Project in progress

The wonders of the internet bring you into contact with so many interesting people. Through one such encounter  I became the recipient of  lovely little butterfly, a Common blue (Polyommatus icarus). I have a number of unrealised projects, and one of them is to look the scales on the wings of butterflies and moths. So when the butterfly arrived, I made a start.

 I set up the stereo microscope for those first views, and took pictures with a Dinoscope lens that replaces one of the eyepieces and is directly connected to the computer. Other pictures were taken with the set up as shown below.

The following pictures show the start of the project. Lighting is always a problem, getting sufficient light with no shadows. Then there is the problem of depth of field.

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) -eye

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) eye

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) wing

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) wing showing scales

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) wing scales

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) wing scales

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) edge of wing

Common blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) edge of wing

 A start has been made, I now want to improve the clarity of the images so will use the compound microscope.

Downs and ups

The down was a sitting down.  I believe that it is impossible to sit on a bookcase full of books without realising (even if said bookcase has somehow been swathed in a jacket carelessly thrown at it). The worst that a book can suffer under said carelessly strewn jacket and then my backside, is a creased page or folded cover. The same cannot be said of a Kindle alas! This I found to my cost the other day. As I recovered the Kindle I saw to my horror that the screen now resembled Etch a Sketch on a high, and accessing any of the scores of books I have stored on it was a total none starter. Yes, I had managed to sit on a virtual bookcase of books.

A lesson learnt the hard way, though at the end of the day, the Kindle is just part of the physical "stuff" that fills our lives, useful and fun but not essential. Luckily for me I was able to go out and get a replacement, and thanks to the wonders of technology all my books were still out there in the ether for me to restock the virtual shelves.







The up is absolutely not "stuff" that can be easily replaced; it was seeing the wonderful spectacle of a starling murmuration. We went out to Leighton Moss one afternoon last week and watched the amazing massed balletics of thousands of starlings as they gathered into a huge crescendo of movement before finally all coming to land in the reed beds.

Attempts at capturing it all on camera merely give a taste of what it was like. Distance and fading light were not conducive to getting good images.

Such was the spectacle that we went again yesterday to see the incredible sight. We put cameras aside and immersed our eyes in the experience. It started with small cohorts of birds which gradually joined forces to form a huge shape shifting pattern, serpent like sliding over the hill top and then morphing into a great fish like  creature ebbing and flowing as more birds joined. As the light caught wings and bodies there was a constant flux of pattern and motion. For their finale, we saw a turn in direction as the shape became a funnel and the birds poured themselves into their night time reed bed roost.

Homing pigeons

I've just finished a book about the code workers at Bletchley Park and am now reading Ben MacIntyre's Double Cross:The true story of the D-Day spies. I had just been reading about the deployment of pigeons and their use in espionage (apparently they had their own section in MI5: The Pigeon Service Special Section BC3). Then yesterday,  I read this in the news . It will be interesting to see if they decode the messages.



WWII carrier pigeon remains found in UK chimney by reuters

All this pigeon stuff got me remembering. My father was a great one for keeping pets and livestock. Among the many animals we had, pigeons had a high profile. We lived in an ideal place . The rectory had vast outhouses and one of the lofts housed the pigeons. I remember the tumblers and tipplers doing their acrobatics, the fantails strutting their stuff. We also had homing pigeons and often two or three of these would be bundled into a box and taken with us on a Sunday as we headed to church in one of my father's parishes. The pigeons did not have to attend the service; they were let loose as we went into the church and then on our arrival home, we would find them back safely in the loft.