Injured Carrion Crow

I came across an injured carrion crow (Corvus corone) yesterday as I was walking through the woods between Farnborough and Frimley.  It was sitting on the path, trembling a little, and there was a little blood just above its beak.  Its feathers looked rather tatty, quite unlike the glossy black plumage that is normal for carrion crows.  I suppose it might have been hit by a car on the nearby Blackwater Valley Relief Road, or else it had flown into the power lines that cross the path just a bit further on.  I picked it up and moved it under some bushes, so that it wouldn't be bothered by cyclists or dogs on the path. It didn't struggle at all. 

This morning when I walked past the same spot, I looked under the bushes and it was gone.  There wasn't even a single black feather left, so I presume that it must have recovered and flown away.

Redwings

I saw some redwings this morning as I was walking from Farnborough North to Frimley.  It was snowing lightly. The smaller lakes were covered in ice and snow and were devoid of water birds.  Further on I saw a green woodpecker and a pair of jays.

One Surviving Egypian Goose Chick

It wasn't until Sunday afternoon that Zoe and I managed to get back up the University lakes.  Straight away we saw that the older pair had only one remaining chick.  Here is a picture of it with its father.



It looked like several people had been feeding it during the day, so it wasn't really interested in the bread that Zoe offered, so we walked on round the lake.  The other pair had none of their chicks left, probably because the male had injured its leg and was consequently unable to help protect them.  We were told that magpies had been seen attacking them.

While we walked back we twice saw a kingfisher, first it was perched on a low branch over the edge of the lake, second speeding low over the water close to the bank.  It could have been the same bird both times, but I suspect that there is more than one kingfisher on these lakes.

Red Kite over the Royal Berkshire Hospital

At 4:30pm this afternoon I was walking up Craven Road, past the Royal Berkshire Hospital here in Reading.  As I neared the southern end of the road, I noticed a large bird flying over the hospital car park.  It was so large that I initially though it was a heron, but as it flew closer I saw it had a the forked tail characteristic of a red kite.  I stopped to watch and it lazily drifted directly overhead, always looking down, its wing-tip feathers spread like fingers.  It circled back over the car-park a few times.  I lost it in the trees as I turned the corner into Addington Road.  I suppose it must have come down from the Chiltern hills on the cold north wind that has been blowing for the past few days. 

Eiffel and 'Design by Contract'

Tony Hoare famously wrote of the programming language ALGOL 60 that it was "so far ahead of its time  that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".  In a way, the same could also be said of Eiffel, a pure object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer in 1985.  The key to Eiffel's superiority over "nearly all of its successors" is the idea of 'design by contract' (DBC). This idea provides key insights into many areas of programming and programming language design, and Meyer has used it to produce clean solutions to problems which have given rise to unnecessarily complex messes in other languages. The best exposition of 'Design by Contract' remains Meyer's book 'Object Oriented Software Construction' (2nd Edition) but Eiffel Software (the company founded by Meyer) also have some nice Macromedia Flash introductions to Eiffel and Design by Contract at http://www.eiffel.com/developers/presentations/.