h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

New favourite - p55. That one is art. I can see it in stain glass.


Meanwhile DOT No 551.2 (http://www.health-safety-signs.uk.com/cgi/products.pl?sign=DOT%20No%20551.2%20Beware%20of%20Wild%20fowl) is added to the shopping list.

An update.

Sir Severn-TrentaLot arrived in his trusty white van, located the spring bubbling up from the earth a foot away from the paving slab and stoppethed the flood. There were immediate rolls of thunder and flashes of lightning, quickly followed by hailstones (absolutely true) so it obviously wasn't a benign source of water. Just as well the bottling operation hadn't started.


Sir Severn-TrentaLot is mystified. Three stop-cocks were unearthed from the verge. Turning one off reduced the flood significantly but didn't stop it, and didn't stop anyone's water supply eiher. Turning a second one off completely stopped the flood, again, it appears, without turning anyone's water off. Which means that although there are three stop-cocks on the verge, the set of four houses are all on the same one and the other two are on pipes that serve no known purpose.

Which means no risk of my having to pay anyone to dig up my front garden looking for pipes, but the water meadow and the toads' (now three of them) swimming pool will disappear.

Which is good as I need, fingers crossed, the £s to pay for going to Iceland and going sight-seeing around their ... hot-springs and geysers.



But they have whimbrels with theirs.

And volcanoes

And whales

Well anyway, it's more or less sorted. The neighbours weren't too keen on the brook, the village will have to look elsewhere for a water feature.

What's a whimbrel?

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/w/whimbrel/index.asp

Press the 'Play' button. Fantastic sound.

Wow.

But isn't that a curlew?

No

Curlew -> http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/c/curlew/index.asp

Bigger, commoner and has a less clear eyebrow effect. And sounds different. And my sister crows about all the whimbrels she's seen. That's just not right because I'm older.

I kept a bird diary once. This beautiful young girl I knew loved birds, and loved to draw them, and she had a copy of the Readers' Digest Book of British Birds (how unromantic is this?), and she made fabulous pencil drawings of the birds inside.

So I started a diary in a little A6 red and black, and I recorded where and when I next saw each bird in the book. I got into three figures, but the new sightings inevitably became rare and the book was misplaced.

The Weddell's book with the pictures is still here, though. I can see it in the bookcase as I type. I can imagine the tawny owl on the front, and I can see in my mind's eye my future wife's rendition of it, her magnum opus. She was just fourteen years old when she drew it. It took her six weeks to finish, and now it lives unseen in a chest at the foot of our bed. It's very nearly a perfect copy, except that it's more alive. The light in its eyes is thrilling. It's the finest piece of draughtsmanship I'll ever see, and one day I will frame it and give it pride of place on a wall.

You should. Didn't you say it was on a book cover once?

My b-in-laws' bird watching enthusiasm was aquired after he met my sister. They watched gannets wheeling below, from cliffs, while on honeymoon.

This is the book.
It's more recent editions have a very inferior barn owl in place of the beautiful tawny.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AA-READERS-DIGEST-%22BOOK-OF-BRITISH-BIRDS%22-1989_W0QQitemZ250205189967QQcmdZViewItem

I can see why someone would want to draw that. It's much more than the usual bird ID picture. It's pretty alive in that version.

I've seen a tawny look just like that. My sister and I came across one once, sitting on a river bank with its eyes shut. We crawled close, one either side and it sensed us at about four foot away. Opened its eyes, lokked round at one of us then swivelled its head all the way round to look at the other. Then took off. It was by the river Monnow, I'll never forget it.

The bird book that got me was my father's South African field guide. The plates of jewel-like sunbirds and bee-eaters... He still has it.

Hey Waz, sorry to hear about the stoppething up of the new water feature! At any rate ... which South African bird guide was that? Roberts? Anyways I now mainly use the guide to the Birds of Africa. It's incredible what a diversity of birds exist on this continent. So far I've only seen about a sixth of them.

Don't be sorry, I spoketh too soon, it has restartededeth. Sir SevernTrentaLot is due back next Friday.

It's coming up, clearly running water, about two foot from the previous place. Doesn't make any sense at all, this. It's a fair amount of water, but not getting as far as the road anymore (just as well in winter, really) before draining. Presumably into that sand and gravel glacial deposit the village is built on.

The bird guide was around in the 1950s, I'll have to check whose it was next I'm round at my parents'. At the time it was the closest he could find to use for East Africa.

Well Waz, East Africa does indeed share many birds with Southern Africa. But there are few others over there as well.

BTW that is a nice Tawny Owl picture. I think they're lovely! I did a 'batik' picture of a tawny owl once.

I like the tawny owl pictured in that Beatric Potter story about the squirrel! The Afrikaans version is called 'Die Verhaal van Dobbertjie'. I think in English it's 'Squirrel Nutkin.

I would be very interested to know what toad species are braving the cold weather for the sake of splashing around in such a temporary wetland.

OOPS a typo! It's 'Die Verhaal van Doppertjie'. A 'dobbertjie' in Afrikaans is a dabchick!

Toad species... digi camera ... ...

Not there! Wouldn't you know. I'll catch them later.

But I video'd the spring... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PcI-LiICBZ8 Not very well, but you can see it bubbling up in the middle. Background singers aren't bad.

Took a while because first there were two loose horses running around down by the pub(now ok), and then we had another conflab over the stop-cocks. Turning number three off stops my water in the house and has no effect on the spring.

Very nice little spring, there, Waz. Just think: you don't even have to have a pump to keep your water flowing.

It's all go where you are LLWaz We have several springs around here like that, that keep resurfacing. We are under ST too, and they stopped one lot which turned out to be from a house, piped water, but there are others which run under houses and bubble up in gardens.

When it progresses to the street we have a ready made skating rink Our water table is apparently very high so it doesn't take much for things to overflow.

I hope you are sorted soon.
Websailor

Sir SevernTrentaLotMoreSenior said that the stop cock(s) is(are) bypassing on pipe(s) that are probably obsolete and have blown their end-caps possibly when SevernTrent had the pumping engines on to make up for the booster that was off due to the massive leak under the booster station that was the very devil to find on Manor House Lane somewhere off the A49 on the same Tuesday that I noticed the drive had got exceedingly squelchy when I got home in the dark.

I nodded.

He said he'd send some men round next week with spades and drove off in an impressive white landrover with a life-boat sticker on it.

That happened to me once, a problem with a rigid PVC pipe system that cracked every time we got a tremor from the (fairly) nearby Tahquitz Canyon fault system. Still worse it was on my side of the meter and I'd been gone two weeks before I returned to discover it. (Twenty four hours of a tap water run is enough to fill an average backyard swimming pool.)
I replaced the PVC joint with a 300 psi flex hose and haven't had problems with it since. (That and turning off the meter and locking it whenever I'm away for any very protracted time.)

Reminds me of program I saw on a discovery of an ancient Roman spring water diversion opted from BBC to History International, still operational in the 1990s.