Dear Steve,
I found it very difficult to respond directly to Gilbert’s Letter XV. His world was very different to ours. If I see something like an unusual bird, I’d want to photograph it, and then use the internet to learn about the bird, in the meantime is hopefully working on its nest. Gilbert’s response, on the other hand, would be to shoot it, because that would be the only way he could get near enough to it for examining it. I can’t bring myself to condemn him for that. I don’t doubt I would have done the same in his time.
Feeding the birds, I noticed that a dropped mealworm was moving. A couple of days later, I decided to investigate further. Putting a mealworm near ants is likely to invite a response. I was watching the mealworm and a solitary ant investigated and attempted to move it. It didn’t take long for a group of ants to arrive. After they failed to move the worm, I decided to break it into three pieces. The ants were able to carry these off. Attempting to follow them with the camera proved impossible, what with their speed and my shakes. If I have a spare hour sometime, I may try again without breaking the worm up, just to see how much effort they are prepared to put in to moving the worm.
It was time to have another Look at Asterisms. The next u3a star gazing session is coming up. The constellation binoculars arrived, but I did not have an opportunity to use them until this week. This one night, the sky wasn’t fully clear, but Hercules was. I still wasn’t able to see the fourth star, but I did see some very faint satellites which weren’t visible with the naked eye. I’ll be thinking about what the next challenge might be. There are a few events (the moon getting near Jupiter, etc. I might say I’ll try to see as many of those events as I can.
I’ve had an exciting development on the vlogging front. I published a vlog on Friday, here’s the link
I’m hoping to do a vlog on the Letters to steve in the near future.
All the very best to you.
Bill
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