Defining the sound of summer

Squealing swifts, the double vocalisations of the song thrush, the romantic ruminations of the robin, the chiff-chaff of the chiffchaff, the yaffling of the green woodpecker, the startled stutterings of the starlings, the warblings of the warblers, the cuckolding cuckoo. Then, of course, there are the birds called Sylvia, atricapilla and communis, the blackcap and whitethroat respectively.


I don’t think I’d ever seen Sylvia atracapilla (the Eurasian blackcap) knowingly until spring 2017, I’d definitely heard the bird, it is a highly evocative sound of spring and summer. Beautiful, vibrant, warbling (the blackcap is one of the warblers). Often referred to as the “Northern Nightingale”. They usually migrate from Europe (Germany and Eastern Europe, specifically) to the British Isles, but many now over-winter in the UK. The males have a blackcap, the female’s cap is more a chestnut brown (as is that of the juveniles).

Blackcaps eat insects and berries and from my observations (having now seen at least a dozen in various locations), they seem to spend much of their time in the mid-level of the woodland, not seen them near the ground and only once high up in a tree, they’re mostly at about 2-3 metres doing their thing.

Anyway, there seemed to be a few about at RSPB Minsmere in the bluebell wood near the visitor centre. I heard this male first, then saw him darting about, fairly high up. He came straight towards me, not as shy as other ones I have seen. As a bustle of birders tried to catch a glimpse of him where he had been with their bins and ‘scopes, I got my camera up to catch his poses and this shot as he fanned his tail in the dappled afternoon sun.

Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita)

The common chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) is a widespread leaf warbler. It is very similar in appearance to the willow warbler (P. trochilus) mentioned previously on Sciencebase. The chiffchaff’s legs are dark rather than pale, it is a slightly more compact bird than the willow warbler and has a more rounded head and shorter wings. It is their songs that sets apart these two avian cousins. Whereas the willow warbler warbles with a melodic, song, the chiffchaff makes an almost metronomic “chiff, chaff, chiff, chaff, chiff, chaff” sound…to my ear it’s actually more of a regular “t’ss, t’ss, t’ss, t’ss”. Not to be confused with the two-tone (but not metronomic) call of the great tit (Parus major).

There are lots of chiffchaffs around in the summer adding their song to the leafy symphony of many a woodland. They are quite hard to spot and unless you hear them sing (which you will) you might mistake a willow warbler (see above). They’re often perched high up, but this one was at head height in Rampton Spinney darting back and forth and singing loudly when it sat still for a moment or two and posed for photographs.



Printing a 3D ovary to treat infertility

Scientists have used a 3D printer to make a scaffold of a soft plastic type material known as a hydrogel. The researchers then loaded this scaffold with the egg sacs known as ovarian follicles from a female mouse and implanted it. The follicles began maturing and released eggs, which were fertilised by natural mating and the mice then went on to give birth to live young. [Laronda et al, Nature Commun, 2017, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15261].

A similar synthetic ovary might one day be used to treat infertility in women who have had cancer chemotherapy. Chemotherapy causes ovarian failure, essentially destroying a woman’s eggs of which they have a limited supply. Men, of course make sperm all their lives, but women are born with all the eggs they will ever have in immature form in their ovaries. Chemotherapy at any point in their lives will destroy their eggs, some women and girls choose to have eggs harvested and cryogenically stored before they start treatment to improve their chances of an IVF baby later in life.

The picture is quite complicated concerning what the anticancer drugs actually do to the ovary. Quoting from this research paper:

“[Premature ovarian failure and thus female infertility] results from the loss of primordial follicles but this is not necessarily a direct effect of the chemotherapeutic agents. Instead, the disappearance of primordial follicles could be due to an increased rate of growth initiation to replace damaged developing follicles.”

The current research itself is all about testing egg follicle survival and showing how they can be viable on the porous scaffold of the synthetic ovary. Moreover, the team has shown that follicles on the scaffold release appropriate hormones as they would in a living ovary and release maturing egg cells. It all looks very promising for mice. Human follicles grow much larger than mouse follicles and would bring different challenges in terms of keeping them alive in an artificial ovary, but this is a step closer.

The obvious question though is what was the source of the implanted follicles. The team describes how “follicles were mechanically isolated” from an excised mouse ovary for implantation. But, if a women has premature ovarian failure induced by chemotherapy, then there are presumably no follicles with which the fertility team could work unless they have been “harvested” prior to her treatment, which would be an additional (surgical) procedure the patient would have to face and a difficult choice made regardless of whether the patient is a baby, small child, teenager or adult.

How can I protect myself from ransomware

As a follow-up to my earlier post about ransomware and making sure you have an unattached backup of your data files, that your PC is up-to-date (OS and programs), and running up-to-date antivirus and the firewall is enabled, there are a few more things you might consider doing to avoid becoming a victim of the emerging malware. Details can be found here, but here’s a summary (be sure to read the complete post on The Hacker News.

1. Always Install Security Updates
2. Patch SMB Vulnerability (If you’re on Win10 version 1703, you’re already good)
3. Disable SMB (even if you’re patched, disable it, just in case there’s an exploit)
4. Enable Firewall & Block SMB Ports (if you really need SMB and don’t apply item 3)
5. Use an Antivirus Program (make sure it’s up to date)
6. Be suspicious of emails, websites, and apps (any of them, even from “trusted” sources could be bad)
7. Backup (and then again, when you add/modify data files, photos, documents, etc)
8. Keep yourself up-to-date with security issues and tech news

Ransomware makes you wanna cry

Before you get stung by ransomware, backup your data files.

DO IT NOW!

Put them on an external drive of some kind and then disconnect that drive. You might even make copies to CD-ROMs or DVDs. Do not save them on a mapped network drive. You don’t need to backup programs or your operating system, just your documents, spreadsheets, photos, anything you’ve created that you couldn’t bare to lose. Oh and speaking of operating systems, make sure you’re using the latest version of whichever OS you’re running (and software too) and make sure it gets its regular patches and updates from the manufacturer.

If you are infected and your files are encrypted you might be tempted to pay the ransom. Unfortunately, the Wannacry ransomware and many others are not ransomware at all, they just look like that. This latest nasty malware apparently overwrites any data files (that’s your documents, spreadsheets, photos etc) if it finds them on your Desktop or in the My Documents folder. These will never be recoverable without forensic level tools and even then you’d be very lucky to restore more than a handful and then perhaps not even completely. Even if you were to pay the ransom, the perpetrators of this crime don’t have the decryption keys, there never was any encryption, the files were overwritten with random data. So, here’s a second tip:

DON’T STORE YOUR DATA FILES IN THE DEFAULT LOCATIONS ON YOUR PC!

If you have cloud storage, such as Dropbox, it may be set to keep previous versions of your files, you might be lucky and be able to retrieve them from there. But, remember the cloud software will started syncing the encrypted versions of the files on your PC as soon as you are infected by the ransomware. As soon as you see evidence of infection, disable syncing to the cloud or it might be quicker to pull the plug on your internet router and stop the sync. Final tip:

IF INFECTED DISABLE CLOUD SYNC ASAP AND RETRIEVE FILES AFTER ANTIVIRUS CLEANUP

Finally, the most important tip of all:

NEVER CLICK LINKS IN EMAILS NOR OPEN ATTACHMENTS WITHOUT DOUBLECHECKING THEY’RE SAFE!

LBJ, little brown job, house sparrow

The common or garden house sparrow (Passer domesticus) or in the parlance of my home town – the spuggy. Here pictured a female with a mouthful of insects plucked from our patio and readying herself to head back to the nest in a nearby shrubbery. The word sparrow derives from the Greek, spergoulos, which means “small field bird”, although that “g” is lost en route to English from Proto-Germanic sparwan (Old Norse spörr, Old High German sparo, German Sperling, Gothic sparwa) to Old English spearwa, so not sure how the Geordies kept it in their vernacular, spuggy (or spuggie). Mentioned frequently in the writings of Scott Dobson concerning the Geordie vernacular.

Female house sparrow
House sparrows are common and like other Passeridae family members considered to be LBJs, little brown jobs. The family split into the species we know today as recently as 25,000 to 15,000 years ago and their family tree, the taxonomy is quite complicated as such. To our eyes they may seem dull and brown, but the facial patterning of each is individual and allows them to recognise each other and to know who is who in the sparrow social heirarchy. Oh and just to prove that house sparrows are relatively omnivorous, here she is again on our seed-dispensing bird feeder (mixed seeds, including sunflower; never opts for the niger seeds, which are the favourite of the goldfinches).

Female house sparrow bird feeder
Male house sparrow

 

Bitterns sighted at RSPB Minsmere

The Eurasian bittern or great bittern (Botaurus stellaris) is a heron-type wading bird. Unlike the little egret and the grey heron, it’s a more camouflaged mix of speckled browns. Rarely seen, but often recognised across a reed bed or watery habitat by its low booming call (sounds a bit like somebody blowing across the neck of a bottle). The bird was essentially extinct in the UK as a breeding species in the UK by 1900. It recolonised in the 1950s with several dozen males counted. Currently, numbers are not too bad with 600 individuals at some 400 sites, according to the RSPB. However, it is still considered to be a threatened species (on the amber list) because of the threat to its wetland habitats from development and climate change as well as its relatively small population.

We visited RSPB Minsmere in the middle of May (2017-05-14) and was hoping to catch sight of a bittern and many other birds from the various hides. On arriving at one particular hide I was lucky enough to spot a bittern landing in the reeds about 500 metres away before I’d even entered the hide. At first, I thought it was a marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus), there had been three or four of those around that patch. I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo of that particular bittern, but turning around to enter the hide saw another flying fairly low towards the shoreline and fired off a few shots. The one above is the sharpest and best represents the bird’s shape in flight and that speckled brown mottling.

Dave Bradley releases new song

Who is fooling who?

Who is really fooling who,
when the chips are down and you head for town?
Don’t recognise the games you play
are just wasting time and they’re pulling me down?

So, who is really fooling you,
when your dreams are broken and your pockets empty?
Won’t you ever realise that
this time you waste is not a time of plenty?

Are you saying nothing now,
’cause no words can right your sorry fable?
Are you never gonna turn around,
’cause although you lost there’s always one more table

Won’t you ever realise,
that you fool yourself with your guilty pleasure?
Maybe when you come on home
you’ll unlock the door, find your only treasure

Who is really fooling you,
when the dreams you stole are running on empty?
Won’t you ever realise that
this time you waste is not a time of plenty?

And, won’t you ever realise,
that you fool yourself with that guilty pleasure?
Maybe when you come on home, babe
you’ll lock the door, find your only treasure

Who is really fooling who,
when the chips are down
but you’re back from town?

Words & Music, Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Production, Artwork dB

Also, on Soundcloud for streaming only.

Common tern – Sterna hirundo

The common tern, Sterna hirundo, fast moving and almost totally white (apart from the black skull cap). Very difficult to photograph on a dull day. According to RSPB web site, migratory species, breeds on the coast where there are shingle beaches and rocky islands or on rivers with shingle bars, also on inland gravel pits and reservoirsrivers and over freshwater. Migrating birds can be seen offshore in autumn. This one of a pair snapped at Bottisham Lock, Waterbeach in South Cambridgeshire, on the river Cam, a few miles north of the city of Cambridge itself.

I need to get a second shot of a tern, of course…one good tern deserves another, after all.

Why do hares box? Hoping for warm leveret

Hare today…out on the farmland of the Fen Edge Patch (12th May), about 500 metres north of the lode bank on which I was walking. There were three, this male and female were sparring as part of their well-known “courtship” boxing match, the other male was hanging around voyeuristically, presumably hoping to get a shot in the ring before the bell (the harebell?). The European, or brown, hare, is one of biggest species of hare and is adapted to temperate, open country, feeding on grass, herbs, and sometimes twigs, buds, bark, and field crops, particularly in winter. Boxing between hares is usually just the female fending off the sexual advances of a male if she is not ready to mate or else testing his ardour

Lepus europaeus, the European hare, can run away from a Brexit bore at up to 56 kilometres per hour. The collective noun for a group of hares is a “drove” hence the phrase “his lack of hare drove him to drink”. A tepid baby hare is a warm leveret, named in honour of The Normal song and the Grace Jones’ album, both alluding to J.G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel Crash.