Sunday 16 September 2018

Unanswered Questions

So, with all the driving up and down between Yorkshire and Aberdeenshire, I have a lot of time for thinking. Not always a good idea, and I sometimes need to take a deliberate step away from the grimmer thoughts that surface, so I tend to let that bit of my mind not engaged in traffic, roadworks and ‘WTF is that idiot doing?!’ freewheel along whichever odd pathways it chooses.
Which ends up in some odd places... for example:

Herons. Storks. Cranes. Egrets. Ibises, flamingoes. Swans and geese. Big things with long necks. Do their necks get sore carrying their heads? Mine does, after time at the wheel ... so why not them?  Well, their bones are lighter, so maybe less of a problem... which led on to considering how they carry their heads and necks in flight. It becomes clear that there are essentially two styles; curved back and tucked in, as demonstrated by the herons and egrets, or stretched out, like pretty much everything else. So why the difference? Can’t just be an aerodynamic thing, can it? But then, aerodynamically, what’s the difference between a heron and a crane? Both wide wings, long necks, trailing legs... Habitat? They all tend to live or at least forage in soggy places. Food might differ a bit... but how would that affect flight?

It really started to bug me. I took time out to deal with the traffic through Newcastle, and then came back to the problem. I thought about how they get what they eat. All of them tend to wander along poking around with their beaks for whatever (and that includes flamingoes, however specialised they are)... but the heron family, including egrets and bitterns, tend to lurk and suddenly spear their prey, in one swift, elastic movement that I can only characterise as ‘b-doink’. I couldn’t think of any of the others that do this... Does this sudden, particular movement have an anatomical knock-on, some kink in the neck vertebrae, an adaptation in the muscles and tendons and ligaments that allows the motion but causes something different in the way the head is carried especially in flight? In the way that for some birds the default setting for feet is ‘clamped shut around the branch’.

I don’t have a handy set of skeletons to make comparisons. But I’d really like to know! So I’ll keep digging and if I do find out, I’ll let you know, too. And if anyone has any better hypotheses, please chip in!

Thursday 6 September 2018

Same old excuses...

Two years later, and i am no better at keeping things up to date. Admittedly, with serious changes in my world, revolving about Mum being unwell following a fall down the stairs in early 2017, and the subsequent acceleration of her Parkinson’s, things are unlikely to be the same again.
Miraculously, she’s still with us, but holidays are off the menu, and a lot of my time is spent on the road between Yorkshire and Aberdeenshire, keeping an eye on things and holding down work as well.

But it’s time to find an outlet, and maybe a return to short daft blog entries may be the answer...