A Winter Walk - Part 2

After watching the subjects of the previous post, namely the robin and crow, I observed a pair of swans trying to deal with the strange environment they found themselves in: an ice covered loch.  It isn't Swan Lake on Ice, more Swan on Ice Lake.  There were some areas of open water but when the came up against the thin sheet ice, they had to improvise.  Forget Boaty McBoatface, this is the real deal. After some initial puzzling, we see the lead swan mount the ice and crash through to create a path. Enjoy.

A Winter Walk - Part 1

I love these cold, clear winter's mornings.  The air feels so clean and the warmth of the sun on your face cuts through the chill. And it's great for photography too. Here are a couple of snaps from a walk through my local nature reserve a couple of weeks ago.

The first is of a robin red-breast that I watched bobbing about between branches, eyeing up semi-frozen berries.

When the robin flew down to the ground, this crow swooped in and landed just past the robin, which made a sharp exit as the crow turned to see what happened to its quarry.

I know crows are omnivorous, they eat pretty much anything, but would the kill a smaller bird? Was the crow trying to get the robin to drop any morsels it may have or was it going in for the kill?

Fascinating to watch. And so were the swans, with their ice-breaking skills, see the next post for the video.

A fine day for shooting elephant

 See it yonder, by those trees.

Now to sneak up on it, ready to shoot.

What a beast! Wouldn't that head look fine mounted on the wall?

And with the final shots, the elephant is captured in pixels for eternity.

IPCC's evil CO2 mantra

I can't believe people are still making up this nonsense:

The IPCC's catastrophic AGW hypothesis - and the entire climate change alarmist community - is getting hammered from all sides by the growing research that points to natural climate variation (ie, oscillations, patterns, cycles) being the principal causes of warming since the 1950s.

The latest evidence is coming from satellites that monitor the world's clouds and energy inflows.

As the adjacent charts depict (information derived from the RSS and CERES satellite datasets) at least one-third of ocean heating could be explained by the simple change in cloud cover over the oceans for a recent 20-year span.

Combine this natural cloud-induced warming with other earthly/cosmic/solar factors, which also would contribute to the modern warming trend, and it does not leave much of the recent modern warming being a direct result of the IPCC's evil CO2 mantra.

Source: http://www.c3headlines.com/2013/10/evidence-mounts-that-natural-climate-change-is-responsible-for-major-portion-of-modern-warming.html

What's worse is people are gullible or desperate enough to believe it.

Sea Snake

Reposting of an old blog post:

Back to the renewable energy theme, this time with the Pelamis Sea Snake.  The amount of electricity generated by this technology will be variable to a certain extent depending on the swell of the sea but it is likely to be more constant than wind energy and (hopefully) its variability will beat to a different rhythm.

The first film shows how the wave motion is converted to electricity and the second shows the first fully commercial implementation of this device at Aguçadoura n Portugal.

Shark Attack

Image via: Joe Chernov

Virunga - Draw the Line

Since news of Soco's intention to drill in the Virunga National Parkin the Congo broke on the 1st of August, the big hitters have stepped up to the mark in the form of a WWF campaign to prevent oil exploration going ahead.

Some may argue that the revenue earned from oil exploitation will help develop local communities.  Given the political situation in the country, local communities are likely to be treated as poorly as those in the Niger Delta by the large oil companies. As centrepiece of the campaign, WWF have published a report which shows the value of the reserve ($350 million/year) based on eco-tourism and other sustainable developments without the need to extract oil.

Please support this campaign by signing the WWF Draw the Line petition here.  At least 94,348 people have signed it already, will you be 100,000?

http://www.wwf.org.uk/how_you_can_help/virunga/