Normal service will be resumed

as soon as I'm back from my birding & eclipse-watching holiday. Look! These are the details, the terrifying details, of the massive hotel where we'll be staying. Quite apart from my extreme guilt (staying in a hotel complex built on the ruins of a fragile Mediterranean coastal ecosystem) I am a little scared; perhaps all these things are mandatory:

Sea, garden, mountain, city views are available. Split air condition and heating, garden, tv corner, game room, internet connection, business center, hairdresser, laundry, ironing, dry cleaning, market, gift shop, leather shop, jewellery store, power generator, doctor on demand, baby sitter, parking without fee. Direct dial telephone, minibar, safe box, tea/coffee machine, pay tv, satellite tv, split air condition, jacuzzi, Refrigerator. Outdoor swimming pool, indoor swimming pool, children's swimming pool, children section, heated swimming pool, aquapark, Turkish bath, sauna, massage, jacuzzi, solarium, health & beauty center, SPA, fitness center, aerobics, table tennis, billiards, animation programs, tennis, football, mini football, beach volley, cycling, jogging, children's playground, diving school, parasailing, banana, jet ski, canoe, wind surf, sailing, extreme sports. 1 meeting room (100 max. capacity). Overhead projector, screen, whiteboard, slide projector, flipchart, projector, barcovision, sound system, microphone, video player, DVD player, television, fax, air conditioning, light system. Shuttle bus with fee, private beach. Breakfast lounge, lobby bar, snack bar, pool bar, beach bar, terrace bar, restaurant bar. 1 open buffet indoor restaurant (960 pax). International Cuisine, Ottoman Cuisine, Turkish Cuisine, Italian Cuisine, Mexican Cuisine, vegetarian cuisine.

Wow. All my astrophysics buddies are bringing their GPSs. I feel I'm letting the side down. I don't own one. I am ashamed. How will I know, to the nearest centimetre, where I am, at any given point?

"With three GPSs and about eight degrees between us, we're not likely to get lost" wrote one travelling companion. Ha. I bet we do: I bet my next post will be from a PC terminal in the British Embassy in Syria.

See you all soon,
pluvialis x

Enraged, appalled,

Disgusted. 1,000 formal objections, from pretty much every scientific body in existence—and yet the government is shutting down three of Britain's most important wildlife monitoring centres. Goodbye CEH Banchory, Monks Wood and Winfrith.

I also sent an objection, an angry one, you know. My own small, hackles-raised angry voice. It's highly egalitarian, this process of 'consultation': Royal Society, RSPB, pluvialis, all ignored equally. None of us made any bloody difference at all. Such august company.

Sir David Attenborough said yesterday the decision to close the centres was "very sad news". He said: "That kind of work is going to be needed ever increasingly as the effects of climate change take hold."Nerc says the closures, which will cost 160 jobs, are needed to reduce the running costs of its centre for ecology and hydrology, which is scattered over nine sites. A spokeswoman said: "We didn't have any choice - we had to do something. David Attenborough does not fund science and he clearly doesn't understand the broader picture."

What broad picture is this? Hang on: this story says that Nerc has decided to allocate a further 1.3m per annum to the remaining centres.

And a reliable source informs me that the original deficit was only 1.4m.

So let's get this straight: the closure of 4 CEH sites, the loss of 160-200 scientists, and dismantling of Britain's long-term biological monitoring and climate change research ... is to save 100k per annum.

I'd write more, but I'm just too angry. I'm too angry to swear. That's how angry I am.

Fashion

Who would have thought it? Pluvialis blogging the catwalk? It's against the natural order of things. But it isn't, when the clothes are by Alexander McQueen. Oh no.

See? Military serge, Lady Chatterley hair and hen pheasant wings. And the gorget of cock-pheasant wing coverts. This is what pluvialis should be wearing all the time.

Night-fighter wear. Suitable for post-seminar drinks parties, particularly those at The Eagle.

Just the thing for shooting lunches, sniper training, and the occasional fetish party. Hmmm. How perfectly versatile this dress must be. Is it really made of feathers? Not even specialist dry clean?
Grouse-hawking clothes! This is what pluvialis will be wearing in Caithness next year. She'll fit right in. See those whisky-glazed eyes? It's a good look.

Ha! No, seriously, this is what I shall wear to The Ball. I'm going to save up for this one. I've already got a pair of red deer antlers, so don't even need to do too much accessorising...

Amuse yourselves with the rest of the collection, and I'll get back to work on my writing. But I'm eyeing the dried ruffed grouse tail on the shelves, there — do you think I could knock up an impromptu hat by combining it creatively with this guillemot skull and some kitchen foil?

Flowering biotopes of the slangs

It's a cheap shot, laughing at automated translation software, but when the great and good German poet Hans Thill sent me a review in German of the Wozu Vögel book, I couldn't resist putting it through Google translate. Which surpassed itself:

Without being represented in relevant Anthologien of the past decades, is J. H. Prynne nevertheless as a joint founder Marxist "Cambridge School" – hardly per easily accessible – Heavyweight of the literature scene Britanniens. Old, the former librarian and scholar full momentum screw nearly 70 years together, which formed the world at fictions and realities. As for instance is Apoll connected with cigarettes? Prynne demonstrates it and over-radiates strength of its brainstorms two Epigonen, which fished Thill for its volume from a quirligen swarm: Helen Macdonald, class 1970, and the six years younger Keston Sutherland. While Macdonald, attained a doctorate Vogelexpertin and Falknerin, their Elaborate with ornithologischen terms, coined/shaped by nature observations, spickt, the texts of the literature lecturer Sutherland are flowering biotopes of the Slangs.

Run, Run, Run

Oh, I do want to see this film.

Today I wish I was....

....wandering around the Pomor Museum in Barentsburg, Svalbard.

Spare the rod...

I saw two flying rods soaring over a sheep then one flew over the sheep and the sheep hovered up behind it. the 2 rods were around 5 meters long each and they were making funny noises, like brrrr brrrr mooooo kinte kunte blaaaaaarg biscuit barrel. it went sumthing like that. anyway im really scared.... oh my god there coming for me get away.........arrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

That is an eyewitness report [more on this later] of a sighting of flying rods. Ah, how infallibly UFOs track our cultural-technological aesthetic! In the 1950s we saw hubcap-shaped chrome UFOs! In the 1990s, we had Flying Triangles, like pieces of huge black-ash Ikea furniture with serried inset halogen lights, zooming around Suffolk...

Did you know that Suffolk (along with Glastonbury Tor) is the centre of British UFO activity? And most particularly in the 1980s, the decade of massive US Air Force presence in East Anglia? Ah, those were the days! Hardly a view across a sugarbeet field without a warthog crashing into it, or (if you were lucky) F-111 pilots doing a dump and burn, igniting a trail of unburned fuel at the request of bored U2 pilots coming back from 9 hours reconnaissance flight. ("There wasn't much to do. I read a lot" explained a U2 pilot to me, once. "My favourite was The Once and Future King").

1980 was the year of "Britain's Roswell", when a UFO landed in Rendlesham Forest. Which is a 1500 hectare pine plantation spanning RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters. One night, a bunch of security guards from these US bases saw a flying saucer amongst the trees, chased it, walked up to it, and freaked out completely. [Note: from the tales I've heard of common recreational activities at US bases, none of this surprises me in the least]. Three markings were found on the ground the following day. Apparently they made up the points of a perfect equilateral triangle. Someone later ventured that these might be rabbit holes, but I'll let that pass. Who knows? It's nice that UFOs land in Suffolk. It's where I take my holidays, too.

BUT! It seems there's something even better than flying saucers or triangles or all those other gobots or transformer things. Here's the site for Flying Rods. Here's another one. Or this one, which has this haiku-like introduction:

Resembling squid, or small bugs
- they move faster then the eye can see -
but not beyond the perception of camcorders.

Rods seem right up there in the heights of cool, like small technological gadgets crossed with creatures from the burgess shale or truncated squid; an oh-so-now marriage of soft metal and biology. I love the home movies and the computer reconstructions of the anatomy of what seems to be—and fairly obviously—footage of lens flares and flies. And some of the aerial ones could, I guess, be some X-plane's peculiar new contrail, too, if I was feeling particularly conspiracy-theoretical. Or some form of Kelvin-Helmholz cloud...Pluvialis, stop!

I checked out some of the entries on the 'sightings in Britain' page. Very, very funny. Like the one at the beginning of this post, they're mostly just people messing about. I mean, calling them "rods" was really a bad idea...

• I was walking down town and it whent straight past me it was shocking.
• Big long hard metal object which tried to rape mt anus!
• Was looking up at the sky when all of the sudden i saw a rod!
• A rod of titanic proportions flew over my colleague james head today much to his annoyance. Twas a dark day for us all!
• I saw a massive rod that kept darting around the lace market one night when i was on my way to Browns
• it flew past rochester cathedral n scared da crap outta me
• A rod appears to fly past a horse in a stable. I have it clearly on film.
• Very long, about 2 metres, bright green. Saw for a few seconds, then went.
• Flew through the leaves of a tree in which i was sitting. It shimmered like the sun at i was taken aback at its sheer gracefulness. It actually flew quite slowly, looked more like 3d rod number 1. It was incredible.
• It was big and hairy, it chased me and my friend all around the school playground. Its name was Tom, he likes to drink tea. Im constipated!!!!

Despite some fantastic material on the site (arguments about the ways bees look in a photograph, musings on whether rods have some kind of interdimensional time-distort ability), even the readers of the site seem unconvinced. Here is the poll on the site's front page:

15.6% Never before discovered Insects discovered Insect
2.8% Tiny Alien ships
1.6% Military experament that excaped
0.7% Flying scrolls like in the Bible
0.7% Fairy of legend and myth
1.0% Scratches on film
5.9% Creatures that can pass between dimensions
71.6% A hoax

Reading poetry on her sickbed

All I need now is a lace handkerchief and a whalebone corset [cough, cough....might I have a little cold tea in a glass?...oh, 'tis all so beautiful from the window, etc. etc.]. Not a calf-bound nineteenth century anthology, though. This is a stonking great Collected Poems by Frank O'Hara. I love O'Hara. When I was a miserable undergraduate, reading this book was one of the things that kept me reading English, rather than running away and becoming a gamekeeper or a bookseller or a long-term-unemployed.

"When do you know a poem is finished?" O'Hara was asked, once.
"When the telephone rings" he replied.

Ah, this poem is so very good.


The Hunter

He set out and kept hunting
and hunting. Where, he thought
and thought, is the real chamois?
and can I kill it where it is?
He had brought with him only a dish
of pears. The autumn wind soared
above the trails where the drops
of the chamois led him further.
The leaves dropped around him
like pie-plates. The stars fell
one by one into his eyes and burnt.

There is a geography which holds
its hands just so far from the breast
and pushes you away, crying so.
He went on to strange hills where
the stones were still warm from feet,
and then on and on. There were clouds
at his knees, his eyelashes
had grown thick from the colds,
as the fur of the bear does
in winter. Perhaps, he thought, I am
asleep, but he did not freeze to death.

There were little green needles
everywhere. And then manna fell.
He knew, above all, that he was now
approved, and his strength increased.
He saw the world below him, brilliant
as a floor, and steaming with gold,
with distance. There were occasionally
rifts in the cloud where the face
of a woman appeared, frowning. He
had gone higher. He wore ermine.
He thought, why did I come? and then,
I have come to rule! The chamois came.

The chamois found him and they came
in droves to humiliate him. Alone,
in the clouds, he was humiliated.

Frank O'Hara

Sick again

So more photos I think. First of all, to reassure all readers that merlins are not simply fluffy toys:
Gaaah! Oh well. This is pigeon, my first jack merlin. In the hot summer of 1994 he slept on a shelf-perch in my bedroom in a shared student house in Cambridge.

One summer night I woke with a start. I was used to merlin noises at night (preening, delicate nose-scratching with one talon, sleepy feather-rousing). But I wasn't hearing merlin-noises now. I sat up. And saw a man rummaging around in a pile of clothes on my bedroom floor.
"Sorry, but what are you doing?" I said.
"Um, getting my trousers" he said, starting slightly.
"What?" I was confused. I didn't know this man, and it seemed unlikely that his trousers would have been...oh, hang on! The penny dropped as he fled from the room. A burglar! Here! In my room! And then all I could think was: he might have stolen the merlin! This was unlikely, I admit. But it seemed a plausible threat at the time. My blood was up! How dare he! And so...I leapt out of bed and chased him from the house. Poor sod, I don't think he'd expected that. Nor did I. The Victim Support man who came over the following day was most concerned.
"Are you ok?" he said.
"Fine" I said. "It was bizarre. Really surreal, and I didn't....I mean, it was....funny. No, really, it was funny".
"But you could have been hurt!" he said, shocked.
I had to make him a cup of tea.


Another old photo: Erin, Niels and Pete in Maine. We're squirrel-hawking with Pete's redtail. She was a solid, passage four-year old female, a pale white-throated Eastern bird with a sleek ivory chest and wingtips that didn't quite reach the tip of her mahogany tail. Pete thought she must have eaten many squirrels before he trapped her on migration; she'd often seek out dreys while hawking; offhandedly pull them apart. That day, she caught her squirrel, eventually, after a high-adrenaline flight between tall trees, our necks craned up into the blank silver sky, squinting as our eyes filled with snow and bark-dust. She stooped from the top of a tall maple and picked her squirrel off the near-vertical trunk of an adjacent tree. ‘Picked’ may be the wrong word. There was no delicacy in this; just precision and immense force. And then she sat there, eating her tough old squirrel as the snow continued to fall.

September 10, 2001, Wyoming, balloon-training a two year old gyrkin called Dooberry, owned by my old friend and colleague Regan. I'm holding him out at near arm's length and laughing my head off because — weeelll, Regan has ... very short hair. Dooberry had never been flown by someone with long hair. So rather than concentrate on the landscape out there: the lure, the balloon, the distant birds, he kept turning his head upside down, half-closing his eyes, and grabbing hold of my hair with his beak. He was absolutely delighted. Regan wasn't.

Brilliant. 1947. How many ways is this wrong?