Tue 2005-03-01 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.
Mon 2005-02-28 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.
Fri 2005-02-25 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.
Wed 2005-02-23 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/.
Mon 2005-02-21
On Sunday morning, before 8am, Zoe and I wrapped up well and went up to the University lakes armed with several slices of bread. The Sun was shining but there was ice on puddles and a cold north-easterly wind was blowing. As soon as we got to the large lake we saw the older pair of Egyptian geese (the rufous phase male with its lame grey phase female) with 5 chicks on the water. Zoe threw bread to them but the mother led her chicks away from us towards the wooded island. Maybe they had recently been fed by some one else? The female looked a lot thinner than when we had last seen her and we were disappointed that we were not able to feed her. We last saw her and her chicks clambering up the bank onto the island. Then the male went off to chase some mallards and Canada geese, even though these were nowhere near the island. The males Egyptian geese seem to have been particularly belligerent for the past month or two.
Zoe and I then moved off to the other end of the lake. There we saw the other younger pair of Egyptian geese (both rufous phase) with only 4 chicks. I took the above picture of the chicks with the female. The male was sat on the path and had an injured leg. Because of this he seemed to find it easier to fly than to walk. Zoe offered them bread and both the male and the female took it, and even the chicks pecked at some of the smaller pieces. Unfortunately the weather forecast is for the rest of this week to remain cold, so the chances of these chicks surviving is fairly small.
