The Raven – surely a misrepresented portent of doom, Fermi’s paradox and the three body problem and

 

Raven

Since my last blog a month or so ago my time has been mostly occupied by very local birding and various major garden projects. I had my first jab two weeks ago receiving the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. I suffered no major side effects apart from a very sore arm. I feel eternally grateful to our amazing NHS for the job they have done on the vaccine roll out program, >20 million jabs to date is a truly astonishing achievement!

 

Last week I again went on my long walk from home around the National Trust’s Croome estate. It was a sunny morning with a definite feel of spring in the air. First stop was Croome church and graveyard which always looks a prime spot for a Black Redstart, ever hopeful (!). I then walked around the edge of the estate which offers a mixed habitat of farmland, damp woodland and open grass parkland. In the woodland a Kestrel, seemly oblivious to my presence, stared intently at the ground for any sign of movement. Kestrel’s spectral vison extends, unlike ours, into the ultra violet which allows them to see the fresh urine trails of rodents. Perhaps it is fortuitous that we can’t see into this frequency range! 

Kestrel

I walked on and was serenaded by singing resident birds, Robins, Song Thrushes and Chaffinches and my spirts were lifted by the thought of the imminence of spring. I must confess I struggle with our long dark winter nights , doubly so this winter with the compounding impact of lockdown 3.0.

 

 I walked on over the grassland towards the Croome river and realised that, in my day dreaming, I had wandered well off the footpath to a previously unvisited area of the park. I consulted my OS locate app to guide me back to the footpath only to find my subscription had expired! The meandering river Croome was in the distance in front of me and I knew that if followed it would eventually take me back to the woodland weir and onto the footpath. As I walked on a very vocal Raven flew over me and landed in an old spruce tree. Quite by accident I had stumbled on its nest! I retired to a very respectful distance and observed the Raven flying down onto the grassland, picking up vegetation and going back to its nest, presumably to line it. I’ve seen more Ravens in the four months since we moved to Pirton than I think I saw in the ten years I lived in Standlake. They are real brutes of birds, being the largest corvid, comparable in size to a Buzzard, with an outrageously large chunky bill and a loud grating croaking call to alert you to their presence, just in case you are rude enough to have missed it! Presumably due to their black plumage, croaking call and diet of carrion, the Raven was historically associated with loss and ill omen and was much persecuted as such. The poor Raven’s undeserved reputation is perhaps best epitomised in the last verse of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door

And his eyes have a seeming of a demon's that is dreaming

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Raven

On Sunday morning I was down by our large pond helping out with our horses when I heard a Chiffchaff signing its distinctive song. I looked up and saw it fliting energetically around, as is often their habit, on one of our old oak trees. I’m pretty sure he was new in as there has not been one in this location over winter and as such he represents the first returning summer migrant to our ranch just one day short of the meteorological start of spring. A truly welcome sight and sound which lifted my spirts for the rest of the day! I grabbed my camera but of him there was no sign when I returned. I lingered for a while by the pond watching one of our resident Wrens alternating between last years weathered  bull rushes and our muck heap where insects are attracted to the warmth. We are blessed with many Dunnocks on our land, a name I still can’t get used to as we called them Hedge Sparrows when I was a young lad. One perched up close to me on one of our paddock fence post and I rattled off a few shots of what is, in my opinion at least, a beautiful and much underrated bird. The garden bird feeders are again attracting the local Greenfinches with the males in particular being resplendent in their dazzling green breeding plumage. We also had our first Yellow Brimstone butterfly of the year in our garden at the weekend.

Greenfinch

Jenny Wren

Hedge Sparrow

I have also kept myself occupied creating a new fruit cage in our embryonic fruit and vegetable plot. It’s a modification of the one I built at Standlake and benefits from all the corrected mistakes of my first attempt. It is planted up with Strawberries taken with us as last year’s runners from Standlake, my 15 year old blueberry bushes, a dwarf mulberry bush, a cultivar blackberry called Loch Ness which we grew with great success in Standlake and a long row of summer and autumn fruiting raspberries. 

Work in progress on the new fruit cage

My next ground work project is to construct the base on which out new Victorian style greenhouse will eventually sit. The ground at its desired location has a significant slope so I am using lovely old oak sleepers to create a retaining wall around the base.

 

Oak sleeper retaining wall for the new greenhouse base

I’ve recently watched Nasa’s fantastic video of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars – click here if you haven’t already seen it. The video shows the parachute deploying in the thin Martian atmosphere, the heat shield being ejected and finally the sky crane lowering the rover the last few meters onto the Martian surface. This was, somewhat incredulously, all controlled with processors used in iMacs from the 1990’s with a thousand times less processing power than a modern smart phone. Why you might ask? Well it’s because there were redesigned for radiation hardness, a perquisite for operation on mars, for use on previous rovers so it was prudent and low risk to use them again.

 

I’ve had a number of interesting discussions about whether spending vast sums of money sending a rover to look for life on Mars is an appropriate use of public funds. The standard argument seems to be that you could build x hospitals or schools with the money. For me there are two strong compelling arguments for this type of scientific endeavour.

 

Firstly, human curiosity to understand the world we live in is one of the defining features of who we are. Since time immemorial we have wondered about our place in the universe and what is beyond where we have been. Take this sense of inquisitively away from us and, it seems to me at least,  that we lose a key part of our humanity. Surely there is no more profound question than are we alone in this universe, a question that perseverance may answer if it discovers evidence of life 2.0 on mars.

 

Ok, I know that won’t win the die-hards over but my second argument is my trump card! Without curiosity led research many of the technologies that both enrich and make our lives much safer and easier would simply not exist. My definition of curiosity led research is something that has no obvious immediate economic value. Both the discovery of the laser and the transistor, two semiconducting devices that are ubiquitous in our modern world, were discovered by curiosity led research. It wasn’t until some years later that the practical applications of these seemingly academic discoveries became apparent. When the Dutch scientist Kamerlingh-Onnes in 1911 used the newly discovered liquid helium to cool Mercury down to close to absolute zero he had no idea that he was about to discover superconductivity, the driving force behind modern MRI scanners which have revolutionised diagnostic medicine.

 

On the subject of are we alone in the universe I’d like to finish up on something called Fermi’s paradox. Broadly stated the paradox is “if the universe is home to alien civilisations where are they all”, i.e surely they would have made their presence known to us by now? Although the barriers to communication and travel between stars currently seem insurmountable to us we should put this into the context of one of Carl Sagan's famous quotes. This broadly says that any alien civilisation that’s is more than a few hundred years more technological advanced that us would be indistinguishable to us from gods! I recently read the Three Body Problem trilogy by the brilliant Chinese author Lui Cixin. Without giving too much away his basic premise and answer to Fermi’s paradox is that any advanced god like technological civilisation would see any new entrant sentient life as a threat and eliminate it! So the sensible thing to do is keep very quiet and not announce your presence to the universe. Perhaps we should not be poking around on mars after all!