Birding pleasures

I woke up to another day without covid symptoms. Clare is slowly improving, and we're hoping that she'll be clear by Saturday so we can go to the performance of the new Wriggledance show 'Squidge' in Bath. It was fifteen degrees yesterday, but today it's twelve and overcast, but feels like nine degrees. 

Before lunch, I wrote next week's biblical reflection on the seventh plague in the Exodus story. Interesting to examine the story with fresh eyes and see the catalogue of plagues as symptomatic of ecosystem changes triggered by big weather disturbances. North Africa was once a verdant sub-tropical environment. For a couple of millennia before the time of the Exodus story, Egypt had been populous and wealthy, engaging in big engineering projects to construct cities, temples, monuments pyramids and canal extensions to the Nile waterway. Making a built environment in a huge flood plain region would be bound to have an impact on its ecosystems and on local weather cycles in turn. 

What interests me is how the story tellers portray Moses taking advantage of rare natural occurrences to put pressure on Pharaoh to free the Israelites. The death of the first-born sons doesn't easily fit into this however, although an outbreak of some disease causing child deaths isn't out of the question. But we'll never know whether it was based on fact or is a narrative fiction.

Yesterday I bought a big pack of chicken legs for me to use, and rather than freeze them raw, they went into the oven for lunch today, along with roasted veggies, one of Clare's favourites, taking advantage of the oven's heat. When cooled down there'll be a place for them in the freezer and keep me fed for a week or two.

On my walk down to the Taff later in the afternoon, I spotted two pairs of Goosanders swimming in the pool below Blackweir Bridge, about five hundred metres upstream from their habitual roosting place on a rock outcrop in the river. They looked like Mum and Dad out with last year's daughter with a spare male in tow. They swam in an uneasy formation with Dad positioning himself to shield the females from the interloper's attention. Occasionally Dad would make an aggressive lunge at the interloper. Then the four headed back downstream, and the young female slipped past Mum and Dad and headed off to join the interloper. It made me laugh out loud. A hundred metres downstream, a cormorant was perched on a rock drying its wings by flapping them slowly. A great sight, very photogenic. 

Leaves are bursting out on many of the chestnut trees around the Fields at the moment. This waterside bush was bare when I passed by last week. Very beautiful and uplifting.

Now that many of the species of daffodil, crocuses and snowdrops are past their best. if not vanishing, I've noticed new different flowers in sheltered spots. I can't identify them yet as my botanical knowledge is very limited.

In news of the Ukraine peace negotiations the Russians are proposing to halt the stalled assault on Kyiv and concentrate on a deal regarding the Donbass. Putin will hardly admit the military failure, unless the real Russian casualty toll gets  out to the public. It's regarded as a pause to re-group forces for the next assault. Continued Kremlin reference to the 'denazification' of Ukraine is seen by observers as coded talk about regime change. Nobody trusts Putin or his negotiators anyway. Ukraine is willing to concede neutrality but how this could work without an external monitoring agency is unclear if not impossible to agree at this stage.