Pluvialis meets a Goshawk

Helen MacDonald (Pluvialis) goes for a walk in the woods of Kazakhstan and meets a goshawk:

Just near here, I looked up and thought I saw a man standing in a tree. That’s what my brain told me, momentarily. A man in a long overcoat leaning slightly to one side.

And then I saw it wasn’t a man, but a goshawk.

Moments like this are very illuminating. I’d never thought before, much, about the actual phenomenology of human-hawk resemblance, the one that must have brought forth all those mythological hawk-human bonds I've studied for so long.

I looked at a hawk in a tree, but I saw a man. How curious.

This goshawk must have been eighty feet away, so dark against the bright morning sun, so I couldn’t see whether he was facing me or the river. His short head and snaky neck craned: he was looking at me.

I raised my binoculars to my eyes as slowly as I could, half-closing my eyes so my lashes fringed the glare. There. There he was. The glare wasn’t so bad. I could see his edges very clearly. The light was very bright. But I could also faintly see the horizontal barring on his chest feathers. This was an adult male goshawk, and he looked very different from the ones at home. He reminded me of old photographs of goshawks flown by falconers on the northwest frontier. Hell, he was one of these goshawks. He had a dark, dark head with a flaring pale eyebrow, and the bars on his chest were close-set and far from the hazy, broken lines of European birds. Imagine tracing—with a ruler—each horizontal line of a narrow-ruled notebook with a thick, dark-grey felt-tip pen. That’s what his front looked like, through the glare. And he was standing on a bare branch and making up his mind what I was, exactly, and what he should do about it.

Slowly, he unfolded his wings, as if putting on a coat, and then, rather quietly and leisurely, he took to the air, one long leg and loosely-clenched foot trailing as he went. I was astonished by how long-winged he was, and how much he looked like a big — albeit long-tailed — falcon. His shape was very different from the goshawks at home. He was a migrant gos; he'd travelled down mountains and across the plains to winter here.

Happy Pluvialis! I wandered back to camp, had a snooze, compared bird notes, smoked a cigarette and had a cup of coffee. Halimjan made soup for lunch; there it was, bubbling in the cast-iron pot over the gas flame and we were sitting around our red plastic table chewing on stale bread waiting for the soup, and all our heads went up at once. A noise like ripping, tearing hessian, like a European Jay, only with real terror in it, was coming towards us right there and we watched — and slow as syrup and fast as a blink all at once, came the male gos trying his damnest to catch a magpie; they flashed right through the trees in front of the table, and gos nearly had a foot to the magpie before he saw us — five humans and a fire and a truck and a Giant Red Table right below him — ack! — wave off! wave off! — and the magpie dove downwards to the fork of a branch, crouching like a man avoiding a blow, and the gos spooled away through the trees. He looked like a coin falling through water, flashing silver and grey. Some kind of metal. A very fierce one. Potassium, Sodium, Goshawk.

Wow!  Tomorrow I am going to Waterstones to place an order for her book.

Spider in the Living Room

Last Sunday evening Zoe and I noticed a ladybird walking slowly across our living room ceiling.  A little later we notice it had become entangled in a web and this spider was attending to it.  As with the spider in the bathroom, this is probably a member of the species Pholcus phalangioides.

Windows XP Login Bug

In the last month or two a bug seems to have appeared in the login software of our fully up-to-date Windows XP Pro installation.  We have the login screen set to display the users' icons.  If I log in as an administrator and then l log out again and try to log in as another user, then the login screen does not detect the keypresses used to enter passwords.  It might be that logging in as any user and then logging out again is enough to produce the problem, I haven't tried it (and I don't care enough to do so).

There is a work-around: pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice brings up the old Windows NT login box and this does detect keypresses correctly.

Me Reading

A pen drawing by my mother, Clare Brelstaff, probably from around 1966 when I was 7 or 8 years old. The bare toes and the length of the trousers suggest that I was in my pajamas ready for bed. This was the days before we had television: my father and mother would listen to the radio in the evenings while I would keep quiet hoping to be allowed to stay up late.  I don't remember what the book was. [Note added 2019-02-03: possibly the Life Science Library book on Mathematics or maybe just some book on dinosaurs.]

Spider above the Bath

This spider has been living on our bathroom ceiling all summer and I have watched it raise at least 2 broods in that time. I have tentatively identified it as Pholcus phalangioides, a common long-legged house spider.  Zoe pointed out to me that the ghostly pale spider shape in the lower right is one of skins that the young spiders have shed as they have grown.