Preening Pigeon

One grey misty misly morning I spotted this pigeon preening in a kowhai tree.

It was, I thought, a bit of a pointless task as it was raining and likely to keep on raining for some time to come. But this set me thinking, how would a pigeon know that? Aside from the weather forecast, we can have a look at the sky and based on previous experience assess whether the rain is likely to clear up. BUt do pigeon instincts cover weather?

Most pigeons, well feral rock pigeons, at least have incredibly homing instincts; which fact is exploited by those people who race pigeons. But do our native, big lumbering native New Zealand wood pigeons have a homing instinct?

My impression is that they are content to keep to local favourite locales. I'm not sure if they are territorial per se. It's hard to tell with the casual bird-watching that we indulge in from the windows of our house.

Mickey-Mouse Post-Colonial Writer

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world – for instance, the son’s concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley’s concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

Stick Insect

I took this photo of an as yet unidentified stick insect one evening. It was resting on some Oamaru limestone just by our front door.

It transpires that there are nine genera and twenty-two species - wouldn't you know it! According to the New Zealand Stick Insect website, there are two subfamilies. Being able to tell one species from another depends on the arrangement of body spines, size of body, and most importantly the structure of the male and female genitalia and morphology of the eggs. Given that eggs were nowhere to be seen, and I couldn't get close enough to investigate the poor beast's genitalia (even had I known what I was looking for) identification of this beastie is not going to be possible. However, based solely on distribution criteria and the fact that it was found effectively in our garden I am plumping for a member of one of the eight species of Acanthoxyla. They are usually green or brown (yes), have black tips to their spines (yes) and thrive on garden plants (yes), and to boot this specimen is about the right size!

Pudding and Praise

I judge the value of human pursuits by their bearing upon human interests; in other words, by their utility; but I should like that we should quite clearly understand what is meant by this word “utility.” In an Englishman’s mouth it generally means that by which we get pudding or praise, or both.

I have no doubt that is one meaning of the word utility, but it by no means includes all I mean by utility. I think knowledge of every kind is useful in proportion as it tends to give people right ideas, which are essential to the foundation of right practice, and to remove wrong ideas, which are no less essential foundations and fertile mothers of every description of error in practice. And inasmuch as, whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas, it is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.

Quotation from: A Lecture on the Study of Biology, in Connection with the Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus. (South Kensington Museum, December 16, 1876). by Thomas Henry Huxley.

Dog on the Beach

The rain kept on pouring Friday and Saturday. The gulls looked miserable.

So on Sunday after it stopped they went for the washed up kelp like mad things, only ...

to be disturbed by dogs running madly round. The beach was well patronised, walkers, runners, the old, the young, the very young in prams, and plenty of dogs - all relishing release from a week spent watching rain; stir crazy times.