Britain
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Flinty
The National Museum of Copenhagen is filled with flint tools from the pre-metal millennia. This stuff makes for very sharp edges. The stone of Europe’s Stone Age, flint stones were also used to start fires and spark guns into the 19th century. The Baltic beaches were littered with nodules of this dark chert. It’s a…
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White’s Selborne
Have you read Richard Mabey’s rousing defense of nature writing? You should. I’ll wait here until you return. Mabey quite rightly marks the beginnings of nature writing in English with Gilbert White (1720-1793), the British country parson whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne I’ve finally come around to reading. Mostly: I picked up a…
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Tadpoles
One of the unexpected sights during our walk along the Northumberland Coast Path was this (tidal?) pool full of what we thought were Common Toad (Bufo bufo) tadpoles. Surprising because this was brackish water at best, if not fully the brine of the nearby North Sea. It seems, though, that they can tolerate a certain…
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Windhover
A Common Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), the “dapple-dawn-drawn-falcon,” as Hopkins alliterated to the nth degree, hovering over the Northumberland beach. Hopkins’s poem The Windhover, although another of his mash notes to his Invisible Boyfriend, captures something of the impression made by these birds hovering with head to the wind and eyes to the ground, searching for…
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Sandstone and Basalt
Kind of hot for blogging, wot? Let’s take a dip in the North Sea: this is Greymare Rock, also known as Saddle Rock and the Whale’s Belly, just south of Dunstanburgh Castle. It’s made up of buckled layers of sandstone, the same sandstone used to build the nearby castle. The castle itself, a ruin now,…
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An Errant Whooper and A Quiz
As we neared the near-end of our first day’s walk along the Northumberland Coast, we spotted two swans in the distance. One was a familiar Mute Swan (Cygnus olor), invasive in the U.S., but native in the UK (and very present on the Tweed, where we started our walk) and the other, pictured below, a…
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Even More British Birds
A very vocal male Reed Bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus) popped out of the dunes. At Long Nanny along the Northumberland shore, we ran into a fence across the beach. As we were trying to figure out the best way to proceed, a volunteer National Trust ranger emerged from the dunes, where she’d had her eye on…
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British Birds II
Robin (Erithacus rubecula). Yup, looks nothing like ours.The Blackbird (Turdus merula), on the otherhand, is much like our American Robin (Turdus migratorius), an omnipresent thrush.Tufted Duck (Aythya fuligula).Lesser Black-backed Gulls (Larus fuscus): we’re seeing more and more of these birds on this side of the Atlantic.Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), the source of the frog-call.Pied Wagtail (Motacilla…
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British Birds I
On our very first day in Edinburgh, we wandered about the Royal Botanic Garden in a jet-lagged daze. An accipiter profile high overhead was one of the day’s first birds. Sparrowhawk presumably. A Kestrel made an appearance, but more on these anon. And a Buzzard (Buteo buteo) was seen twice, the second time being mobbed…
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Jackdaws
The British Isles are rich with members of the Corvidae. The Jackdaw (Corvus monedula), for one, was a species ever-present on our trip, particularly in towns and villages. One of many dialect names for them is Sea-crow and we rarely strayed far from the coast. They are very fond of using chimneys for their nests…
Backyard and Beyond 