Red Kite over Reading Town Centre

This morning at 6:40 I was walking briskly along King's Road past the Huntley and Palmer building when  I noticed a large bird of prey high in the direction of  the town centre.  Its forked tail indicated that it was a red kite.  It was drifting in the cold easterly breeze, circling here and there.  I stopped to watch it for a couple of minutes.  It had a large gap in the feathers on the trailing edge of its left wing but this didn't seem to hinder its flying at all: it soared effortlessly, looking down all the time (maybe for stray chicks on the Kennet?).  Eventually I had to hurry on to catch my train. 

Chicks Galore!

This last week there seems to have been a boom in the number of young birds.  On the Frimley lakes in the mornings I saw three pairs of Canada geese with 4, 3 and 1 young.   Near Farnborough North station one evening there was a young, but fledged, song thrush cheeping stridently for its parents to feed it.  On the Kennet in Reading town centre the swans from near Homebase had at first 7, but later 6, fluffy grey cygnets.  The coot chick from the nest near Gunter's brook is now larger and is out and about on the river with its parents.  Another pair of coots nesting on the other side, nearer the town centre, have 5 very small chicks which were spilling over the sides of the nest this afternoon as I walked  past.  Last Saturday, Zoe noticed two young pigeons in the girders under the bridge where the Kennet goes under Watlington Street.  And, finally, this evening I took Zoe to the Reading University lakes where we  saw three coot families with 5, 4 and 2 chicks and a pair of Canada geese with 13 (!).

Blackcap Songs

Yesterday I was walking back through the woods near Frimley when I saw a male blackcap singing.  Its song was rather like a short version of a blackbird song.  A little further along the path a small bird flew across my path making a loud tak-tak-tak alarm call.  I took this to be a wren, but on closer inspection its was slim and warbler-like with a greyish body and some brown around its head (it didn't stay still long enough for me to get a good look).  This could have been a female blackcap as, according to BWPE-CE, blackcaps also make a tak-tak-tak sound

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

This is a truly wonderful book, and probably the best popular science book of recent years.  Pinker writes with authority, clarity, and generosity, and he writes about something that just about everybody can claim some expertise in: language.  Indeed, language is something that we are all so deeply immersed in from a very early age, that few of us realise just what a strange and unusual thing it is.

Pinker carefully guides the reader through the scientific theories of language structure and development, giving just enough details, but not too much.  Some parts are quite hard-going and on my first reading, several years ago, I found myself skimming some of the later chapters.  However, this time I took the whole book more slowly and enjoyed it much more.

The underlying theme of the book is that language evolved by natural selection and that babies are born with an inbuilt instinct to try to make sense of the speech of those around them.  Pinker describes some of the beautiful simple experiments that have been performed to show this.  He also reveals the grammatical sophistication of those whose language has been looked down on as degenerate and slovenly, such as teenagers and people with regional accents, and shows how they follow rules just as precisely as any university professor or pettifogging language maven.

A few quotations from this book:

... the English past-tense ending -ed may have evolved from the verb do: He hammered was originally something like He hammer-did.

Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

Paleontologists like to say that to a first approximation, all species are extinct ...

Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.

A few thoughts provoked by this book:

• The ability to learn languages is one of those abilities that evolution deliberately switches off beyond a certain age. This would appear to be analogous to the menopause in women. Is learning a language really so costly that switching it off like this is evolutionarily advantageous?
• Darwin showed that complex design does not necessarily imply the existence of a designer. Maybe we should now turn this argument around: wherever we think have evidence for the existence of a designer then we can be sure that natural selection has been at work.  After all, designers themselves are products of natural selection.
• A thought experiment: So you think you have free will? You think that you chose the make and the colour of your car by free will?  You think you chose the colours of your clothes by free will?  Maybe you did, but consider this: Suppose tomorrow you find out that you have an identical twin who was separated from you at birth.  And suppose further that your twin drives exactly the same make and colour of car, and wears the same coloured clothes (this sort of thing apparently does happen to identical twins separated at birth).  What then do you feel about the freedom of your will?

Blackcaps

Early last week I saw what I took to be a marsh tit or a willow tit as I was walking through the woods between Farnborough North and Frimley.  It was about the size of a great tit but had a light grey body and the top half of its head was black.  I assumed it was a tit because it was fairly dumpy and rounded.  It didn't occur to me that it might be a blackcap because I thought they, being warblers, were slimmer.  However, on Friday I was walking past the same spot when I saw two birds in a bush, one with a black cap and one with a brown cap.  They were obviously a pair of blackcaps, even though they were rather dumpy, the one with the brown cap being the female.

I have seen male blackcaps singing along that stretch of path before, a year or two ago.  Zoe has also seen male and female ones in her great aunt's garden in Egham.