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| Red-flanked Bluetail |
My birding friend Nick has started to call me lucky Jim based on the run of birding good fortune I’ve had in recent months. Well it had to end sometime didn’t it?
A week ago on Friday a mega rare Taiga Flycatcher was found at Flamborough in Yorkshire in an area called South Landing. It seems highly likely that this was one and the same bird as a one day wonder a short distance away at Flamborough head in October. There was the added attraction of a Red-flanked Bluetail, an attractive small passerine, also at South Landing.
The weekend was taken up with looking after grandchildren and other family stuff so the first day I could twitch the Flycatcher was Monday. On Sunday night I looked at the overnight forecast for Flamborough with some trepidation, clear sky and light southerly winds, ideal for the flycatcher to continue its migration! I’d also seen video taken of it on Sunday showing it preening profusely, often a sign that it was packing its bag ready for departure.
I left home at 05:30 for the three and the half hour mainly motorway drive to Flamborough. A couple of stops to check RBA appeared to confirm my fears with no reports of the Flycatcher. I parked up at South Landing and walked the small distance to the picnic area where the Flycatcher had been. The Red-flanked Bluetail was showing well but it was soon clear that the Flycatcher had moved out, dip one of the day!
I’ve only ever seen one Red-Flanked Bluetail before in the UK in Norfolk last autumn and having great views of my second one was, as it turned out, more than ample compensation for dipping the Flycatcher.
It is a migratory insect eating bird which breeds in coniferous forest and has a very wide breeding range from Finland eastwards across Siberia to Japan. It mainly winters in south-eastern Asia. It is a rare but fairly regular autumn vagrant to eastern England. In recent years numbers of vagrants have been increasing, probably because the breeding range is slowly expanding westwards through Finland where up to 500 pairs now breed. As the name implies, both sexes have a blue tail and rump, and orange-red flanks. They also have a white throat and greyish-white underparts, and a small, thin black bill and slender black legs which taken all together creates an appearance that is very pleasing on the eye.
As is so often the case, the bird was doing a feeding circuit fliting restless around the canopy but coming lower down by one of the picnic tables. I hence followed my usual strategy of picking the most promising and photogenic spot and, rather than chasing the bird around, waited for it to visit me on its circuit. I spent the entire morning in this one place during which time it did four circuits and I was treated to some great views of this lovely little bird.
Come lunch time I walked the small distance back to my car and had my traditional birding sandwich lunch while pondering how to spend the remaining few hours of daylight. I thought I was unlikely to get better views of the Bluetail and hence checked RBA for what else was around. I found an intriguing report of a mega rare American Belted Kingfisher across country at Brockholes nature reserve, a site I have never before visited. The Kingfisher had been seen briefly and photographed on the opposite bank of the river Ribble before flying downstream calling. Checking the sat nav it seemed to add 60 miles to my journey home which would now be down the car park previously known as the M6. With the ever shortening days I calculated that I would have 90 minutes or so of reasonable daylight on site. This was a high risk high reward strategy but I figured that if it was re-found I would forever regret not going!
The reserve was well signposted just off of the motorway and I parked up and walked the short distance to the riverbank where a number of other birders were walking rather forlornly around, cue dip number two of the day. In fact the bird has not been seen since and there has been some debate on social media as to the provenance of the report. The one picture posted is very distant and you can just about make out a bird which appears to be the kingfisher although I would certainly not stake my life on it. The fact that it has never been seen again is somewhat strange and perhaps counts against the record, but it might well turn up again, stranger things have happened in the world of birding!
So it’s been quite some time since I’ve digressed into the world of physics in my blogs so look away now if memories of physics at school make you come out in a cold sweat. I’ve talked a lot before about the seemly absurd world of quantum mechanics, not least the disadvantages of “I’m doing a PhD in quantum liquids” as a party chat up line when I was at university, but here goes again anyway!
The cover of last weeks New Scientist asked the age old philosophical question – “Does anything exist when we’re not looking?” Pretty much as weirdly as it gets, the nature of quantum reality suggests the answer may be no! We know from countless experiments and tests that, at the atomic level at least, the fundamental properties that make an entity real to us, its position, its velocity etc. do not exist as hard determined values until we try and measure them. Rather we can only talk about an electrons, for example, position as a cloud of probably places where it might be that condense into one specific position when we measure it. We have also learned recently from experiments that the collapse of this cloud of probability, defined in what physicists call a wavefunction, into a definite value does not happen instantaneously, rather it takes a finite amount of time. This may all seem very esoteric and of little practical value to anyone but the processor in the computer I’m currently using follows and obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and would not work without them.
So can we extrapolate these strange quantum phenomena from the microscopic to our everyday macroscopic reality? Or, to put it another way, is the position of the oak tree in my garden only defined by a cloud of probability until I look at it? Common sense would say not as every time I look it’s in the same position. The answer lies in something I’ve mentioned before called decoherence which effective creates a brick wall between the quantum and classical worlds and saves reality as we know it. The concept of decoherence relates to how fragile quantum states are and how easy they are destroyed by outside influence. While it’s possible to isolate an electron from outside disturbance that will destroy its quantum coherence its almost impossible to imagine a macroscopic object, such as my oak tree, preserving quantum coherence. Hence my tree is probably there whether I look or not!
Total confused but slightly interested- try reading the article entitled “is reality real” in the New Scientist of 6th November 2012 – you might be reaching for the nurofen before the end of the article though!
Unlucky, Lucky Jim!
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