Walking Down Creek Fen

The Goldfinches were everywhere, chirping away as Carole and I strolled down Creek Fen towards the River Nene. It was a smashing day and the late afternoon stroll was the cherry on the cake. The fields were bright yellow with the rapeseed that has suddenly flowered everywhere.

Still, the many birds were the best. I snapped a kingfisher with my camera, which I've already put on the blog. But there were other grand things too.

Weasel and the Woodpecker

From March 15th 2015

My wife, Carole and I went to Hornchurch in Essex today and passed Hornchurch country park on the way to my Dad's house. He lives in Elm Park, Hornchurch. When we arrived, he had the news on the television. There was the usual news of politics and crime but then on a light-hearted note, the news team showed a picture of a weasel attacking a Green Woodpecker. It was one of those charming little aside pictures that an amateur photographer caught perfectly.

Weasels are tiny little carnivorous creatures that are very fierce and territorial. However, they are very small, about the size of a small chocolate bar. This one attacked a Green Woodpecker that flew off in a panic with vicious little weasel upon the back.

We were surprised to hear it was at the very country park we had driven past. Our little patch on national TV. The photographer took loads of shots according to the news and this one was caught wonderfully. 

The woodpecker went down again and as it hit the ground the weasel sped off after his unexpected flight. No doubt leaving Green Woodpeckers off of his menu in future.

Tagging Bees (TXCHNOLOGIST magazine article)

Taken from :
http://txchnologist.com/post/92641625085/rfid-tags-show-elite-bees-are-made-not-born-by

Some bees in a hive have a right to complain. Researchers studying individual foraging behavior found that a minority group of elite colony members work much harder than others. 

By attaching tiny radio frequency identification tags to the backs of bees, University of Illinois scientists realized that 20 percent of bees that leave the nest to forage account for 50 percent of the total food brought back.

“We found that some bees are working very, very hard – as we would have expected,” said lead researcher Gene Robinson, who heads the university’s Institute for Genomic Biology. “But then we found some other bees that were not working as hard as the others.”

Read more and check out the video below.

Robinson said previous research had uncovered elite foraging corps in other social insects.

"Workers in many eusocial insect species show a phenomenon sometimes referred to as ‘elitism’, in which a small proportion of individual workers engaged in a task perform a disproportionately large fraction of the work achieved by the colony as a whole," they write in an article published in the journal Animal Behavior. “This phenomenon has not been well studied for foraging behaviour in honeybees (Apis mellifera) because detailed observational studies of foraging activity have been limited by the difficulty of successfully tracking large numbers of individual workers.”

The thought had been that the difference between the great and the average was genetic. But tracking so many busy bees’ comings and goings from a number of colonies revealed that elites arose because of environmental and social factors. After elite bees were taken out of a colony, others increased their work to pick up the slack.

"Other bees upped their game considerably," Robinson said, "and started acting in the way we would have described for the elite bees."

The UI team report that a new crop of elite workers filled the void by increasing their activity level almost five-fold within 24 hours after removing the elite foragers. They hypothesize that there may be colony-level regulation of elite foraging behavior and that the majority that work less hard serve as a ready reserve when elites die.

"In beekeeping there’s something called the wisdom of the hive, when you can’t really explain what’s going on but the hive does something…that looks like intelligence," said Paul Tenczar, a citizen scientist who developed the bee tagging technique and conducted the research. "The wisdom of the hive has responded by making new elite bees as needed."

Read entire article Here

http://txchnologist.com/post/92641625085/rfid-tags-show-elite-bees-are-made-not-born-by

Barn Owl Hunting in the Fens

Taking Sasha, our puppy German Shepard, for a walk along the Creek Fen Road, there were loads of things of interest. The field were fool of poppies growing in the wheat. We met a farmer who said they were a pain but did not do a great deal of damage to his wheat crop. He was checking for black grass, which he said was more of a danger for his wheat. 

There were various wild flowers growing along the hedge rows and loads of birds. We spotted a number of barn owls but they were to far for me to capture on camera. That is, until I got close to the River Nene. Carole saw one by a grassy mound and called, "Look at that."

To my delight, there was a barn owl hovering about where we had seen young rabbits scatter into the long grass. They were obviously trying to evade the bird of prey.

I must have got about thirty shots, but only a few come out with any clarity. We also saw another barn owl at distance, across the River Nene. It was flying across a field. The picture is good because of the wheat crop and the cottage etc. The barn owl is hardly noticeable, but it gives some idea of how many owls are in the Fens now days. Their population is increasing and farmers are encouraged to put up owl boxes to attract them.

Of course there were lots of other good things going on as well, besides the delight of owls hunting. We had a lovely summer afternoon walk from our house into the Fens, chatting away and clicking the camera at this and that.