Pochards

Yesterday morning I walked with round the Reading University lakes with Zoe.  On the large lake there were still a few shoveller ducks under the bushes on the north side.  We also saw three brown headed grey ducks which I hadn't seen before.  Their backs were light grey and their side an even lighter grey.  On getting back home I was able to tentatively identify them as common pochards (Aythya ferina).

Update on Sun 2009-02-01 by Tristram Brelstaff

We saw one of them yesterday, in with a group of shoveller ducks.

Cold

I knew it was too good to last.  Having not had a single day off work due to illness in 15 months, I do two weeks as a teaching assistant and come down with a cold.  I noticed two children sniffling and sneezing in the class I was helping on Wednesday, and on Thursday evening I was sniffling and sneezing myself.  On Friday morning I prepared Zoe's breakfast and saw her off to school.  With her guitar on her back she looked like a himalayan sherpa (she is taking guitar lessons with Berkshire Maestros).  Then I went back to sleep until after 10am. 

Infections are the bane of new teachers.  Back when I was a lab technician, I remember a new female teacher being being laid low for most of her first term by a particularly nasty series of colds and 'flu.  Hopefully, I won't be as bad as that.  I have mentioned before that I regard children as vectors of disease.  And schools might have been specifically designed to maximize the efficiency of those vectors.

Silk Button Spangle Galls

Oak trees seem to be host to an unusual number of parasites.  Just by casual inspection I have been able to identify six different types of insect galls on the oak trees in the grounds of Reading University.  The above photo shows one of these, the silk button spangle gall.  Like the smooth spangle gall that, I blogged about here, this is found on the underside of leaves and contains one stage in the development of a type of small wasp (in this case the species Neuroterus numismalis).

Photo taken in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2008-09-02.

Translation

On Monday I sat in on an English lesson for children with very poor English.  At one point the teacher was having difficulty communicating with a Slovak boy, so she got a Polish boy to talk to him in Polish.  Apparently, Polish is similar enough to Slovak to be understandable.

Angle Error

This afternoon I was assisting in a maths lesson where two children independently made the same error:  they both read the above angle as 160°.  They seemed to be interpreting the curved arc as a leading 1 of the number.  The original diagram on the board, although hand-drawn, seemed quite clear to me, but it obviously wasn't to them.