Sauntering Vaguely Downward

(With apologies to those of you on DW who may have already seen this in the common_nature community, but I have had a long day at work and am too tired to compose a new post.)


Things are a bit exciting around the bird feeders at the moment. It has been very cold for several days here in the UK, and I've noticed an increasing number of regular visitors to our garden. I'm having to fill the feeders every day. Today I filled the main seed feeder twice. There are currently five goldfinches feeding in the garden. I've never seen more than two at a time before. In this photo you can see four of them, plus a house sparrow and three blue tits, and a light dusting of snow.

Below the cut is one additional photo, in which you can see all five goldfinches, three sparrows, two blue tits and a robin.

( +1 )

[Tropical Blue Morpho (Morpho peleides) butterfly, at rest underneath a waterfall.]

[Black tropical butterfly (Heliconius?) with red and white accents, perched on a cluster of small orange flowers.]

This wasn’t the post I was intending to make today, but having discovered the above on my phone whilst searching for something else from about a month ago, I felt I must share this with my Circle immediately. It is a series of three delightful photographs on display in the toilets (no really) of BOM, the Birmingham Open Media gallery. BOM is a little odd corner space a few tens of metres from one of the exits of New Street Station, over the road from an Adult Entertainment Shop (™?). It features tiny exhibitions celebrating “the intersection of art, technology and science”.

The caption for the photographs reads as follows.

Gemma Marmalade
The Seed Series, 2015

The Seed Series is a series of photographic prints by artist Gemma Marmalade, which explores the possibility that those of homosexual persuasion may be more likely to have a visceral impact on the cultivation of plants.

During studies of communal lesbian gardeners in the 1970s, German botanist Dr Gerda Haeckel observed accelerated growth, crop abundance and increased vegetational health. The Seed Series depicts some of Haeckel’s original subjects and their finest vegetable specimens.

Pardon the awkward angle of the photograph - it was not easy to take whilst holding a toddler who was frustrated at the thought that I was about to steal his dirty nappy and replace it with a clean one.

This section of crumbling wall is in the middle of Imperial College London's South Kensington campus. The ivy Virginia Creeper (h/t to perennialanna for the botanical correction) that masks it is presently changing from red to green, drawing attention to the contrast between it and the functional brutalist buildings surrounding it.