away from ourselves - with the call of a benign siren. Nature lays out a feast for the senses - all we have to do is notice it. Puffball...

I visited this long adandoned tennis court on my patch. You wouldn't think it was the most promising for wildlife - but on close inspection it's full of natural treasures! I think this shows some interesting things When humans abandon a place nature reclaims it. We're living in the Anthropocene - an age when man has fundamentally altered the earth - often to the detriment of everything else - but even a man made habitat like this one can play host to a degree of biodiver sity. Simply put there is a lot of nature! - a lot of species, each adapted to its unique way of life. Whatever the specialised habitat there will be something (and often 100's, even 1000's of species) that can live there. and also the more you look the more see. Tortella tortuosa. Frizzled Crisp-moss It's a tennis court - there are a lot these cushions of moss that look like tennis balls - what are the chances!!  First colonisers - cyanobacteria (Nostoc commune) T...

Most people are unaware that one of the wonders of nature is going on above their  heads - quite possibly  at  this very moment.  Bird Migration. I’ve never grown out of  the thrill of witnessing migration in progress. I think it started during my wheelchair-bound days -  sitting in the garden watching this avian spectacle seemed like a taste of freedom as if a part of me fleetingly hitched a ride.   Birds on a long  journey…you look up and catch a glimpse.  This morning they might  have been in Cumbria, they may touch down in Staffordshire.  Like a stage of the Tour de France, you are the roadside spectator - the birds are Team Sky. Pink-footed Geese. I had been half expecting the first Pinkfeet of the winter on Thursday - in fact they showed up on Friday There’s the unexpected. Most of what you see are the common birds – Swallows, Pipits, Finches – but you keep on watching,  willing the sky to give...

Ground beetles, in the garden pitfall trap during a seven day period (nb these are not to scale). There were other kinds of beetles in the trap - several species of Rove beetles for example these are just the Carabidae - Ground Beetles The biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reputed to have been asked what could be concluded about the nature of god from a study of his creation -  his reply was that he has -  "An inordinate fondness for beetles." Yes there are a lot of beetle species - nature has got beetles coming out of its ears. I had my own taste of this during my week long 'beetle drive' (fans of pointless stuff your parents used to do should check out the beetle drive ). I put a pitfall trap in the garden - this being a glass jar placed into a hole in the ground. Beetles stumble into the trap and can't get out - simple, yet...erm...simple. Almost every time I inspected the trap - I would see one or two ground beetles scurrying around and bumping into each...

Buff Arches - it's moth masterpiece, it also exhibits a very convincing optical illusion. I think the Buff Arches is my favourite moth - it's a moth masterpiece! Even though you know you're looking at a flat wing, the optical illusion is so convincing that you can't help but see it as two surfaces. I like the way that evolution has provided it with a drop shadow, to give the illusion of depth, of the kind you'd produce if you were using photoshop. To see how closely I could mimic the effect I produced the image on the right. Why would coloration like this evolve? It seems clear that breaking up the outline is the 'objective' here. But what about the other markings? Why is it that colour? Why does it have the looped markings, why does it have the line along the wings' trailing edge? Is it possible to ever know? It's sometimes contended that every single marking on a moth or butterfly's wing, every tiny line and dot, must have an...