Chasing an elusive Richard’s Pipit in Gloucestershire, another visit to the Forest of Dean and further thoughts on Quantum weirdness
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| Jay |
If truth be told, Richard’s Pipit is not the most colourful or exciting bird in the world being very much the archetypal “little brown Jobby”, a description which also covers most other Pipits. It is a scarce rather than rare vagrant to the UK with a small number recorded in a typical year. It breeds in open grasslands in the East Palearctic and is a long-distance migrant moving to winter in the open lowlands of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.
It was a long muddy slog down from Awre to the fortified riverbank of the Severn where the bird had been regularly reported in the long grass. A report of the Pipit appeared on the bird alert services just as I parked the car and on site I learned that another birder had managed some photos an hour or so before I was on site. There were five other birders walking along the long bank looking for the bird when I arrived and, to cut a long story short, it was very mobile and elusive and we only managed one or two probable flight views during the whole morning so as is now traditional, here is a record shot of one I took earlier.
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| Richard's Pipit |
Somewhat disappointed by the poor yield from a hard mornings birding, I made my way in the early afternoon to Parkend in the forest. First stop was the lovely and highly recommended café for a bowl of soup and then onwards to the sports ground to look for Hawfinches. I was a little apprehensive about this as recent reports indicated much disturbance from dog walkers, cyclists and even other birders exhibiting very poor field craft. The only way to work this site is to stay in your car and use it as a bird hide. There was just two other likeminded photographers parked parallel to the yews and there was a nice free parking space for me. I was there for a couple of hours and, as it turned out, I did not need to be apprehensive as the disturbance was minimal. I guess dog walkers and cyclists were mostly out and about in the morning meaning that the afternoon was hence pleasingly quiet. You also sometimes get someone wandering around under the trees with bins trying to see, with absolutely no chance of success, the somewhat skittish Hawfinches. Fortunately there was no one that I had to have a chat to on this afternoon!
The original attraction for the Hawfinches was the yew seeds but the area is now regularly seeded by photographers. Large flocks of Chaffinches were taking the opportunity to feed on the supplied bounty together with the occasional Nuthatch and the much more skittish Coal Tits. There was also another very welcome visitor to the feast, a very attractive and photogenic European Jay. It even posed for photos on an ideal moss covered log.
After perhaps 30 minutes another much bulkier bird landed in the Chaffinch flock close to my car, a stunningly beautiful male Hawfinch. It would have been very rude not to have taken many pictures of this very obliging avian model as he went about his business under the yews. Apart from his incandescent plumage, his most stunning feature was his huge parrot like beak. This is specially adapted for cracking the toughest seeds and is even able to crack cherry stones. The force that this powerful tool can apply is said to be over 150 pounds per square inch. Incredibly, that’s equivalent to over a thousand times its own body weight! So you certainly don’t want one to mistake your finger for something edible!
Records indicate that the Hawfinch was a very rare winter visitor to the UK up to the 18th century. It would then seem that an eruptive event in the 1830’s resulted in a small breeding colony being established in Epping forest. This seed colony was clearly very successful as the Hawfinch subsequently spread across the UK’s forests such that by 1960 they had reached as far north as central Scotland. Sadly, along with so many other birds, their numbers have since steadily declined. In the autumn of 2017 another eruption event occurred with many hundreds of birds being found across the UK in unusual locations. There was hope that some would stay to bolster our native birds but, as far as I’m aware, there is no evidence that this happened, so the vast majority presumably returned to continental Europe in the Spring of 2018.
I finished the day with a bit of bling photographing and watching the Mandarin ducks at Cannop ponds.
It’s a long time since my blogs featured any physics so readers of a nervous disposition look away now…..
I recent read a very well written article in the New Scientist entitled “Why exactly is the quantum world so weird?” Quantum mechanics, describing nature at an atomic and subatomic scale, is one of our most successful science theories and uses very straightforward mathematics. So why is it so hard to translate its ideas into our real world? When we compare the maths and what researchers see in experiments, quantum mechanics is totally accurate. Much of the modern technology we take for granted, e.g. the chip in our mobile phones and just about everything else these days, only works because of quantum mechanics.
Our intuition often says that’s impossible when the mathematics of quantum mechanics says otherwise, for example an electron being in two places at the same time.
I think its all down to how our minds rationalise reality to keep us sane. The macroscopic world we perceive defines our reality; a football is never in two places at the same time. But if we had evolved as sentient creatures of the subatomic world that would be our reality. We must accept that our perception of the universe and what makes us sane is only a tiny part of natures much broader landscape. The trick is not to conceptualise quantum mechanics from our narrow view of reality. Rather we have to accept what the mathematics says, it has been tested experimentally and not found wanting a thousand times, and not to frame it in our everyday reality, our brains have simply not evolved to allow us to do so.
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