25th November 2025
Lamenting Grasshoppers, Mating Hermaphrodites and
Butchering Shrikes – Yikes!
We had an interesting walk at Ramat Hanadiv near Zichron
Yaakov last week. In
the immediate aftermath of some serious rain, we hoped we might glimpse the
first signs of the coming season’s flowers. Although sea squills are beginning
to sprout their luscious green leaves, we didn’t see any wildflowers. But we
did see a blossoming male carob tree with clusters of small, reddish blooms
emerging directly from its branches. Generally, carob trees are dioecious - that is, they have
separate male and female trees with different flowers. The male flowers are
reddish, while the female flowers are greenish and develop into delicious
chocolate-brown pods. However, some carob trees are hermaphroditical, bearing
both male and female flowers, and can therefore self-fertilize.
Just a short distance from the male carob tree, we
encountered three snails mating. For two to mate is quite common, but for three - that’s a little unusual.
Snails are not dioecious, though some people, particularly the French,
find l’escargot delicious
- no accounting for taste. As a child, I naïvely thought that
hermaphrodites like snails could reproduce without a mate, and I also thought
that if you cut an earthworm in half, you would get two living earthworms.
Neither is true. Snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and
female reproductive organs, but they certainly can’t self-fertilize. Two snails
together can fertilize each other. Three mating together is most certainly a
case of bigamy (or ‘trigamy’?).
And, by the way, if you cut an earthworm in half, the half with the head and
brain may be able to survive, but the tail half will die sooner or later.
A little further down the track, we came across many
short-horned grasshoppers. They jump so quickly and so far that it was
difficult to catch a photo. I did eventually manage to take one, and with a
little help from an expert – Alena - who is a leading authority on birds and
ornithology – we identified
it as a lamenting grasshopper (Eyprepocnemis plorans). The name
comes from the mournful-sounding calls males make, which can remind one of “lamenting”, when they stridulate
(produce sound by rubbing body parts together). This, believe it or not, is a
mating call. We might have expected the mating call to sound more joyful, but
grasshoppers seem to prefer misery to happiness.
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Some birds look so nice and friendly. Who, for example, can
resist the adorable robin redbreast, chosen by the public (by popular vote) as
the UK’s unofficial national bird? But the robin can be quite fierce and will
go to war with other robins that infringe on its territory.
On the other hand, some birds are rather short on good looks
– think of the Muscovy duck, surely the world’s ugliest duckling, or the
guineafowl (see the accompanying photos). They might lack good looks, and
certainly wouldn’t win any bird beauty contests, but they are generally not
known to be particularly aggressive towards their fellows.
A few weeks ago, on our way to nearby Mount Arbel, we bumped
into a lovely-looking
bird – a great grey shrike. Indeed, it looks lovely, even with its hooked beak,
but looks can deceive. Shrikes have a rather macabre way of processing their
prey – unique in the animal kingdom. After killing the victim (insects,
lizards, small mammals and birds), the shrike will impale it on barbed wire or
thorns and leave it to dry. For this grisly practice, it has earned the
gruesome name “the butcher bird.”
We might think it somewhat unpleasant for birds to kill
their victims like this, but birds are just doing what their instincts tell
them they should. Lamentably,
humans, have committed murder since the days when Adam was a lad, so can hardly be critical of
the animal kingdom, whose members, by and large, only kill to feed themselves.
We're back home now after spending three weeks in Leeds and Manchester in
England, visiting Mum and the rest of our family. It was sad to see how much
more noticeable the police presence
was on the streets of Leeds and Manchester where the Jewish community
lives, than when we last visited; sad, because for the safety of the community,
this is now necessary.
Unsurprisingly, we saw a fair amount of rain too, and of
course we grumbled about it each rainy day. We’ve got quite soft over the years – we
struggled in the “cold” local climate
– we can’t cope with autumn temperatures of 15 degrees Celsius any more. Thank
goodness we didn’t experience proper cold.
As you know, home is Tiberias, and from our window we’re
able to see Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) and, on a clear day, Mount
Hermon, snow-capped in winter. We live about 50 metres below sea level and look
down on the Kinneret, some further 160 metres below us, and up to
Mount Hermon, whose peak is 2,814 metres above sea level. That’s quite a dizzying range of altitudes.
This last year hasn’t been great for the Kinneret; we
haven’t had sufficient rainfall and so the level of the lake has dropped
significantly – it’s now about 2 metres lower than it was at this time last
year, which makes a loss of approximately 350 billion litres. Being so low, it is causing serious concern
for conservationists – if the lake level gets much lower, trees, flowers, fish,
birds and animals will all suffer. Shoreline plants will be destroyed, fish
habitats will be reduced, and pollutants will be concentrated, all leading to
severe ecological imbalance. This collapse of aquatic life and vegetation will
deprive birds of food and nesting areas, threatening the entire lake ecosystem.
In the past, drought was also a major problem for drinking
water, but these days Israel’s desalination programme provides more than 80% of
the country’s drinking water. And now, for the first time ever, desalinated
water is being pumped into the Kinneret. This is a world first. One thousand
cubic metres of water per hour is filling the Kinneret. It sounds a lot, and it
is. But at that rate (a million litres per hour) it would take about 40 years
to replace the water lost in the last year. The rate might be increased from a
second source of desalinated water, but that won’t be enough. We really need
some serious rain.
And a
day or two ago, we got a serious drenching. We were out walking in the rain for
half an hour and our coats and hats weren’t quite as waterproof as we thought.
We’ve been praying for it and continue to do so, and so we didn’t complain about the soaking –
at least not more than was strictly necessary.
One morning last week we walked in the Switzerland Forest – it was 26°C. We saw a couple of jays fly past, as well as a kestrel and some bulbuls and sunbirds. A couple of old sages were flowering wisely, and a less wise rosemary was too. I photographed a large salmon Arab butterfly which, despite its name, is really rather small. But it is large when compared to the small salmon Arab. The scientific name for the butterfly is Colotis fausta (not to be confused with the altogether different colitis). It was feasting on the flowers of the false yellowhead bush (Dittrichia viscosa), also known as the sticky fleabane – “sticky” because it is, and “fleabane” because fleas flee from it, not wishing to get stuck on it. Colotis fausta means “the beautifully coloured, fortunate one” - I guess it was fortunate not to get affixed there. And I’ve also included a jay that I was fortunate to photograph in Netanya last week.
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With a Little
Help from My Friends
The posts in this
blog are almost all about the nature we see in Israel, with an occasional
comment or two concerning current events that we experience. All the photos in
the blog were taken by me (with the exception of just one or two, which I
indicate are from other sources).
This post is going
to be quite different. First, it is not specifically about nature – it relates
to an ethical dilemma, as I will explain. Also, one of the photographs is not
entirely my own work – it has been enhanced with the use of AI, artificial intelligence.
During a trip to
the Hula Valley, I photographed a marsh harrier. It’s a wonderful bird and not
a bad photograph. However, the bird was in flight at quite some distance above
the ground, so the photo is far from perfect. The bird isn’t completely sharp, particularly
around the edges of its wings, and the bird’s eye isn’t as clear as I would
like. All in all, the definition could be considerably better. But I’m not a
professional photographer, and though I have a good camera, it’s not one that a
professional would use. It’s not a bad photo, but for sure not a prize winner.
A friend told me
that AI can enhance a photo really well, so I submitted my photo to ChatGPT
(the free version) and was really impressed by the results. You won’t need me
to tell you which is my photo and which is ChatGPT’s version. But hasn’t it
done well? It really is the same photo, but with the definition and sharpness
improved considerably. It is my photo with a little bit of help from my friends (as Lennon and McCartney would say).
I would have been
truly proud to take such a photo – but I didn’t. And though I could include it
as my work, would it be right to do so? Ethically, for sure, it wouldn’t be
right – unless, of course, I were to declare that the photo was enhanced with
AI.
You might ask me
whether it’s any worse to use AI than to use the sophisticated built-in tools
within my camera, such as ‘image stabilisation’, which I don’t give credit to
for improving my photos. Or if it is worse than using Lightroom or other such
software to manipulate the image after the camera has finished its work.
Let me declare that
I do indeed use Lightroom (as very many photographers do), which enables me to
make minor tweaks to sharpen the image and/or to adjust the intensity of the
whites. In fact, my camera is set to produce ‘raw’ images rather than JPEG
images, because raw images keep all the data that the sensor records, whereas
JPEG files are compressed and compacted to allow them to be conveniently
distributed. So, for example, I have greater control over the white balance in
a raw file.
Likewise, my poems
are my own work; they are not written or improved by using AI – there would be
no satisfaction whatsoever in my computer producing a really great poem, which
it could certainly do.
I have thought long and hard about whether to use AI to enhance my images, and I have decided that I will not. If I were to do so, I might just as well use someone else’s photos to illustrate my blogs. So what I’m presenting to you is my work – my writing and my photos – albeit photos that are adjusted in a very minor way.
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