2024-12

9th December 2024

A few years ago (in December 2021) Miriam and I had a wonderful few days in the oasis of Ein Gedi close to the Dead Sea. I wrote about our visit – see https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/nature-of-ein-gedi-a-photo-essay/ and posted one or two of the best photos on Facebook. On one of our walks, two little hyraxes glared at me (the Grey) and one of them showed his dentition – clearly indicating I was not welcome. I posted the photo on Facebook with a caption ‘Syrian Rock Hyraxes - The Good and the Bad, waiting for the Ugly’. Twenty-four of my friends were kind enough to press ‘like’ when they saw the pic on their Facebook feed.

Last week, my clever niece, Tamar, spotted the photo on her FB feed – in a post by ‘Teh Lurd Of Teh Reings’ and I was staggered to see that more than 12,000 ‘Rings’ fans have ‘liked’ it, shared it or commented about it.

I did a bit of a search with Google Lens and found that there are several other social media posts that include my photo, and it has been seen and liked by literally hundreds of thousands of viewers – most of them Tolkienist Ringers.

How powerful social media is – but are they allowed to use my photo, without asking my permission? Actually, they are, because I signed away my copyright rights when the photo was included on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_hyrax in the ‘gallery’ of photos.

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5th December 2024

Ducking and diving and some dabbling

Last week I spent an enjoyable hour in the bird hide (or bird blind, in American English) at Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. Enclosed in a tiny wooden box, I was captivated by the beautiful mallards swimming freely across the small lake (actually more of a puddle). They were going about their business, ducking and diving, as ducks do – doing headstands and generally having fun. When I got home and reviewed my photos, I realised they weren’t mallards, at all – they were Northern shovelers. The males are rather beautiful with their iridescent dark green heads just as mallards are – but the bills are somewhat different, the shoveler having a dark blackish spatula-like bill while the mallard’s is yellowish and not quite so broad. The females, though, have a very similar appearance.

Although they appeared to be good divers – these ducks are not divers but dabblers. Divers, dive deep; dabblers dabble around the surface.

While at the Valley as well as gazillions of gazelles, of course - I also saw a woodpecker, kingfishers, bulbuls, chukars (game birds), plovers, prinias, a pied wagtail and an Egyptian goose – a bird-watcher’s paradise.

In my photos, the shovelers of Gazelle Valley are swimming from right to left and the mallards (from a previous visit to Netanya) are going left to right.

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3rd December 2024

‘I caught this morning morning's minion, king-/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’

So expressed Gerard Manley Hopkins almost 150 years ago in his poem The Windhover.

I guess that if Hopkins were to have had a digital camera and WhatsApp he’d have written, as I would:

‘This morning, I photographed a kestrel’, or perhaps he’d have said he photographed a windhover, which was one of the names used in days gone by for the bird we knew in England as the kestrel, or here in Israel, as the Eurasian kestrel.

As one drives on the highways and byways between cities in Israel or in the UK, it’s always a joy to see a kestrel, which is a small falcon, hovering above the fields looking for a little vole for breakfast, lunch or tea - they need to eat six or eight voles a day to stay alive.

Amongst all the birds, kestrels are probably the best hoverers. They manage to remain perfectly still midair, by flying into the wind at exactly the same speed as the wind – and they adjust this speed as the windspeed changes. And even when there is no wind, they can still hover by changing the direction of their wings. That’s more than clever! Indeed, scientists are studying kestrel flight to learn how to make parcel delivery drones hover in different wind conditions. Actually, the scientists could learn a lot from me – many a day I go absolutely nowhere despite ‘flying’ frantically!

One of these two kestrel photos was taken at the Switzerland Forest last week – the bird was perched atop a high-strung plastic pipe. The other photo – the closeup – was a live (but caged) kestrel at the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Bet Shemesh, which we visited last week. This bird was unable to live in the wild and after being rescued has found a happy home in the museum.

More about the museum in a future post.