Battling Mallards

Recently someone on London Wetland Centre's Flickr group posted a picture of some newly hatched Mallard ducklings. That was enough to persuade me to pay a visit this weekend. As it turns out, I didn't see the ducklings, but I did see plenty of male ducks either trying to impress the females or fighting off other males, both on the water and on land:





In the second case, the female they were fighting over looked completely uninterested.



In fact, a few minutes after I took that photo, she hopped into the water and swam away. The males were so absorbed in the fight that they didn't even notice. It all looked very vicious, but no damage seemed to be done beyond the loss of a few breast feathers.



Eventually one admitted defeat and flew away, but by then the female was long gone. Hopefully all this fuss will have resulted in some ducklings by my next visit.

This post contains strong language and bloody violence*

I predict that Elizabeth Taylor will have pushed Japan and the Arab world right out of today's news reports,** so there's no hope of any lesser celebrity deaths being featured. But here's a tribute to a British athlete who, I must confess, I knew mainly in a musical context.

(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube's site.)

* If you count the reference to the Middle East.

** If you think it's insensitive of me to point this out, please note that at least I didn't make a tasteless joke involving her, Gaddafi and bad plastic surgery.

Snow the rabbit

Today in the park across the street from my new job, I saw this albino rabbit being walked on a lead. His person (whose name I didn't get, sadly) told me he has a fiesty character and is the father of many daughters.



He was very interested in hopping about and exploring his surroundings.

This is the only time I'll ever be called "stylish"

Recently, the Curator of The Pet Museum very kindly gave me a Stylish Blogger Award. And that means it's time for me to give something back to the blog world, by telling you seven things you may not know about me, and passing on the award to 15 other blogs.

I doubt I can find things that are unknown to everyone, but here are a few that may be a surprise to some:

1. As a child, I was fascinated by Canada and wanted to move there when I grew up. I thought it was very intriguing that there was a vast country right on our borders that no one ever seemed to talk about. (The fact that I had a crush on Alasdair from You Can't Do That on Television didn't hurt either.) Sadly, other things got in the way, and I have yet to actually visit there; the closest I got was a stopover in Toronto airport a few years ago.
   


2. My paternal grandfather participated in some of the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. Later in life he developed hypothyroidism, as did all three of his children. (I've been watching for symptoms myself.) I don't know if these two things are connected.
   


3. I have a bachelor's degree, but no high school diploma (I dropped out at 16 and got special admission to university).
   


4. I've never been on a roller coaster.
   


5. It's been 10 years since I lived in a house with a television.
   


6. I once asked Carl Bernstein a question that caused him to say, "You know, I never thought of that before." (He'd just given a lecture at WVU in which he'd denied that advertisers had any affect on media coverage. I asked him if he thought a women's magazine would ever run a piece telling its readers they didn't need the cosmetics advertised in its pages.)


7. I find it extremely difficult to read any work in which animals are hurt or killed. But books with human deaths are OK.
   

Now for my awards. I decided to exclude blogs that are in my blogroll, as well as blogs that I gave the Superior Scribbler award to a while back. So we have, in no particular order:

1. JC's blog, with wonderful bird photographs from around the world.
2. The Charley Project Blog is by Meaghan Good, who, as you might expect, also maintains The Charley Project, a site devoted to cataloguing missing-persons cases. In addition to articles about missing people, her blog has a lot of interesting glimpses into her own life.
   
3. Woodpeckers of the World. If you like woodpeckers as much as I do, you don't need any further explanation.
4. Centuries of Advice and Advertisements is a Tumblr, but I guess that still counts. You're bound to find something amusing or jaw-dropping here.
   
5. The Flaxen Wave loves Joseph Brodsky, and that's good enough for me.
   
6. Sviatoslav Richter: Recordings and Videos is included on similar grounds. Despite the title, it also publishes lots of old reviews and reminiscences, in multiple languages.
7. Bradshaw of the Future has a really interesting concept. It takes two seemingly unrelated words and shows the etymological connection between them. Highly recommended for language buffs.
   
8. Szabolcs Kókay is a very talented bird artist from Hungary, and you can follow his work on his blog, Wildlife Art and Illustration.
9. Vertigo keeps fans of the late W.G. Sebald up to date with studies and adaptations of his work, as well as books by other writers who follow in his tradition (particularly novels with embedded photographs).
10. Bhutan Journals. Bhutan is another country I've long been fascinated with, so I enjoy this sporadically updated blog about its culture and folklore.
    
11. Got Medieval may be too famous for me to put here. But with scholarship, Gingrich-debunking, and drunken monkeys, how can I resist?
12. Language Hat is definitely too famous, but it's how I found several of the other blogs on this list, so what the heck.
    
13. David Orr's Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs is pretty well known, but his other blog, Under Indiana, isn't. It turns out his home state is a lot more interesting than it seemed when I was driven along Interstate 90 a few years ago.
    
14. Aves Noir -- a lovely blog about all things related to corvids (crows and their relatives). Sadly, a bit quiet lately.
    
15. My final choice is definitely not safe for work. Vintage Pulchritude is a collection of nude or semi-nude photographs (all of women, as far as I know) from the late 19th and early 20th century. I find it interesting for two reasons. First, it shows a side of this period of history that we don't often think about (many people seem to take seriously Philip Larkin's claim that "sexual intercourse began in 1963"). Secondly, it gives an idea of what was considered desirable in the days before silicone and Photoshop.

An open letter to useless bureaucrats, paper-pushers and call centre workers everywhere.

Dear incompetent jobsworths,

I think the cliché is to wish that you will get cancer. I won't do that. It's cruel and unfunny and offensive. Here's what I do wish:

I hope that one day you will have to be tested for cancer, and that you will have to phone a large centre to get the results. And while you're trying to get the results (which will be negative, but you won't know that yet, and you will feel as if your entire life depends on the next five minutes), I hope the following things will happen:

1. You will be told that the centre's "service level agreement" is three working days, and be scolded for calling before that time is up.
2. When you call back, you will talk to some swamped-sounding school leaver who will be unable to find any record of your existence.
3. You will be transferred to the wrong department four times, be kept on hold for at least ten minutes between each transfer, and finally be cut off.
4. You will hear at least three conflicting accounts of what the tests you have gone through measure, what the results mean and what happens next if the news is bad.
5. Someone will explain that the company to which the hospital outsourced your tests has just outsourced some of its work to yet another company, and therefore you can't blame them if there's a delay.
6. After all this, someone will claim that their records show the results were actually sent to you a week ago, but that they can't tell you by what method they were sent, to what address, or what the results were: "We can only read what comes up on the screen."
7. When you finally -- somehow -- learn that all is well and are able to return to work, you will be just a bit more considerate of the person on the other end of the phone.

Waxwings

Waxwings in more detail a photo by Laura A. Brown on Flickr.

On this dark day, with its terrible news from Japan, I was glad for a little spot of brightness. On a visit to Uxbridge, in the outermost suburbs, I was surprised to see a flock of about 20 Waxwings. They were eating berries from some bushes in the centre of town, and then coming to rest in a nearby tree.

This was the first time I'd seen the Bohemian Waxwing (not to be confused with the Cedar Waxwing, a North American species). According to the RSPB, they can only be found in the UK between October and March, and there are less than 100 of them here in a typical year. I suppose this group was in the middle of its spring migration.

You can see more pictures of the Waxwings in my Flickr photostream. And while you're there, check out my contact Masashi Mochida, who takes wonderful photos of Japanese Macaques in Nagano Prefecture. Shortly before I started this post, I heard that the area where he works had been hit by a severe aftershock; fortunately, it doesn't sound like any serious damage was done. Let's hope this is the last shock -- and do keep checking your local Red Cross site to see if they are accepting donations for the quake victims.

Secret treasures of Afghanistan

What do you think of when you think of Afghanistan? Do you think of delicate golden crowns that fold on hinges for easy carrying? Of chair legs shaped like swaying goddesses? Of glass blown into the form of prickly fish, and goblets painted with bright scenes of the date harvest? Of inlaid shells forming tiny colourful flowers? Of people dedicated enough to keep these objects safe from a succession of invaders, looters and fanatics?

All of these are part of the British Museum's Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, probably the best exhibition I've seen this year. The show tells two stories little known to us: the mingling of cultures in ancient Afghanistan, and the struggle to preserve and recover its artifacts from today's turmoil.

Pretty much everything in this exhibition was a surprise to me. Take the Hellenistic society that once flourished at Ai-Khanoum. In many ways Greco-Bactrian art was similar to that found in Greece. But the sculptures had stockier figures, and elements of the mythology were blended or replaced with local equivalents. For example, Eros had traditionally been depicted as riding on a dolphin, but since the people in this landlocked country had never seen dolphins, they substituted fish instead.

Then there was Begram, now a small town near a U.S. air base, but once a major stop along the Silk Road. In the objects here, one could see traces of all the cultures that had shared the route. This part of the exhibition held my favourite objects, a collection of wonderfully expressive little bronze statues showing various figures from classical and Indian mythology (plus a rooster with a human head, which no one quite seemed able to explain).

The folding crown that is the emblem of the exhibition comes from Tillya Tepe, where archaeologists have found massive first-century burial hoards from a nomadic people of uncertain origin. The thousands of gold and turquoise ornaments that were unearthed there were thought for many years to have been destroyed by the Taliban, until it was revealed that employees of the Kabul Museum had hidden them away in commodity crates.

This story was echoed throughout the exhibition. Not everything escaped the Taliban: the show opens with what's left of a Hellenistic statue that they smashed. Work continues to recover objects that have been looted or smuggled out of the country during the past 30 years. But it's a testament to the strength of the Afghan people that anything survived at all.

This exhibition does everything that a museum exhibition should do. It surprises its viewers with new knowledge, delights them with beauty and gives them a new appreciation for the world around them. Go see it if you possibly can.

Bird mysteries

Here's a pair of ducks I saw at Kew Gardens today. The top one is a plain old Mallard, of course (not that Mallards are really "plain"). But the lower one looks like a cross between a Mallard and a Shoveler. Is such a hybrid possible?



An ID on these captive exotic birds would also be greatly appreciated.



Update: Thanks to David Orr from Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs for identifying these as guinea fowl!

Jan Gossaert's Renaissance

In the National Gallery's new exhibition devoted to the 16th-century Flemish painter Jan Gossaert (also known as Jan Mabuse), a sequence of pictures of Adam and Eve illustrates how the artist developed his own style. The earliest, painted around 1510, is a near copy of a work by Dürer. It has nice clean lines and not much expression.

Two pen-and-ink drawings made about a decade later are a lot more eye-catching. In one, the strongly muscled figures of the couple embrace. Their faces are highly individualised and not entirely attractive. The second drawing, on a dusky grey background, shows the couple huddling together at the exact moment when Adam eats the apple, as if seeking comfort from each other in their shared guilt. A final painting from around the same period shows them at the moment that their eyes are opened to their nakedness. The fatigue and anxiety on their faces is very moving.

The exhibition divides the rest of Gossaert's work into three main categories: erotic nudes, portraits of dignitaries, and religious works. A lot of his pictures of the nude Venus actually looked quite ugly to me, but Hercules and Deianeira is a much more touching and effective work. The room of portraits contained the only work of Gossaert's that I'd been familiar with before, An Elderly Couple. But the portrait I liked best was of A Man Holding a Glove. It was apparently painted in a great hurry, and the sitter's expression and the way he clutches the glove make me wonder just what was going on.

I found the pictures of the Virgin and Child remarkable because Gossaert portrayed the baby Jesus as acting like an actual baby. In one painting from 1520, he grabs hold of Mary's chin while squirming toward the edge of the painting, and in a picture of the Holy Family, he looks as if he's about to wriggle right off his mother's lap.

With this in mind, as well as that first picture of Adam & Eve, I was intrigued by Gossaert's picture of St Luke Painting the Madonna. The Virgin and Child, plus a passel of slightly unkempt-looking angels, appear in the same cheerful disorder I noticed in Gossaert's other paintings of the subject. But if you look at St Luke's easel, you see that he's actually painting a much calmer and tidier version of the scene.

The Gallery hasn't actually managed to get that many of Gossaert's paintings, and many of his drawings are badly faded. The exhibition is filled out with works by his contemporaries and influences. I was particularly pleased to see Jacopo de'Barbari's little painting of a sparrowhawk, which I don't think they normally have on display.

As usual, the Gallery also has a small free exhibition to complement the paid one. This time it focuses on a triptych by Gossaert's contemporary Jan de Beer.

I was charmed by the left panel, showing John the Baptist, in which a tiny lamb lounges on the pages of the saint's Bible like a cat demanding its owner's attention. A baby Baptist and an even smaller lamb appear at the foot of the Virgin's throne in the central panel. In this panel, the peacock-like wings of the angels echo the rich dress of the female saints surrounding the Virgin and Child (no humble austerity here!), while the round carved putti at the top of the throne recall the shape of the apples in the tree above. Meanwhile, on the right, a tiny dragon flies out of John the Evangelist's cup; in the background, you see the same dragon waiting to devour the child borne by the woman clothed with the sun.

Places You Find Cats

Just a quick note to say that the cat photo from my Highgate Cemetery post has been turned into an instalment of the webcomic Places You Find Cats. I highly recommend this comic; the creator, Emily K., is a fantastic artist and does a lot to promote cat welfare. You can submit your own pictures of unusual places you've found cats, too!