2024-06

30th June 2024

Early last Sunday morning, I had a pleasant walk by the lake in Tiberias. There was a fellow painting the town red, boaters were boating, and fishers were fishing. The fishermen, patiently waited for a catch, but they weren’t as successful as the little egret that I stalked. Birds have an instinctive fear of humans – they see us as huge giants and take to flight in much the same way as we would, if a bull-elephant came too near. I wish mosquitos were half as afraid of me. But young birds are not quite as cautious, and a young night heron out on its own, allowed me to come quite close.

Actually, it’s only the female mosquitos that I need to worry about. The males are quite harmless. I read a few days ago that conservationists in Hawaii are releasing 250,000 male mosquitos each week – they drop them out of a helicopter.  These mosquitos carry bacteria that limits the population growth. They’ve been doing this to protect honeycreeper birds that are being wiped out as they have no resistance to the diseases that mosquitos carry. So, one bite is enough to kill them. I think we could do with a few of these male mosquitos in our apartment.

However, I hope the conservationists know what they’re doing. Messing with nature can be a dangerous thing, as Chairman Mao found out when trying to eliminate sparrows. See my blog post https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sparrows-the-tweet-on-the-street/. 

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24th June 2024

Mid-Summer’s Day

A long time ago, when I was at junior school, I was taught that summer started on 21^st June and ran through ‘til 21^st September. It then seemed strange to me that mid-summer’s day should be 24^th June. So today, being mid-summer’s day, I’m reflecting on just when summer actually does begin. Is it 21^st June or perhaps a month and a half before 24^th June, which would be 10^th May? And what exactly is summer? I think there are various definitions, and I’m not sure which is right. So, without dwelling further on this, I will just say that I do know that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, or so Aristotle believed.

I saw this one swallow, along with many of its friends and colleagues who had gathered on telegraph wires near Caesarea, one day last week. Swallows perch on wires as they’re good places from which to spot insects – if they perched on tree branches, the foliage would obstruct their view. They also gather on wires when it’s getting close to the time to migrate.

It has long been known that swallows disappear when it gets too cold for insects, their major food source, to be out and about. We know that the swallows are involved in a hugely long migration to a warmer climate. But until relatively recently (just a hundred or two years ago) it was thought that swallows hibernated at the bottom of rivers, and then appeared again when it was warmer.

I’ve tried many times to photograph swallows in flight, but they’re far too swift for me to have any chance. But I love to watch swallows, martins and swifts, as they fly along a road towards me, and then veer to one side to avoid a close encounter of any kind. And sometimes from our balcony, I watch swifts and swallows, flying at great speed, and marvel at how close they come to the building, without ever hitting it – there’s very little room for error. Swifts, martins and swallows, look very similar, and indeed swallows and martins, are closely related - swifts are not related at all. But they all eat, while on the wing, and are very fast and agile. I wish I were half as swift and half as agile – but that’s just a dream that will never be. Indeed, it would be a good dream for tonight – a mid-summers night’s dream.

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23rd June 2024

Last week in the city of Tzefat (Safed) we met a tortoise – but a much bigger tortoise than those we usually see in the local countryside - the Greek tortoise, aka spur-thighed tortoise, which is only about 6 inches long, whereas this tortoise in Tzefat was about 14 inches across and 20 inches from head to tail - but they do look rather similar. It was walking quite quickly (for a tortoise, at least), and as I was photographing it, a fellow approached me and told me it was a Sudanese tortoise, which is also known as the African spurred tortoise. These tortoises, which do not live in the wild in Israel, are the third biggest worldwide – the biggest being the Galápagos tortoise, which is found on the Galápagos Islands (where else?). Here’s a funny thing (well, it amuses me) - Galápagos means tortoise, so the Galápagos tortoise, is a Tortoise tortoise – and if that’s not tautologous, what is? I shall forever think of it as the tautologous Tortoise tortoise.

My new friend, the African spurred tortoise, was visiting Tzefat, with its keeper, for some sort of educational/entertainment event for school children. I don’t altogether approve of the idea of keeping animals or birds in captivity, even for education purposes. Though, it must be said that some zoos do a good job in preventing endangered species from becoming extinct, by breeding them and rehabilitating them into the wild.

I wish I knew what this African spurred tortoise thought of his captivity. If only we could communicate! As a young seven or eight-year-old lad one of my favorite series of books was Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The doctor was a naturalist, not to be confused with a naturist, who could talk to animals. We can all talk to animals, but the Doctor could understand what they said to him in return. It is said that King Solomon, who lived not so far from here about 3,000 years ago, could understand animal-talk. Since then, barring Doctor Dolittle, nobody has managed to have a two-way conversation. That could be about to change. The University of Tel Aviv has just offered a $10 million prize, the “Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication”, to scientists who can demonstrate that they can communicate with animals – to the point, for example, where they could send a model bee to tell real bees where to go in search of pollen.

So, keep on talking to your dog or your cat, and listen out for what they say to you.

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16th June 2024

Here are some of my G.O.A.T. photos 🙂! The Nubian ibex, a wild desert-living goat, has been in Israel constantly since the Pleistocene era. It is classified as a vulnerable species – there are only 4,000 or so in existence – two hundred of whom live in and around Ein Gedi, the oasis by the Dead Sea. [Ein Gedi, means spring of the kid goat.] The Nubian ibex and Tristram’s grackle (a desert starling, also found in Ein Gedi) are friends - they have a symbiotic and mutualistic relationship – the grackle will sit on the ibex and pick fleas from it. The Nubian ibex, being a goat, eats all sorts of vegetation and will climb into trees if that’s where their food is. They’ve even been known to climb on top of cars – the car in the picture was our car (subsequently sold). They’re fearless on narrow mountain tracks – but just last week, one of the ibexes fell into a 10-meter sinkhole near the Dead Sea. A local resident out walking his dog, saw the ibex and called for help. It took a considerable effort for rescuers to rappel down into the sinkhole, attach a rope to the ibex and haul it to safety. There’s a very short video clip of the ibex in the sinkhole in a Times of Israel report (see - https://www.timesofisrael.com/nubian-ibex-rescued-from-10-meter-deep-sinkhole/) -

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Last week I posted a photo of a swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon) – and today an animal from the Pleistocene era – the world of plasticine and papier-mâché is truly amazing 🙂!

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10th June 2024

On our way to Netanya yesterday for our weekly visit with our grandchildren, we stopped at the River Alexander for a walk along the riverbank. It’s not quite clear why the river was so named – some say it was in honour of Alexander Yanai, a 1^st Century King of Israel, others say it was named after a local 19^th Century watermelon farmer. But, either way, it’s a rather lovely river and we enjoyed our walk in the warm morning sun. As we walked along westward, that is towards the sea, we saw that the flow was away from the sea, which we assume meant the tide was coming in. We saw a few egrets, and kingfishers and a few turtles - hardback Caspian turtles and softback African turtles. The softbacks are really quite huge, reaching up to 40kg. One of them came right to the riverside to check us out and grinned at us with a toothless smile. They might be toothless, but they have very strong jaws and their bite is significantly worse than their bark, so we kept our distance. After seeing that we were no threat, the turtle hurtled off – turtles might be slow on land but they’re quite speedy in the water (up to about 30mph). A little later on, another turtle tried to climb out of the river, but the bank was just a bit too high and steep, and it did a backflip as it fell into the river, showing its underparts, that is, its plastron.

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I think I made a mistake in yesterday’s post. I said the hoopoe had caught a cockroach. Judy pointed out that the little creature wasn’t a cockroach, though the Lens app told me last week that it was. I’m not entirely sure what it was – I’ll just say that it caught a bug – and actually there are a lot of bugs going around at the moment, so take care 🙂.

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9th June 2024

The big question about millipedes is - how many legs do they actually have? Well, if centipedes have a hundred legs (which they don’t) then millipedes should have a thousand legs (which they don’t either). But they can have several hundred legs – so millipede is a bit of a misnomer. At least it was until 2020 when a species was discovered with about 1,300 legs – a genuine millipede! And strangely, another species of millipede was found recently, with four penises.

A week or two ago, we came across a 5-inch (12 cm) millipede, out for a walk. It’s the Archispirostreptus syriacus, which is found in Israel and in neighbouring countries. Exactly how many legs etc it has, I’m not certain – too many to count, that’s for sure.

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A few days ago, when in the centre of Tel Aviv, I saw a hoopoe digging up the lawn outside the Sarona Market. Eventually it found what it was looking for – a little cockroach.

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6th June 2024

Even by Tiberias standards it’s been a hot week. A couple of days ago the temperature reached 45 degrees C (113F). To be out in such heat for prolonged periods can be seriously harmful to the human body. On Wednesday morning, with the temperature still not reaching its daytime peak, like a true mad dog, I ventured out for a walk, up Mount Arbel. I covered myself in sunblock, took plenty of water and wore suitable clothing including a sun hat. And I only stayed out for about 45 minutes. But it was seriously hot, so much so, that no birds or animals were to be seen. Nor were there other people around, save for a party of teenage schoolchildren who seemed somewhat subdued by the searing sun. But real sun worshippers, those that depend on the sun for energy, were to be found – butterflies and lizards, particularly swallowtail butterflies and roughtail rock agamas. The blood of such critters isn’t actually cold, it’s just that they are poikilothermic, that is they don’t have a mechanism to adjust their body temperature – it will always be more or less the same as the environment that they are in.

The butterflies were flying so fast, barely resting for more than a second, they clearly had plenty of energy. I dizzily watched several pairs chasing each other in upward spirals – a sort of courtship dance. The lizards, who were basking in the warmth, were also exceedingly quick as they scurried away when I came too close. The butterflies and lizards were fast in the heat – but the hotter it got, and the hotter I got, the slower I became. Before long and before my blood boiled, I retreated to the comfort of an air-conditioned café for a much-needed iced coffee.