These must have blown in with the storm, and brought their log with them.
I thought I’d almost finished with the birdspotting series. Someone told me where to see a kingfisher, but it’s too wet to try out, and my nuthatch picture was not very good. I could post the green woodpecker, I suppose.
Cormorants swim very low in the water.
The plague of the common vole (Microtus arvalis, Feldmaus) in Spain this year has led to desperate measures such as burning.
Such drastic measures are only permitted by European Union officials in exceptional circumstances and many observers are questioning why the EU has wasted so much time and money in dragging voles through the courts on previous occasions when burning them to death is so much quicker, cheaper and effective.
This precept could be applied to many court cases.
It’s a shame they are not the right food for the vultures that have now emigrated to the Netherlands after carcasses were no longer left out on the hills.
I’m not sure that driving the voles with ultrasound to where they can be burned or drowned is quite the same as the Pied Piper of Hamelin luring them away with music. But perhaps the playing of various instruments in Villotilla is?
According to my book on European mammals, the common vole is breeds faster than any other mammal. One vole lives for 4 – 5 months and can produce 500 descendants in that time. If the population is too dense, they attack each other and may even eat weaker ones. The situation improves when there is mass death, usually at the beginning of the cold weather.
Thanks to Trevor, who is taking the vole plague with equanimity.
Can anyone identify this? I don’t take enough photos of insects (all my dragonfly shots have been failures), but this actually came indoors.
This is fairly close.
Now closer – at a German site for identifying moths and butterflies, it looks like Phragmatobia fuliginosa (Zimtbär – Ruby tiger moth – borealis? more brown than red on top).
I really should be doing something else, at least cleaning that floor. The insect has disappeared, so I never photographed its underwings.
Here are some pictures for those who have missed the events of the last weeks in Bavaria.
As I have run out of current trivia, here is a photo of a window in Carey Street in London, behind the Royal Courts of Justice and near the Seven Stars, and a close-up of part of the window (somewhat lightened).
LATER NOTE: This turned out to be the pub cat Tom Paine, of the Seven Stars.
According to a dpa report I’ve only seen in English, at Expatica, a German lawyer is suing a German state, Bavaria I presume, for interfering with his constitutional right to enjoy nature:
Munich (dpa) – A lawyer has sued a German state on behalf of a dead bear, a spokesman for a tribunal in Munich said Friday, four months after Bruno the badly behaved bruin was shot.
The lawyer argues it was illegal to declare open season on Bruno, an Italian-born animal that was the first wild bear to roam Bavaria state for 170 years. Officials said it was likely to attack people.
…The lawyer, acting in his own name, is trying a different tack, suing at a tribunal that reviews administrative decisions and citing his constitutional right to enjoy the fruits of nature. The case could take several months to decide, the spokesman said in Munich.
I presume that by tribunal they mean an administrative court, the Verwaltungsgericht. Just because we don’t have administrative courts in England, I don’t see it as a reason to downgrade the German ones in translation!
By the way, Expatica has some interviews with people working in Germany: an English teacher, a journalist, and someone in the NGO sector.