birds

Coastal Fishing

September 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

Pity the fish.

Hemingway was long presumed to have exhausted his creativity when he produced a novella out of the blue, so to speak. The Old Man and the Sea was first published in just one edition of Life magazine which sold 5,300,000 copies in two days. And that’s today’s story, a tale of five million likes in just a few 1951 days and zillions more since. Not bad for a book the literary critics say is among Hemingway’s least significant works. Perhaps that became easier to say after he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature on account of books like The Old Man and the Sea.

While on the subject of pity and fishing, here are seven photos of fishing activities and the like around the coast here in South County Dublin.

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Other People’s Words

September 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

Other people’s thoughts often provide the focus for my own musings. And I’ll admit that there are many days when I think that other people’s words convey my thoughts better than I can express them for myself. Today has been one of those days.

This seal isn’t alone surfacing for oxygen today.

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Bird Migration

August 15, 2020 by Simon Robinson 4 Comments

Jetting from London to Houston, with noise cancelling headphones isolating me from both a snoring neighbour and the rumble of our propulsion, I imagined a Bantu throwing a spear at a stork. I also wondered what it was like in 1822 when no one could imagine a White Stork making an annual round trip after breeding in Germany, going south of the equator in East Africa to avoid European winters. At that stage in our understanding, the ancient Greek idea that birds turned into fish for the winter was still popular.

Flamingoes over Lake Naivasha in Kenya 2005

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A Week In Three Photos

July 30, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The summer weather has not been kind here in Dublin. In a mock despair, we ended up doing a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table while it lashed rain. The puzzle took several days and it made an interesting photographic challenge once completed. How do you make a jigsaw interesting but different to the picture on the box? There are hundreds of ways but I wanted to do it with a tilt-shift adaptor on a 50 mm manual lens. I really like this photo with a focal emphasis on two tourists in front of an iconic London bus. It was raining there too.

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Radio Condor Skiing

July 22, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Three words to start today. Skiing came to mind when I was listening to a discussion about the Andean Condor on the car radio the other day. The enthusiastic recommendation was to go see a Condor on your travels. The reason the Condor was being discussed was the recent publication of studies based on GPS tracking plus a motion sensor that counted the bird’s wing strokes. There’s a science alert you can read on this subject if you want more. Meantime, for me, the most interesting part is not that a condor flew for more than five hours without beating its wings once. Sure, it flew over 170 kilometres using nothing but air currents. I’m pretty sure this has been happening for millions of years. What I want to know if it ‘sees’ the thermals or relies on something else entirely?

Albatrosses fly huge distance too. Same kind of problem. Dovetail this with how both species manage to stay aloft and you have an interesting chance to find something new. New ways of seeing our world perhaps?

Volcanoes of food sustained my writing today.

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Shaggy Fenec: Episode 1

July 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Imagine a shaggy dog story set in a desert. Let’s call it a shaggy fenec story because of a desert fox that liked chickens that pecked after scorpions and camel spiders.

‘There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.’

Spiders, scorpions and vipers v hens, turkeys and fenec.

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