Spring of the Day + migration + tea
Sorrel in sunlight, 4 May 2008
I just like this picture. Maybe should have cropped it closer, but I hope it makes you happy too.
I've been listening to the BBC podcast of World on the Move, a really wonderful program tracking animal migrations all over the world. They check in with contacts in different countries watching wildebeest, swallows, butterflies, raptors, whales, elephants, even toads. Even better, they've gotten the public involved in the UK, watching for first spring sightings of certain animals.
The most dramatic thing was the story of a female osprey, Logie, who wintered in Africa and then migrated to her summer nesting site in Scotland. She had a radio attached, so you could go online anytime and see where she was on her route, and there were schoolchildren holding their breaths (and adults wagering) about when she would finally make it home. She had bad weather crossing over from Africa to Spain and then stayed several days resting by a lake. And it turned into a total soap opera when she was about to arrive home, because listeners knew that her mate was on the nest already... but he had thought Logie wasn't returning, so he had let another female onto the nest and was feeding and caring for her! Logie returned home after all her weeks of traveling to find a usurper pairing with her husband! It was very upsetting. I had to wait several days for the next report to find out what happened - but she eventually managed to get her nest and her mate back, without bloodshed. Whew.
Migration is SO COOL, y'all.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I have tea
Also rather touching: newly declassified documents have revealed that, in the 1950s, the UK government was very worried about tea shortages in the event of a nuclear attack. They went so far as to have a Minister for Tea who worked on a decentralized warehousing system to try to mitigate the threat of the loss of tea stocks.
Good. These things are *important*.