If you have even a passing interest in the natural world, you will have most likely heard the phrase “invasive species”. By definition, a deliberate or accidental release of a species to an area beyond its natural environment where it then multiplies and causes damage to that environment and the native wildlife that relies on it. I discussed the UK issue of invasive species briefly last year and in the context of Muntjac and Black Hairstreak butterfly too.
Ecologist and conservationist Hugh Warwick tackles the issue in much more depth in his latest book – Cull of the Wild. Warwick is, as most of us are, not keen on killing in the name of and recognises that the arguments and issues regarding the culling of invasive species where they threaten the very existence of native species and ecosystems are still very complicated.
In Cull of the Wild, he discusses how different approaches to control have been tried worldwide. The grey versus red squirrels, the cane toads in Australia, rats, even Pablo Escobar’s hippos and the Burmese python trade.
Warwick, a former vegan and now a self-confessed meat-eschewing vague-an, points out that millions of animals are killed, or culled, every year in the name of conservation, invasive species, feral populations, domestic animals. Sadly, much of this killing is cruel and essentially unregulated. To quote from Warwick’s introduction:
“We deserve an honest conversation about conservation. To do that we need to establish one very important point. Conservation, wildlife management, and the ecology that underpins them both, is really complicated. Add to this one more variable: people with differing perspectives. Now, it becomes close to impossible to solve the very real problems with which we are confronted. Complicated problems rarely have simple solutions…”
There are, we learn, no absolutes. Each invasive case has nuance where humans have destroyed habitat and the native species that once filled a niche are long gone, an incomer might fill that space and become prevalent. It might be that the new species brings benefits to that environment, perhaps reducing plant overgrowth and opening up biodiversity that resurrects the habitat.
The beautiful Box-tree moth, Cydalima perspectalis, represents an interesting example of the kind of nuance we have to address. It arrived in the UK around 2007, presumably hitching a ride on imported Asian strains of box-tree, Buxus. Unfortunately, it has spread and thrived, ravaging decorative box hedges across southern England.
There is little that can be done to control this invasive species at this point in its history other than grubbing out its larval food plants, Buxus, and planting something else. Insectidal sprays are not the answer as they kill the native species too, pheromone traps are of limited use and while they kill some of the males there will always be another to fertilise the female’s eggs on one’s box hedge, and picking off caterpillars for, ahem, disposal, is not the most pleasant way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.
However, to talk of the lack of the nuance and the lack of absolutes, it’s worth noting that Blackbirds are starting to recognise the larvae of this moth as a rich food source. So, whereas the presence of the moth is essentially well-balanced in its native environment, there is hope that this might happen naturally here too.
It is unlikely that many of the problematic invasive species we must cope with will naturalise in that way, so there may well forever be a need to find ways to control them or live with them. Warwick offers much for our consideration of the nuances of invasion.
Incidentally, you can easily get to my other social media pages. All you have to do is use a link like this – https://sciencebase.com/social – but swap the word social in the link for whichever service you are hoping to find me on.
For example swap the term social for mastodon: https://sciencebase.com/mastodon and that will take you straight to my Mastodon page.
I’ve even set one for Notepin, although all I’ve published there is a link pointing back to this page! Click through to see what I mean…it’s possible I might add other material. It’s US$11 per annum if you upgrade to be able to post photos etc
Meanwhile, just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to come up with some inspirational words to encourage you, dear reader, to follow me on social media…so here those words, take your pick with regard to which one persuades you to follow me, hahaha!
Join me on my social media journey and stay updated on all of my latest adventures!
Let’s connect and share our passions together on Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and more!
Life’s too short to not follow your favorite artists and creators. Join me on my social media platforms and let’s make the most of every moment.
Social media is all about building meaningful connections. Follow me on my various accounts and let’s create something special together.
From music to art to everyday musings, you never know what you’ll find on my social media pages. Join me and see for yourself!
Join my social media community and never miss a beat. We’ll stay connected and inspired together.
Social media isn’t just about likes and follows – it’s about creating real connections with real people. Join me and let’s make something beautiful.
ChatGPT then adds “Remember to keep your message authentic and true to your personality, and don’t be afraid to inject a little humour or personality into your writing. Good luck!” If I were to be authentic and true to my personality I definitely wouldn’t use words like “journey” or say anything quite so pretentious as to talk of “meaningful connections”. If you want to follow me, please do, that’s the message, plain and simple.
I’m sure someone will tell me this has been done, but having come up with a silly meme idea on Twitter, I was thinking of a game that’s a hybrid between Six Degrees of Separation and Mornington Crescent.
Title:Famous Connections
Objective: To be the last player holding all the chips
Players: Four or more
Materials: Ten chips per player, a designated referee, a timer
Setup: Each player starts with ten chips. All players contribute one chip to the kitty
Gameplay: The player deemed oldest/youngest/tallest/shortest begins the game. The starting player states a famous name from any field, real or fictional. The next player must use part of the previous name to suggest another famous name within a given timescale (30 seconds for adults 60 seconds for children, perhaps). Homophones are allowed.
Example of play: Guy Garvey, Guy Ritchie, Lionel Ritchie, Lionel Blair, Tony Blair, Toni Basil, Basil Brush…
Another example: Finger Bobs, Bob the Builder, Build-a-Bear, Rupert the Bear, Prince Rupert of Hohenzollern-Singmaringen
A successful player takes one chip from the kitty. If unsuccessful, the player forfeits one chip to the kitty. If a player repeats a name or gives a name unrecognized by all other players, they forfeit one chip. If a player cannot think of a name, they forfeit one chip.
Play proceeds clockwise until one player accumulates all chips from the kitty and from other players. If the kitty is empty, a successful play allows the player to take a chip from the next player.
Any player with no chips remaining is eliminated from the game. The referee keeps time and has final say on the validity of plays. The referee may introduce “stop names” (names that halt play), “block names” (names causing a player to miss a turn), and “bonus names” (names rewarding the caller with two chips from the kitty). The referee will have made lists of stop, block, and bonus names in advance of play.
In Andrea’s example above, there would be bonus points for coming up with Phoebe Waller-Bridge after Phoebe Bridgers as it has two “overlaps”.
Optional: Unsuccessful plays may result in amusing forfeits determined by the players.
Having spent a couple of evenings watching Starling murmurations with hundreds of thousands of birds, it was time to seek out some Aves in smaller numbers. I had a quick look in at RSPB Ouse Fen (Earith) as it was bright and sunny on Saturday morning. I was hoping to that there would be a chance that the Cranes would be showing. They weren’t but there was a Great White Egret, as ever, and a Chinese Water Deer, I had only fleeting, distant views of a solitary Marsh Harrier. I headed out to Chain Corner to check on the Whooper Swans, a few on the water and one that flew right over me.
Next on to a patch of flooded farmland, often used for fen skating historically, it had lots of waterfowl, but no Glossy Ibis there this year, despite their having bred not far from here in 2023. Then on to RSPB Berry Fen, which is just a short hop further up the road. Chiffchaff calling, lots of Widgeon whistling but no Black-tailed Godwit, there were several hundred earlier last week, apparently.
A Wigeon pair in flight, there were many more on the water of the flooded fen
There was also a distant piping Redshank and the Merlin app picked up the sound of a Green-winged Teal (it’s perhaps the same American vagrant we’ve seen here over the last two or three years; previously, there has also been a Blue-winged Teal). There had also been Dunlin and similar species there but I couldn’t see them. There was a Sparrowhawk, known affectionately as a Sprawk to birders, that flew right over me and away with its familiar flap-flap-glide flight pattern.
Further round, the flood, a group of Greylag Geese hanging out with some Russian visitors – three White-fronted Geese. This species, Anser albifrons, might better be known as “white-faced” as you can see from the photos. But as is often the wont of naturalists names sometimes don’t quite match the species description.
The Berry Fen Three – White-fronted Geese, most likely visitors from GreenlandEuropean White-fronted Goose, a visitor from Russia
According to the BTO website: Two races of White-fronted Goose occur in the UK. A. albifrons (the European WfG) breeds in western Russia and is usually about 1000 to 2000 of them are found in the south and east of England in the winter. A. flavirostris breeds in western Greenland (the Greenland WfG) and about 10000-12000 of this subspecies usually spend the winter in the north and west of Britain and Ireland.
Back in February, DxO sent me a beta version of their PureRaw4 software to test drive ahead of the official launch in March. So, having used version 3 for years, I was keen to incorporate the upgrade into my workflow. I’ve pushed it to the limit with a high-speed, low-light photo of a Mute Swan landing on a lake. This is the final result, below you can read how I got there from a very noisy RAW file straight out of the camera.
This is the final denoised and processed image – Mute Swan Landing
The bottom line is that PureRaw4 does an excellent job of basically knocking out noise to the equivalent of about three whole stops of ISO, fixing various aberrations inherent in one’s camera-lens combinations, and also applying a degree of subtle sharpening. I wrote a short summary around the time of their official launch when they emerged from beta testing.
Preview of a RAW file straight out of the camera. Fast shutter (1/16000s) and so high ISO (6400). Zooming in on the Mute Swan’s head shows how noisy the original was.
My photography has various focal points – birds (flying and perched) snapped with a Sigma 150-600 on a Canon R7 and macro photos of moths, with a 90mm Tamron 1:1 lens, and commonly focus stacked. The focus-stacked output from the camera is JPEG, so inaccessible to PureRaw4 which requires a RAW file. But, the bird photos and landscapes, events, and architectural photography is always shot in RAW. So, a perfect fit for PureRaw4.
This image has been processed with PureRaw4 to remove noise without removing detail and to correct for known camera-lens errors automatically and sharpen accordingly. The level of noise has been massively reduced.
The biggest problem with the big lens is hand-holding, and I rarely take a tripod for various reasons. Anyway, when the light’s fading, and I’m keeping shutter speed short to freeze the avian action, the camera will ramp up lens sensitivity, the ISO, and that makes for more photographic noise. My Canon 7Dii was the worst, I never got on with that. I do wish I’d had PureRaw back then, it would’ve been a lifesaver. But, the R7 its mirrorless successor, is not particularly over-noisy, thank goodness. However, there is always room for improvement. And PureRaw4 does wonders for my twilight owl shots, for instance.
The same zoom on the image after a little processing with PaintShopPro to adjust levels and apply an unsharp mask.
Anyway, in terms of workflow, as I’ve mentioned you must be shooting in RAW. You will get the most from your photography if you take control in that way. RAW gives you all the information that the sensor captures in your shot. RAW is your digital negative.
So, my first step, having selected an appropriate shot I’d like to use from my downloaded photoshoot, is to open the RAW file. You might prefer to open multiple files or to import and process semi-automatically, but I prefer to work with one photo at a time. You let the software download the requisite files for your camera-lens combination. And, then choose your settings. I go for the high-end algorithm (DeepPrime XD2) and allow the software to do the default lens softness, vignetting and other fixes. PureRaw4 runs faster than its predecessor in tests.
Often my photos are at 600mm zoom on a 2/3 frame camera, with a shutter speed of less than 1/2000s, f/6.3 aperture almost by default and then whatever ISO the camera chooses. If it’s dusk or dull, that ISO number will inevitably be way too high and there will be noise. As per the Mute Swan photos example. I’d used a very short shutter speed, 1/16000s, which mean the ISO was at 6400 as the aperture is f/6.3 at this zoom. It’s like dropping three whole stops to ISO 800.
PureRaw4’s algorithm strips away the speckles without stripping away the detail. Its sharpening seems to do something rather subtle that enhances the photo, to my eye. It is worth pointing out that any digital manipulation leads to a technical loss of information, but our eyes don’t see information, they see details and patterns, light and shade, and an enhancement that may technically discard pixels will in the case of this kind of processing lead to a better image
PureRaw4 removes a lot of the noise from any photograph really well. The basic “camera-lens” corrections for your setup are very useful too and as I said, I just leave them at default, but you might get more out of your photos adjusting the sliders.
At this point, you can export the image processed by PureRaw4 as a faux RAW file in the format known as DNG. This is essentially a generic RAW format that can be opened in many photo editors as if it were an actual RAW file straight out of the camera. This means you can take the denoised image from PureRaw4 and start your usual editing process like you would with a standard RAW from your camera.
My usual approach at this point is simply to open the DNG file in my photo-editor (PaintShop Pro 2022 Ultimate) and let it do the RAW conversion. I might do a highlight retrieval or bump up the brightness at this point, to get a better final photo. PaintShop Pro has inbuilt denoising, but it’s relatively ineffective on the whole and I never use it.
My first processing step in PSP is to crop to the more precise composition I am after for the final image. I might also mirror an image of an animal so that it is facing to the right or flying left to right. Seems to be a better view of any creature to my eye unless there’s a good reason not to. DxO has a decent photo editor of its own, which I’ve not tested much. It and PSP and many of the other editors, let you adjust various parameters: Overall brightness, shadows, and highlights, saturation, vibrancy etc. You might also fix white balance if there’s a colour cast. Tools that do a “fill highlight” or boost “clarity” are quite useful too.
Fundamentally, the best approach to any adjustment is to push the sliders or percentages to the level where it looks too obvious that you’ve made a change, and it becomes brash or problematic and then draw them back down a notch or two so that the effect is still there but is much more subtle. The key is to process without making the photo look too painterly. I’d say that if you’re pushing anything beyond about 12%, then it might be time to abandon the photo unless it’s a precious one-off or record shot, and you don’t mind a bit of the painterly effect for the sake of having the shot rather than not.
Now that’s all done I might deal with distractions and use cloning or scratch removal tools to get rid of stray stems of grass and other things. Magic Fill in PSP does wonders for removing distractions and unwanted elements in a photo. It also helps if you’ve done a crop-rotate and ended up with empty triangles at each corner of your photo. Simply select the triangle and apply a Magic Fill and the space will be filled smartly with neighbouring texture, works great with background foliage, water, sky etc.
Once all that’s done, my final step is usually to resize the image for a particular purpose. For sharing on social media, I always resize to a pixel width of 2048, and save as a JPEG with 90% compression. This leads to less compression server side. Then I might apply a moderate “unsharp mask” to make the final image a little bit crisper, but also remembering my 12% rule. I then add my dB/ logo if the image is not destined for a client who requests images without logos or watermarks.
I should add that for denoising I have tried some of the online AI tools and perhaps DxO’s most prominent rival in this area, but they simply cannot compete for removing noise without removing detail. PureRaw4 offers subtle sharpening. If you’re hoping to reduce the effects of motion blur and other such problems in your photos, then you might need to turn to an alternative for that kind of sharpening. That said, I tend to use the DxO denoising and then run it through a (motion) blur-reduction tool.
UPDATE: My report of Orange Tip on 2024-03-17 may well have been the first reported nationally this year, according to our County Butterfly Recorder.
I saw my first Orange Tip (Anthocharis cardamines) of 2024 on 17th March in Cottenham patrolling a roadside verge (Broad Lane).
Archive photo of male Orange Tip on Cuckoo Flower
This was the first report for Cambridgeshire and Essex butterflies this year, apparently. I have to admit I’ve not kept a personal record of first sightings of this species, but the Cambs & Essex page does, so I can give you a list of previous years.
4 Apr 23, 24 Mar 22, 30 Mar 21, 26 Mar 20, 28 Mar 19, 17 Apr 18, 28 Mar 17, 8 Apr 16, 8 Apr 15, 24 Mar 14, 25 Apr 13, 26 Mar 12, 24 Mar 11, 11 Apr 10, 5 Apr 09, 21 Apr 08, 12 Apr 07.
So, it looks like my sighting is the earliest Orange Tip of the year in our Butterfly Conservation sector since they started recording public records on those pages. Previous earliest was three years where it appeared on 24 March, i.e. a week later. I posted on Twitter about the sighting and the tweet garnered a lot of interest.
Someone asked if there were wild brassicas, such as Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis) or Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) plants in bloom in our area. As far as I know, there aren’t. Indeed, the wildest it gets on that roadside verge is probably with the presence of Common Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and Common Daisy (Bellis perennis) unless someone has shaved it to the ground to make it all neat and tidy.
The lack of blooming wildflower brassicas (formerly known as crucifers) species, Cuckoo Flower or Garlic Mustard, could be a problem for early mating Orange Tips as the females are very choosy about the host plants on which they lay their eggs. They need large flowerheads from those wild brassicas and then generally plants that are growing in full sunlight. They don’t even like to fly through shade to find the plants, it seems.
Then there is the issue of egg colour and pheromones. When first laid, Orange Tip eggs are white but change to orange and then brown within days perhaps making their presence obvious to other females arriving at the flower. The female also covers her eggs with a pheromone that dissuades other females from laying eggs in the same bloom. This will benefit the larvae of both females as the original ones will not have competitors for food (the host plant’s seed pods), but also, the more recent eggs, and so younger larvae, will not be cannibalised by the older ones.
The weather patterns have been weird at this time of year for several years now. Think back to the warm days of March during lockdown. I’ve not seen any more Orange Tips yet, so this may have simply been a precocious male who may miss his chance of spreading his seed if no females appear soon. The main emergence may happen at the end of the month and into April, as is more usual.
The kind folks at DxO let me have a copy of the latest version of PureRaw ahead of launch last month and so I’ve been using that to process my RAW photos from my camera for a few weeks now. It does an excellent job of basically knocking out noise to the equivalent of about 3 stops of ISO.
So, if I were shooting birds in flight at dusk and the camera needed an ISO of 6400 to compensate for a short shutter speed, then PureRaw4 is giving me the photo as if I’d shot at ISO 800, which is a lot less noise than one gets at ISO 6400 on a 2/3 frame camera like the Canon R7, especially with my big Sigma lens zoomed in to 600mm across the fens. PureRaw adds a new level of sophistication in terms of the algorithm it uses to denoise your photos when compared to the previous version.
PureRaw4 also adds a nice, but subtle sharpening process to the denoising that does not destroy details nor add artefacts of the kind you often get with the more basic tools in photo editing packages. There are sliders for controlling the denoising process based on luminance or “forced details”, so while it can be an autonomous process you do have some control over how the output is generated.
There are lots of enhancements to the workflow for the software that simplify processing for photographers who have a stack of RAW files to process in a given session. Personally, I usually work with just a single photo at a time, but I can see that if I were running a big photo session that the new workflow would make for a much slicker job.
When you first load a photo into PureRaw4, it identifies the camera and lens combination you used and downloads a package that allows the software to improve lens softness, reduce vignetting and fix other aberrations known for that combination. It saves the information for the next photo, but when you load another photo where you swapped out the lens or used a different camera it will download that appropriate file to fine-tune the output.
Anyway, I’ve been testing this new version of PureRaw for about a month now and all my photographic output in that time including pictures of stork, starling murmurations and those photos of moths that were not focus-stacked, have all benefited considerably from its denoising. Check out shots on the Sciencebase blog as well as my social media.
So much of what shows up on social media, Threads in particular, it seems, is what might be referred to as “engagement bait”. It’s often inane or perhaps an inflammatory comment, it could be a boring or open-ended question, a reboots of stuff from other places that might be years old, some cliched statement with no qualification, for instance. It all seems like a rather pathetic and lame attempt to boost one’s reach and gain attention, to get interactions for the sake of interaction. I won’t embarass anyone by sharing examples, they’re endless anyway and it would take weeks.
The phrase “engagement bait” is itself a bit lame though. There must be a better phrase. “Interaction bait” is one alternative, but just as inept. We need something closerto “clickbait”. Perhaps “likeBait” or thinking of Donkey in Shrek, “PickMeBait”…or to abbreviate that “PickBait”. That’s it, PickBait!
First Oak Beauty of the year seen in the garden last night (6th March 2024). It’s a quite stunning creature, isn’t it? Sharp-eyed readers will note this is a geometer moth. So-called because their larvae (caterpillars), known as inchworms in the US, move in such a way as to give the appearance that they are measuring the earth, geo-meter, inch by inch.
This is a male Oak Beauty, you can tell from its enormous feathery antennae, which it often folds underneath its body to protect them.
You might also be thinking it looks like a Peppered Moth but with more colourful and more pronounced markings. Well, the Peppered Moth is a kissing cousin of this species, seen a little later in the year than peri-spring. The Oak Beauty is Biston strataria, the Peppered Moth is in the same genus, and is B. betularia. While the shape of the moth is very like the Peppered, the markings resemble those of some of the so-called carpet moths. By the way, they don’t eat carpets, but look decorative, like the luxury item that was a carpet back when the early lepidopterists were giving all these species their names.
In a recent incident that caught the attention of billions of users, a major social media platform (Facebook) experienced a widespread outage, leaving users unable to access their accounts for several hours. Many of them quickly migrated to their other social media accounts to gripe. Of course, as such disruption unfolds, initially users will perceive it as an individual issue, a problem with their phone or PC. We all occasionally get “session expired” notifications but are able to log back in to our apps, many people faced with this tried and were then told their password was incorrect and 2FA systems failed. It soon became apparent that this was a system-wide problem affecting all Facebook users.
The incident highlights an important lesson in recognizing systemic failures. Often, when faced with technical difficulties, individuals may assume that the issue lies with their own devices or accounts. However, as demonstrated in this case, persistent problems affecting numerous users indicate a broader issue with the platform itself.
The implications of such a widespread outage extend beyond inconvenience for users. First off, imagine not being able to use your social media and having to interact with the real world, chatting face-to-face with other humans, listening to bird song, smelling the roses, going for a walk in the fresh air!?!?!?! Whatever next?
Social media platforms do play a significant role in our lives and in modern communication, commerce, and information dissemination in general. When these platforms experience downtime on such a large scale, it disrupts not only individual users but also businesses, organizations, and even governments that rely on them for all kinds of activities including meeting social and healthcare needs in many instances.
Such incidents underscore the importance of strong infrastructure and contingency planning for technology companies. In an increasingly digital world, ensuring the reliability and resilience of their online services is important. Companies must invest in putting backup measures in place, in proactive monitoring systems, and rapid response protocols to minimize the impact of potential outages and so be in a position to resume normal service quickly. I mean, imagine having to spend more than an hour talking to other people face-to-face or taking a long walk, like maybe a mile or more!
