Albert revisited, Ripple lakes and the meaning of infinity

 

Gannet

Last Thursday I decided to visit the sea bird city at Bempton cliffs RSPB reserve in Yorkshire. I was hoping to see Albert the Albatross who has recently returned from his winter wanderings and also enjoy the seabird spectacle as noisy Gannets, Auks, Kittwakes and Fulmars return to the cliffs to nest. My blog on last years visit to see Albert can be found here. As discussed in this blog, Albert should be in the Southern hemisphere where Black-browed Albatross breed in the Falklands and other remote locations.  He was most likely blown off course by a storm and is thought to have been in the northern hemisphere since 2014. He has also been spotted across the North Sea in Germany and Scandinavia where he seems to spend the winter. It has always been assumed that we have just one lost Albatross wandering around Northern Europe.  Not so it would seem with conclusive proof recently of two adult Black-browed Albatrosses present simultaneously in the North Sea - with one photographed at sea west of Hanstholm, Denmark on 2nd April and then passing Salo, Bohuslan, Sweden two days later whilst the Bempton bird remained  in Yorkshire. I don’t think we know if they are males or females but we can only speculate what would happen if they met! It is certainly not unknown for pairs of vagrant birds  to establish self-sustaining breeding colonies far from home, for example see my blog on the Elegant Tern here.

 

The mainly motorway drive from home to Bempton normally takes three and a half hours but a combination of two long queues from motorway accidents and driver stupidity, i.e. driving onto the M6 toll road when I should have turned off onto the M42, resulted in an extremely frustrating drive of over four and a half hours. So it was not until just after 10:00 that I arrived at Bempton. I checked the recent sightings board at the visitor centre and then made my way to the Staple Newk viewing platform where Albert often sits with the Gannets on the cliff. When I got there he had already  flown off the cliff and was sitting some distance out on the sea. I watched him through my scope for a while and he eventually tucked his head under his wing and fell asleep! I spent the next couple of hours watching the other seabirds while occasionally checking on Albert as he drifted further and further out to sea.

 

At lunchtime I decided to go for a walk along the various cliff viewing platforms to watch and photograph the other seabirds. The whole area around the cliffs was absolutely teaming with birds. Noisy Gannets were coming and going, presumably from fishing trips, landing back on the cliffs, and often reacquainting themselves with their partner by their characteristic mutual head raised beak taping  display.  Guillemot and Razorbill sat seemingly precariously but confidently on the many cliff ledges in-between the Gannets while Kittwake and Fulmars flew around on the thermals. Gannets were landing on the top of the cliff to collect grass for their nests providing some very nice photo opportunities. 

 

Gannet

Kittwake

Razorbill

Fulmars, like Albert, are so called tubenoses.  All birds have an enlarged nasal gland at the base of the bill, above the eyes, which is inactive in most species. However, the tubeforms do use it to extract and expel salt from their bodies from the sea water they drink during their many months at sea. The gland concentrates the excess salt into a strong saline solution which then drips from the characteristic nostrils on their beak which give them the tubiform name.

 

I have mostly used my R5 on single shot mode to avoid filling my memory card with unwanted images but for flight shots I like to run at high speed continuous. In the case of the R5 this is some 18 frames/second. I shot frame after frame of the Gannets in flight and the inevitable happened –“CARD FULL”. A quick mental calculation said that at 18 frames/second the card would be full in 70 seconds so no wonder! I sat down and delete enough rubbish photos to leave some space for possible flight shots of Albert and then went back to the Staple Newk viewpoint. I learned that Albert had flown back from the sea and was now perched out of view on the cliff and, despite waiting a further two hours before driving home, there he stayed!

Albert from last years visit

I’ve been meaning to explore Ripple lakes, which are just a 15 minute drive from home, for some time. On Saturday further incentive to visit materialised when two summer plumage Black-necked Grebes were reported on site. I drove to Ripple and parked in the Anglers car park on the north shore of the north lake and walked for 30 minutes to the south shore of the south lake where the Grebes had been reported. They were feeding and displaying near that bank of an island a little too far out for anything but record shots but they looked quite stunning in their dazzling breeding plumage. I think I’ve said before that the Black-necked Grebe is a bird that goes through a visual metamorphism from its drab winter plumage to its startlingly beautiful summer plumage. There was also a very smart drake Garganey on the lake. This spring has been very good for stop over migrating Garganey such that I have probably seen more this spring so far than I’ve seen in the previous 5 years.

Distant record shot of the Ripple Black-necked Grebes

Summer plumage Black-necked Grebe from a few years ago

Winter Plumage Black-necked Grebe from a few years ago

On a completely different topic, there was a fascinating article in this weeks New Scientist on the meaning of infinity and mathematicians progress in understanding it. Physicists and mathematicians differ on this one. Physicists hate it because its appearance in the solutions to their equations indicates that something is seriously wrong with the theory. It is, however, of fundamental importance in mathematics. Infinity is a concept that our brains struggle to deal with which won’t be helped at all by me telling you that in mathematics there is more than one kind of infinity!

 

To understand the basic concept of infinity in mathematics consider the answer to the number one divided by zero. Now the answer must clearly be, say, more than 10 as 10x0=0. In fact, by the same rational, there must be more than a billion. You can keep doing this with larger and larger numbers and the result is always the same, there must be more than that number of zeros in the number. In fact no number is large enough so we say that there must in fact be an infinite number of zeros in one.

 

Now in a mind blowing twist it turns out that in mathematics there are an infinite different types of infinity, the simplest example being so called countable and uncountable infinities! Such perplexing puzzles drove me to study maths and physics as my first degree at university. Now you can see why most great mathematicians are not your normal average sort of person!

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!