Summer birding in Gloucestershire, Caspian Tern, Turtle Dove, Green Sandpiper and ….if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

Occasionally, just very occasionally, my birding plans actually work out. 

 

Thursday was one of these rare occasion when a plan to go and see a Turtle Dove and a rare Caspian Tern followed by a visit to Slimbridge to photograph Green Sandpipers worked perfectly. The dove and tern were located in the small village of Epney on the river Severn a few miles north of Slimbridge. The cost of fuel for my car, it’s now costing a rather staggering £135 to fill my Landover with diesel, is certainly becoming a major factor in where I go. Slimbridge, being only 40 miles from home, has hence become an even more attractive birding location.

 

An uneventful drive down the M5 had me exiting one junction before the Slimbridge exit and driving down a narrow country lane towards Epney. Epney turned out to be a delightfully quintessential English village with an attractive  pub called the Anchor overlooking the Severn. There were a few other birders present who informed me that the tern had flown off a short while before I arrived and that the dove had not been seen so far that morning – a good start then!

 

The dove had previously been seen by the pub and as I walked past I heard the distant but unmistakable purring of a Turtle Dove. It was located atop a silver birch tree some 100m away. During the next hour it did a loop around the village while singing and forlornly displaying. Several times it settled on a fir tree adjacent to the road allowing a few photos to be taken.

 

The story of the Turtle Dove is truly a sad one and in many ways epitomises the decline of so many birds that were once a common feature of our English countryside. In my childhood they were a common bird and as little ago as 1970 there were still 125,00 breeding pairs in this country. The last survey in 2021 found this had vastly reduced to 2,100 pairs. At this rate of demise they will soon be a distant memory. Research shows that there are two main factors behind this, unsustainable hunting along their migration routes and lack of quality breeding habit in the UK. Action plans are in place to address the latter but the former remains a massive problem. I recently read that the allowable hunting catch this year in Italy actually exceeds the total remaining population of birds. I really do despair  at man’s stupidity.

 

Not that the British are any better! Did you know that shooting red listed Woodcock is still permitted in the UK? If you feel as strongly about this as I do, please sign this petition.

The Turtle Dove at Epney

A clearer view of one taken a few years ago.

As I was about to leave Epney I checked RBA and saw that the tern had been located at Longney , the next village north along the Severn. I passed the info onto a friendly local birder called Les who I had been chatting to and we both drove to Longney and continued chatted as we walked along the footpath to the riverbank. There was a flock of gulls on the other side of the river and as I scanned through them with my scope I soon saw the unmistakable Caspian Tern in amongst them, the fourth one I have seen in the UK. With heat haze building, it was too distant for photos so I concentrated on watching it through the scope. Its most noticeable feature was its massive thick bright red bill with a darker tip.

 

Caspian Terns are the largest members of the Tern family and have a large but scatted distribution being present in all continents except the Antarctic. They are mainly found in Europe in the Baltic and Black sea area and are comparatively rare vagrants to the UK with a small number of sightings most years.

 

With part one of my mission accomplished I headed to Slimbridge for the Green Sandpipers. It was lunch time when I got there so I went to the restaurant and ordered the soup of the day and a pot of tea. Pretty much every time I’ve been there I’ve had to ask for a clean cup. The one I was given was filthy with tea stains that could easily be removed by wiping with a finger. I was told that they were indeed tea stains as the teacup had previously had tea in it – no shit sherlock! The soup of the day, tomato, was watery and the rolls were stale surely you can do better than this even if you have a captative market Slimbridge!

 

I went to the hide overlooking the Rushy which has been good for the Green Sandpipers in the past and found two feeding on the margin a little way off. I was in the hide on my own and waited patiently as they slowly walked closer and closer. The hides at Slimbridge can be quite busy and noisy and, as the sandpiper got closer and closer, I hoped that no one else would come in and disturb it. My luck held and I was treated to some frame filling views as it continued to feed right in front of me.

 

The Green Sandpipers, often said to be the harbingers of the autumn passage, were probably adult females. Along with many other artic breeding waders, the females abandon the young straight after birth and head south leaving all subsequent parental duties to the dad.  They have dark greenish-brown back and wings, a greyish head and breast and white underparts. The back is spotted white to varying extents, being maximal in the breeding adult, and less in winter and young birds. The legs and short bill are both dark green which presumably gives the bird its name although in most instances both are covered in mud.

Green Sandpiper

In the garden the home grown hanging baskets and tubs are at their very best. The lack of rain and hot sunny days really suits them. This year I grew a type of trailing petunia called wave from pelleted seeds in the propagator and these have grown on well and the plants are very floriferous, I will definitely grow these gain.I deadhead pretty much every day, especially the flowers that set seed like the petunias, to expand the flowering season. In this hot weather they are watered twice a day on an automatic watering system and fed once a week.

The late summer hot border on the top patio is also benefiting from the hot weather with the dahlias, helenium and salvias in flower and the perennial lobelias in bud.

  

In the veg plot this years peas and broad beans have been harvested and frozen and we should have enough to see us through to next years harvest. The autumn sow garlic and onions have been harvested, dried and hung on strings. Together with the yet to be harvested spring planted onions these should again keep us going to next year. The heavy blue clay soil has been enriched with many barrels of well rotted horse manure which has resulted in huge individual garlic bulbs and onions.

I've just finished harvesting the summer raspberries and those not already eaten will soon be transformed into yummy jam. The cultivar blackberries are just starting to ripen and will keep us in puddings reminding us of these sunny summer days during the winter.

Now for something completely different!

I came across an interesting question the other day.

“If the universe is expanding, what is expanding into?”

 

We are pretty sure that the universe started with a big bang some 14 billion years ago and that its been expanding ever since. The big bang theory fits very well so far with our observations and measurements. So the question of what it is expanding into is an excellent one and, not too surprisingly, there is no simple answer. 

 

Our best mathematical theory say that it is truly expanding into nothing. In this case nothing does not simply mean a vacuum. A vacuum is a volume of space time with no physical material in it. Nothing in this case means no material, no space, and no time!

 

An analogue that is often used is of a balloon that is slowly expanding but, in my mind at least, this is very simplistic and unrealistic. The balloon is clearly expanding into the room it is situated in.

 

I’m afraid that we have to accept a rather boring truth that this is not something we can ever experience and hence all our analogies and metaphors fail. This is similar to trying to explain quantum mechanics in everyday language. It will always seem strange and weird to us because we always try to explain it with words that refer to our everyday experience. We live in a physical environment which is highly constrained compared to all the possible environments that can exist. For example, we can only exist in the most minute and restricted temperature range compared to all that our possible. Our experience and descriptive language is limited by this and when we look at extremes, be it, for example the extremely large or extremely small,  we have to accept that the only true way we can completely describe it is in the language of mathematics,  words do simple fail!

 

It must be said, however, that, while our mathematical models have led to incredible advances, for example in electronics and computers, they are very far from complete. We have no idea what material the vast majority of the universe is made of or why it is expanding at the rate it is. We have coined the words dark matter and dark energy for this. So perhaps one day better theories may well tell us that the universe is expanding into something we currently simple don’t understand!

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