I've just been having an idle flick through a copy of Complete Guide to British Wild Flowers by Paul Sterry and I'm here to remind you that common plant names are wild. You probably know that already (Love Lies Bleeding, Fat Hen, Deadly Nightshade, etc), but there are so many more:
There's a lovely folklore/fantasy vibe going on here and none of these names would be out of place in a Tolkien/Prachett-style fantasy world. I particuarly like Melancholy Thistle (Eeyore's thistle of choice), Sticky Mouse-ear (another job for Supervet) Petty Spurge (really needs to get a sense of proprtion) and Toad Rush (OK, obviously a reed, but also probably a classic Sega video game).
Sterry's book is about flowers, not fungi, but don't even get me started on popular fungus names - the Destroying Angel alone is metal enough to tell you that there are some fungi you really, really don't want to mess with.
Just one of a very long list of needless cruelties that people once thought were OK.
More surprisingly, this sort of thing didn't die out with the Victorians. Apparently, competitive sing-offs between caged chaffinches (called vinkenzetting, or vinkensport) is still a thing in Belgium, although at least blinding the birds was banned in the 1920s (interestingly enough, as a result of a campaign by blind World War I veterans, it says here). Even so:
Modern animal rights activists, such as those from the Flemish Bird Protection Society, accuse trainers of "brainwashing" birds into singing more than is natural or healthy by playing looped recordings of finch calls, and that caging birds in the intentionally small and dark contest boxes is cruel.
Of course, morose and sulky boys that they are, some of the owners still find bizarre reasons to criticise the songs of the birds they've imprisoned in the dark for their own amusement:
I knew that the creationist mythos included dinosaurs on board Noah's Ark. What I didn't know was how the creationists thought that the mighty beasts which got saved from the Big Wet were subsequently wiped out - until I came across this:
Really? Knights and dinosaurs? Yep, creationist Kent Hovind has confirmed that humans were busy hunting dinosaurs ("dragons") into the Middle Ages and beyond.
This notion would really have appealed to the six year old me. I had plastic dinosaurs. I had plastic toy knights. If I'd known of Kent Hovind's scenario, knights and dinos would definitely have fought one another for possession of the dinner table and sand pit.
It may be nonsense, but if your sole aim is to get the little ones into church, tabletop battles involving knights versus dinosaurs might not be such a stupid idea.
Give me the child until the age of seven years and I will give you the man.
Probably just another headline/image pairing mismatch by Google News's algorithm, although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to hear that even marine reptiles in the far-off Pacific are shaking their scaly heads in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the British government's omnishambolic implosion.
The resulting bestiary ranges from the conservative (tapier-like creatures, drawn by artists who presumably wanted to keep the reported trunk down to a plausible-looking size), to fanciful beasts sporting fanned-out ears, ribbed like fish fins, or bat wings.
Interestingly, it's some of the most conservative visions, with a modest trunk, or bodily proportions based on a known animal like a horse, that look the least like a real elephant.
The universe, as someone* once mused, is not only odder than we imagine, but probably odder than we can imagine. Although a few of these illustrators got pretty close to out-odding nature with elephants that wouldn't have been out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
The River Great Ouse at Newport Pagnell. The weather's been scorching, we had a dip in the cool, inviting water and saw a grass snake swim across the river, coming out of those reeds and slithering into the undergrowth on the opposite bank.
A timely reminder that there's more to life than whingeing about the state of the world.
“It’s this immigration thing. It looks as if the whole of Europe is turning into a barricaded society. ‘We don’t mind people as long as they are our people. We don’t like these foreign squirrels coming in and taking over.’ It’s intolerance, and it’s illogical.”
John Bryant of Animal Aid
[Environmental journalist Fred] Pearce also notes that, in 2009, the racist BNP branded the North American signal crayfish “the Mike Tyson of crayfish … a diseased, psychotic, evil, illegal immigrant colonist [that] totally devastates the indigenous environment”.
But I think Bryant and Pearce are dead wrong when they make a rhetorical link between such bigoted nativism and attempts to stop local ecosystems from being destroyed or degraded by introduced species.
First, you can argue for controlling invasive species without making it about this country versus the rest of the world. When humans unwisely introduced the Nile perch to Lake Victoria, several hundred resident species were driven to extinction or near extinction. Introducing rabbits to Australia led to massive overgrazing and species loss. Introduced cane toads and Burmese pythons have taken to eating resident species (some of them endangered) in their new homes (there are countless examples from around the globe - these particular stories were taken from here). Both perch and python are devastating ecosystems which have nothing to do with this nation.
Second, as per the title of this post, introduced animals and plants are not human beings. Comparing them to abused and vilified human migrants is just the flip side of the category error racists make when they rant about a crayfish as a "psychotic, evil, illegal immigrant colonist." A crayfish isn't an oppressed minority, or an antisocial person without valid documents. It's a big shrimp.
Third, I'm not that impressed by the idea of environmental laissez faire:
Fred Pearce has argued that ecosystems are always changing and invasive species should be celebrated. The vast majority of Britain’s flora and fauna arrived in the last 10,000 years. Nothing is “native” – everything is visiting. For Pearce, the alleged damage caused by most “invasive” species, such as Japanese knotweed, is overstated by grant-seeking bureaucrats and sensationalising media.
Yes, flora and fauna naturally move about over thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years. Species move, evolve and perish over time. But that's not an excuse for perpetrating, or doing nothing about, ecological disasters caused by human meddling or negligence.
I'm reminded of the time when the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould mentioned that extinction was a natural part of the evolution of life and that over 99.% of species that have ever lived are extinct. He was bemused to find his words being cited by people arguing that wildlife preservation was therefore a waste of time, because all species die eventually. Gould compared this misrepresentation of what he'd said to somebody refusing to give life-saving drugs to a sick child on the grounds that all humans are mortal anyway.
Forget the misplaced anthropomorphism. There's overwhelming evidence that introduced species have devastated environments and driven other species that live there to extinction, or close to it. The newcomers aren't the psychotic, evil, illegal immigrant colonists of racist metaphor, just lifeforms surviving and reproducing in their normal way, in an abnormal environment, but the damage they do is real. If we value our biodiversity we should avoid upsetting our existing ecosystems with thoughtless introductions and we should control invasive species wherever possible. Sometimes a rhododendron is just a rhododendron.
A human moving from one place where humans already live, across an artificial line on a map drawn by humans and ending up in another place where humans already live is not like an invasive species.* It's a bad metaphor. The economic and socio-political arguments about the pros and cons of human migration have nothing to do with what happens when humans transplant a novel species into an environment where it didn't evolve.
As far as I'm concerned, migration and invasive species are two, entirely separate, issues that shouldn't be conflated, either by racists comparing other humans to alien species, or by self-described conservationists who won't do anything to prevent the damage done by actual invasive species because they, also, view non-native species as being like human immigrants, only in a good way.
When it comes to environmental policy, I completely disagree with Bryant and Pearce. I do concede that they have a point when it comes to the use of language. It is, after all, a short step from the BNP's ridiculous description of the signal crayfish as "a psychotic, evil, illegal immigrant colonist" to Katie Hopkins' notorious description of migrants as "cockroaches." This sort of language is becoming so normalised that people are becoming immune to it.
But I'm starting to have second thoughts. Not only were my words open to misinterpretation by the irony-deficient, as per Poe's Law, but giving more exposure to the language of racists, even in mockery, is probably a bad idea. There are other ways to mock bad faith and terrible ideas and I'll bear that in mind when writing about this sort of stuff in future. So at least Bryant and Pearce have made me think about the language I use, even if I've got no time for their ideas about conservation and introduced species.
*Bad things have happened in the past when humans have moved around the world (think of the fate of the native Americans when Europeans came along with their germs and weapons), but it shouldn't take more than a few moments' thought to realise that these, too, are misleading, useless metaphors for what happens today when somebody from a poorer country comes to the UK to do a bit of cleaning, or fruit-picking, or to work in the NHS.
LBC is facing growing pressure to end its relationship with Nigel Farage after it was forced to retract a series of false and misleading claims he made on air...
..."The fear is that he is going to be the next Hopkins," one LBC source told BI.
Which is presumably why the panicky, feather-brained pheasant seems to be in almost as much danger of ending up as roadkill as it is of being blasted out of the sky by some feather-brained toff with a shotgun. The altogether smarter crow, on the other hand, will view your approaching vehicle with bored contempt, then grudgingly hop out of the way at the very last, precisely-timed, moment before returning to resume its rudely-interrupted meal of carrion (pheasant, if it's lucky).
... but, sadly, it'll take more than two "apparently credible" sightings (one of them more than thirty years old) to convince me that the marsupial tiger/wolf/whatever other placental equivalent you prefer, has indeed cheated extinction:
Scientists in northern Australia are preparing to hunt for the Tasmanian tiger following a series of “sightings” of the species, which was declared extinct after the last one died in a zoo in 1936.
As part of a search due to begin next month, scientists plan to set up more than 50 camera traps to try to spot a so-called tiger, or thylacine, in Cape York, a peninsula in the country’s north-east corner.
This follows two apparently credible sightings in the region, including one by Brian Hobbs, a former tourism operator who revealed earlier this month that he spotted a family of the animals in 1983 after they startled his German shepherd.
*Spoiler alert- if you've not already read H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, do so immediately, or read on at your own peril...*
I've just been re-reading the first alien invasion novel, H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, and I can see again why it created a genre all of its own and why it immediately grabbed me as a child. Mainly because it's such a cracking yarn - the alien visitation starts off as an intriguing curiosity, but escalates to being, ominous, threatening, awe-inspiring and terrifying at an unstoppable pace that mirrors the relentless advance of Well's iconic Martian tripods, seen here in one of the novel's big reveals:
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand... Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about.
That's a fantastic piece of writing and there are lots more like it. The book also has its expository digressions, where the action stops and Wells explains things rather than just showing you awesome stuff, but these aren't too long (at least by the standards of the time when Wells was writing) and by this stage he's already created enough momentum to keep you gripped and reading on. Compare and contrast with that other piece of proto-sci-fi, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which also starts with strange, ominous events, building up to an exciting reveal and some great set pieces, but is so weighted down with the ballast of endless pages of over-long explanation that Verne almost sinks the cracking yarn he created.*
If the The War of the Worlds looks forward to every alien invasion yarn that followed, it also looks back to an aesthetic trope that's probably been around for ever, but was largely formalised in the Eighteenth Century and peaked with early Nineteenth Century Romanticism - the sublime. That's the idea that humans don't just appreciate things which are beautiful in an ordered, harmonious way, but also dig stuff that's wild, inhuman in scale and frankly terrifying - as the Tate Britain put it, in the blurb to an exhibition dedicated to "Art and the Sublime":
The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757). Burke’s definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as
darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and
suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of
pleasurable terror.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was
associated in particular with the immensity or turbulence of Nature and
human responses to it. Consequently, in Western art, ‘sublime’
landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period,
often represent towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms
and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually
experienced, would be life threatening.
Compare Wells's description of the towering Martian tripod with William Wordsworth describing his youthful memory of stealing a boat and rowing out onto Ullswater at night, in The Prelude. As young Wordsworth looks back guiltily at a peak overlooking the lake, the huge, shadowy, inhuman form seems, by an unsettling trick of perspective, to be pursuing his boat:
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me...
Wordsworth's looming peak only looked threatening, but extreme fans of the sublime had access to far more hardcore material than that. Wells's Martians may have wreaked terrible destruction on the South East of England, but even they would have had a hard time competing with acts of God. The Almighty's awesome destructive capacity was given the sublime treatment by popular Nineteenth Century painter John Martin, in a series of massive, full-frontal disaster porn canvasses like The Great Day of His Wrath:
It's the end of the World as we know it (and I feel fine).
Sublimely terrifying and imaginative though Well's Martian tripods are, it's probably best not to think too hard about how they work. According to Wells's description, the unearthly three-legged machines move like "a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground" and elsewhere he writes of their swiftness and "rolling" motion, which is vivid enough.
But if the whole machine is whirling around to pivot from one leg to the next, surely the Martian pilot within is also being whirled around, unable to stay facing the machine's direction of travel (or any other fixed direction) and getting horribly dizzy, (assuming that the Martian vestibular system can suffer from dizziness).
Maybe the tripod legs whirl around, but the cowl housing the Martian pilot doesn't. But that would imply that controlling part of the machine is mounted on some sort of axle or pivot, which, according to Wells, isn't the way the Martians, with their biomimetic technology, do things:
And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion...
...And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained.
Of course, this might just be one of the singularly rare occasions when the Martians did make use of the fixed pivot, but it definitely goes against the Martians' overriding design ethos. Or maybe the cowl isn't on a pivot, just hyper-mobile, like an owl's head:
But this would present difficulties of its own - if the tripod rolled around in only one direction, the head would eventually have to snap back round, even if it could stay pointing in one direction for a while. If the tripod alternated its direction of roll, a hyper-mobile head would work, but the change from whirling in one direction to another would would be inefficient, robbing the machine of momentum, just as it was getting onto a roll.
Movie versions of the novel have struggled (or not tried) to reproduce the motion of the Martian tripods, as described by Wells. In the 1953 film adaptation, the special effects people decided that they just wouldn't be able to create a convincing walking tripod and opted to redesign the Martian fighting machines as floating manta ray-shaped craft, topped with a heat ray on a flexible mounting that looked like a striking cobra. In a nod to the original novel, the film's hero scientist explains that the seemingly unsupported Martian craft are actually held up in mid air and moved by means of three invisible "electromagnetic legs."
With the advent of CGI, a later generation of special effects wizards
were finally able to produce a plausible-looking version of the Wellsian
tripods for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation - sort of. In some
ways the CGI works well and the tripod machines have some of the
Wellsian details right. For example, the limbs are flexible, just as
Wells described, looking more like a supple living thing than a stiff,
jointed mechanism
.
But the motion is distinctly un-Wellsian - Spielberg's tripods don't whirl forwards with an unstoppable rolling gait, but pick their three-legged way through the ruins like a dog with an injured paw, or a human walking with one good leg, a plaster cast and a crutch. I don't think this really catches the essence of Wells's vision, where the tripods signified two things. First, alienness - no creature on our planet has evolved to walk on three legs. Second, implacable swiftness - it's clear from the original novel that the Martian machines move fast and efficiently on their three legs, bearing down like express trains on the puny humans in their path, pursuing and outflanking them with ease.
To date, nobody (AFAIK) has been able to represent, or reproduce the sort of tripod locomotion Wells described so vividly. Whether this is a failure of imagination, technical skill, or just a reflection of the fact that it's impossible to translate Wells's vision into actual engineering, I don't know (although the fact that terrestrial biology has taken millions of years not to come up with a working three-legged creature might point to three legs just being an inefficient number for a walker).
An impossible form of locomotion, or just one nobody's figured out yet? You decide.
*To be fair, I've only read it in translation and it probably sounds better in French, but the endless pauses in the action when Verne just stops everything to list species of fish, or whatever, must be just as boring in any language.
Ukip MP Douglas Carswell has become embroiled in a bizarre argument with scientists over whether the moon or sun causes ocean tides.
Scientific knowledge generally holds that tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon orbiting the earth. The Sun’s much further distance means it has a much more limted effect because of the effect of the inverse square law on gravitational pull.
However, committed eurosceptic Mr Carswell on Monday challenged a top scientist at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) over the claim, arguing that the sun in fact primarily causes tides.
The Curmudgeon has a satirical take on this, although I wonder why he bothers when these lunatics have automated self-parody fitted as standard.
Here in Britain, we're not recycling as much as we could be, but we're generally moving in the right direction. And, even better than recycling, we're re-using stuff. The plastic bag tax may not be as straightforwardly brilliant as some people think,* but at least we're opening up to the idea that there's got to be a better way than pouring irreplaceable raw materials into single-use throwaway products, then festooning our hedgerows with discarded polythene bags.
I think these new ideas range from mildly encouraging to quite exciting. But among the new ideas, there's maybe also room for a tried and tested old idea - a thing we used to do right, but gave up on:
One of Britain's favourite childhood memories is long overdue a comeback in a bid to increase national recycling rates, says Mark Hall at York-based BusinessWaste.co.uk
Paying a deposit on a glass bottle, which is then refunded when returned to a participating retailer, effectively died out in the UK with the advent of the disposable plastic bottle, but now is the time to bring it back.
Figures from the United States - where bottle deposits are still widespread – show that the higher the deposit, the more likely a bottle is returned intact.
We often look at the past with rose-tinted glasses, but the bottle deposit was something that really did work.
In the post-war period, children could make themselves a reasonable fortune by scouring their local area for empty bottles, which they'd then take back to the shop to receive a few pence each.
It was killed off by plastic bottles, but that came with a legacy of millions of tonnes of waste in hedgerows and kerbs filled with bottles. It's time to end this epidemic of wastefulness.
It worked then and it's still working, not just in the USA, but in Europe, where Germany deserves a special mention for trying to get back on track with deposits:
Sounds like a no-brainer. So why aren't we doing it? An old opinion piece in the Guardian, titled "A bottle deposit scheme would be costly and counterproductive" gives us a clue. Not because the piece makes a convincing counter argument, though. This is the sort of thing which passes for an argument against bottle re-use:
Your editorial on the Campaign to Protect Rural England's call for a deposits scheme for drinks containers highlighted that "it's a simple scheme and an old one" (In praise of… deposit bottles, 17 September). However, that's exactly the point – it's old, defunct...
...CPRE admits that the scheme would cost as much as £700m a year to run – money that would ultimately come from consumers, either directly through unclaimed deposits or indirectly through higher prices...
...drinks containers are an income-generating part of councils' recycling collections, and vital to fund the other low- or no- value items.
That last argument, in particular, is so weak, it's almost funny. It reminds me of a documentary about litter I saw a few years back. The film makers set up a secret camera and recorded people who were dropping litter in the street. A reporter confronted the litterbugs and asked them why they were messing up everybody's environment.
Some offenders had the good grace to be a bit ashamed of being caught and conceded that dropping their rubbish wherever they happened to be had been a bit antisocial. Others got aggressive and tried to bluster it out, including one gentleman who argued that by dropping litter in a public place, he was doing a public service because people like him kept street cleaners in a job.
Arguing that by producing more waste for the council to recycle, you're public-spiritedly providing them with an income stream is almost as silly as arguing that by dropping litter you're selflessly promoting employment opportunities for street sweepers.
Jane Bickerstaffe, who produced this piece of corporate bluster was, at the time, the director of The Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment (INCPEN). And what is INCPEN? Glad you asked:
Our members are an influential group of International and British companies who have a common interest in packaging and sustainability. They include raw material suppliers, packaging manufacturers, and manufacturers and retailers of packaged products.
ONE VISION
We share a vision of the future where all production, distribution, and consumption are sustainable.
We aim to:
Help ensure policy on packaging makes a positive contribution to sustainability
Encourage industry to minimise the environmental impact of packaging and packaged products and continuously improve packaging
INCPEN's arguments may look weak, but its incentive to lobby on behalf of the influential producers and users of packaging materials it represents, and which fund INCPEN, looks quite strong.
Maybe the countries which still seem to be making a success of bottle re-use have got it all wrong. Maybe INCPEN is a disinterested organisation, more interested in what's best for the environment than it is in its members' bottom lines. But I can't help thinking that the environmental case for re-using glass bottles looks pretty sound, and that the counter arguments look a lot like PR spin and corporate lobbying.
** Post updated - the paragraph quoted above expains the situation in Germany better than the passage from this other article, which I'd originally used.
The latest batch of Pluto images downloaded from the New Horizons probe look alien and stunning, sure enough. But to me, they also look both unreal and strangely familiar. They remind me of the artwork from some vintage science fiction film, an alien world as imagined by a visual effects artist from the 1950s.
To see what I mean, compare Pluto with the planet Altair IV, as visualised for the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet - the desolate plains, punctuated by towering mountain ranges, the hazy, layered atmosphere. The only thing missing from the New Horizons download is Louis and Bebe Barron's unearthly electronic film score.
Science fact is finally starting to look like science fiction.
The Forbidden Planet image was nicked from NZ Pete's Matte Shot blog, a highly-recommended wunderkammer of cinematic visual effects artistry, in what I hope is an act of fair use.
Like somebody who's spent too much time doing repetitive exercises at the gym, the head's a bit out of focus, but the bum's crisply defined. All the same, I quite like this photo, blurry head and all (that's what you get when the subject tries to eat the camera lens).
World, meet Mrs Cluck, one third of our astonishingly prolific egg production team.
Well, the eclipse has now swept over Europe and there's been nothing on the one o'clock news about massive power outages and general chaos* as the continent's partly-solar-fed power grids fail to cope with this entirely predictable event. Goodness me, I was relieved (not really)!
If there really were people out there who were reduced to a state of panic, I guess the biggest threat to the grid would come shortly after local maximum coverage, when any panicky pants who'd been fearing the coming near-dusk experience all started breathing normally again and switched on their kettles to brew themselves a calming decaffeinated beverage.
Fortunately, it was sunny here at around 9.35 (well, the sun was shining through a very light haze) and I did manage to stop what I was doing for a few minutes and witness the drop in light levels. It wasn't that dramatic, but you could tell that something was subtly different. The sun was high and the visible bit was still too bright to look at, but the light levels felt more like the immediate post-dawn or pre-dusk than half past nine on a bright equinoctial morning.
More than anything else, being outside at the height of the eclipse felt like looking out on a bright spring day from inside a building with tinted glass windows. Plus a slight drop in temperature. Casualties are thought to be light to non-existent, thank Sol Invictus.
*I'll update this post, should news of any actual disruption come in, but don't hold your breath.
Here's a guy who's heard that it pays to advertise:
You have to admit it's an impressive display, from that fan of gorgeously patterned feathers, wider than some people are tall, to the extravagant headgear and dandy highwayman coat in shimmering ultramarine.
What's rather less impressive is the degree to which an advertiser with a brain the size of a plump cherry can segment his market and focus on influencing the appropriate target demographic. In short, he's trying to impress the wrong species. Here's another photo with a bit more context:
Although guys showing off to other guys is pretty common, it isn't the small boy in shot he's displaying to - even a peacock isn't dumb enough to waste energy on a mere mammal. The object of his advertising campaign is the poultry cage in the background, where a baffled group of chickens are watching a display that would be fruitless even if the females in question weren't caged and out of reach.
I went to an stupendous orgy last weekend, a massive non-holds-barred free-for-all of wet, writhing bodies. In fact, I was only there to watch:
Yes, it was our dear old friend, Rana temporaria, greeting the spring with a traditional batrachian frenzy of mating activity. May your spawn be fruitful and prosper, little ones.
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
