Not so much Fly as Plummet...

A Pythonesque tree-climbing goat of Morocco.  Apparently these goats like the fruit of the Argan tree.  More details here.  A Flickr photo by K. Horn

My Short Illustrious Collaboration with Sir Francis Crick by David Ng

From a short article in The Science Creative Quarterly:

CRICK: Is that your Ford Escort?
ME: Yes it is.
CRICK: It’s in my parking spot.  Can you move it?
ME: Yes, definitely.  Sorry about that.
CRICK: No worries.

But the best bit for me is the last sentence:

I just thought it was cool that his license plate read “ATCG”.

Birds of the Week

In the half-dark of Tuesday morning, a heron laboriously flapped up from the bank of the Kennet.  A  carrion crow flew up behind it and made as if to nip at the heron's tail but the heron just carried on upwards, and then turned north towards the Thames. The crow swooped back down to the bank, as if satisfied at having driven the off the large intruder, but I suspect that the heron hadn't even noticed it.

On Thursday evening, under a cold clear sky, a red kite gliding northwards over the Polish Catholic Church on Watlington Street, forked tail and outstretched wings that didn't beat for the whole of the 30 seconds that it was within my view.

Goshawking

Pluvialis and her goshawk have been out enjoying the late autumn sun:

Today I walked up to the crest of a hill on this freezing, smoky afternoon, the whole Cambridgeshire countryside laid out in front in woods and fields and copses beneath us, all bosky and bright with golden sunshine, and I can see that what the gos wants to do is launch a prospecting attack on the hedgerow over the rise.  I let her go. Her tactical sense is magnificent.  She drops from the fist, and sets off, no higher than a hands-width above the ground, using every inch of the undulating relief as cover, gathering speed until the frosty stubble winks and flashes under her, until she curves over the top of the hill, and then she sets her wings and glides, using gravity and momentum to race downhill, flash up over the top of the hedge in a sudden flowering of cream and white, a good hundred yards away, and then continue down the hedge’s far side, invisible to me.  I’m running, all this time, my feet caked with mud, feeling earth-bound but transported at the same time.

Danegeld

Danegeld was a sort of protection money extorted from Anglo-Saxon kings by Viking and Danish raiders in the years between about 850 and 1020.  The extraction of Danegeld was so extensive that, according to Sven B. Jansson, more English penny coins from that period have been found in Sweden than in England.