My colleagues and I attended a brief introduction to an Information security, records management and data protection workshop during our lunch break. I found it ridiculous that such an important issue was slotted for only an hour and not made compulsory for all staff to attend. I wished that they had given us links to the websites to be read first before we attended. This was because they showed us the links, gave a very brief introduction and asked us if there were any questions????? when we weren’t given any chance to read. Most of us highlighted that in the feedback form.
On the weekend, it was my annual trip to London to catch up with a bit of urban busyness, culture and off course friends. HI, SP and I had been planning this trip since June (?) but we just couldn’t confirmed the date where we could make it. It was a huge relief when we finally agreed on this date. We had an early start from Coventry with a huge mug of hot tea and cookies for HI and hot chocolate for me. We were so busy yakking that we didn’t realise that we’d arrived in London. SP was already there and after the obligatory hugging, we started our adventure.
~Walter Cronkite~
We later freshened up and got ready to check out ‘Oceania’ an exhibition that explored the art past and present of the Pacific Islands at the Royal Academy which was just next door. We were so grateful that SP managed to get a pair of complimentary tickets for us. The exhibition marked 250 years since the British explorer Captain James Cook first journeyed to the region and it coincided with the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy. Oceania was the first ever major survey of Oceanic art held in the UK.
The Royal Academy’s exhibition Oceania presented the region’s distinctive landscape as a vital and deeply interconnected highway that linked Pacific peoples together in a network of dynamic exchange and encounter. It included an astonishing array of some 200 artworks, ranging from 14th-century carving to 21st-century painting. The show was structured around three key themes that guided the visitor and reinforced the close conceptual underpinnings that connected what appeared to be radically distinct art traditions. “Voyaging” evoked the extraordinary story of navigation across this vast landscape, presenting the arts associated with ocean travel: decorated paddles and immaculately executed fishhooks were accorded ritual, as well as practical, purpose; exquisitely carved canoe sterns and highly embellished prow figures from the Solomon Islands were inlaid with sections of shell designed to catch the light.
A second theme – “Making Place” – explored the extraordinarily innovative ways in which Islanders created and inhabited homelands in these vastly distinctive geographies, establishing dwellings on sacred sites where they might interact with their gods in the strip of existence afforded them between ocean and sky. The artworks in this section told a multitude of stories relating to origins, ancestral power, performance, secrecy and initiation. They included some of the great masterpieces of Oceanic art, such as carved and elaborately painted façades of ceremonial houses, crocodile reliquaries from the Sepik region of New Guinea and spectacular turtle shell masks from the Torres Strait Islands.
The final theme – “Encounter” – explored a range of defining moments grounded in early indigenous encounters that consumed rival clans in inter-island warfare and localised raids that sought to settle disputes and restore cosmological balance. The Enlightenment era of scientific exploration, which began in earnest with Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific region in 1768– the year in which the Royal Academy of Arts was founded by Royal Charter – launched a dramatic new epoch of encounter between the Oceanic cultures now long-established in the region and the emerging European nations whose tall-masted ships now ventured into the maritime theatre of the Pacific. This colonial encounter was seismic in scale, and its reeling effects are still being processed by indigenous peoples today – it kick-started an era marked as much by misunderstanding, violence and tragedy as by the sharing and mutual curiosity of “discovery”.
Pacific artworks remained a vital cultural resource for both sides of this extraordinary and entangled era of encounter. Expansive in its vision, Oceania gave visitors a strong sense of the range of values that have been imposed over time upon these singularly impressive objects. Those brought back to England by early explorers such as Cook lined the shelves of 18th-century cabinets, as specimens of intellectual curiosity. Other works on view became salvaged trophies that gauged the successes of English evangelicals from the London Missionary Society, who were active in the region from 1797 onwards.
Customary traditions and protocol remained alive in the Pacific region. Many of the major loans for Oceania were accompanied by tribal elders who had been overseeing appropriate cultural protocols for these ancestral treasures when they were installed. These treasured heirlooms were not valued simply because they survive from an earlier era; they were understood as vectors of spiritual power, or mana. As remnants of the past, they bore the traces of the ancestral hands that fashioned them. Yet they were understood as not just made by ancestors – they were ancestors. Ritual protocols included the rhythmic and steady recitation of chants by elders skilled in the arts of oratory, and served to animate and activate ongoing relationships between the living and the dead, with those who have gone before but who were recognised as continuously present in the cultural heirlooms and artworks on display. Pacific artworks was understood as having agency; bridging the past with the present, they actively engaged the community with its past, channelling and invigorating ancestral relations at appropriate times.
It was a huge exhibition and there was so much to absorb. It was also the first exhibition I attended that photography was encouraged. Unfortunately due to poor lighting and the large number of people, I wasn’t able to take as many photographs as I liked. This was especially so when you needed to be quite a distance away from the objects and there were people photobombing. Another thing which I found lacking was was that was no one around to answer any questions. You have to rely on the notes that accompanied each object. All in all it was a wonderful experience.
After about 2 hours, our tummies were rumbling and it was time for a late lunch. As we walked out of the neoclassic building into the Annenberg Courtyard, we were greeted by an eerie surprise. Cornelia Parker’s Psycho Barn was inspired by the quaint, yet deeply unsettling homestead from Alfred’s Hitchcock classic Psycho and Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting, House by the Railroad. The 30-foot tall installation wasn’t a real house. It was a scaled-down facade, made from repurposed strips of wood from an American Red Barn. According to the artist, it confronted the polarities of good and evil. The installation first appeared on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC in 2016.
We found it surprisingly hard to find a place to eat which wasn’t a fast-food restaurant and within our pocket range. Some were either full and some had ran out of food. Finally, we found a quirky, hipster, vegan cafe tucked in a corner. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name and what I ate. I think it was a quesadilla washed down with a hot lemon grass tea. We didn’t stay long because we’d a train to catch. On the way to Euston, we walked past Liberty and we just had to stop and had a quick browse. The place was packed and beautifully decorated for Christmas. I bought a very expensive Xmas bauble as a momento to be added to our tree. Then it was a brisk walk to the station. We’d a lovely time in London with SP and made promises to do it again next year.
When I was away in London, Babe was at our favourite playground where he photographed this handsome fox on Wigeon bank. The natives in the reserve used this bank as a highway to move from one end to another. As it walked across, it stopped to survey the ground. Foxes ate virtually everything, from rodents to amphibians, insects, earthworms, fruits, berries to leftovers scavenged from humans. They played an important role in our ecosystem, primarily through the control of rodent and rabbit population which could decimate our crops and plantations.
He was looking magnificent with his reddish-brown fur, a white chest and a bushy, white-tipped tail called a brush. Foxes were primarily crepuscular, meaning usually active at dusk and during the night, searching alone for food. We were very lucky to have foxes visiting our semi-rural garden. We also often put dog food out and the bones from our roast for them, if the neighbourhood cats don’t get them first. From time to time,during the cold winter nights, an eerie screeching sound echoed around us. A vixen was signalling to the males that she was ready to mate.
Babe had also photographed a Little Grebe swimming past the Baldwin hide. Also known as Dabchick, it was UK smallest grebe. It was now in its dull brown winter colour with a pale and fluffy rear. The lack of a tail made it buoyant and usually swam with the undertail feathers fluffed up. A great diver and readily dived when disturbed, surfacing unseen some distance away. Little Grebes were solitary feeders but formed small groups when foraging for food in the winter. Their diet was mainly small fishes, insects, crustaceans, frogs and shellfish. I was pleased to see them again as I’ve not seen them in the reserve for some time.
We made our first trip to Donna Nook this year. We’d been diligently checking the weather forecasts, the seal count board and the RAF planes scheduled for their target practice. It was a 3 hour drive and we wanted to make maximum use of it. The first pup was born on 22nd October and from the Twitter feed, more had been born and more people had been visiting them. I took Friday off to avoid the weekend congestion at the site. We left early at 7 am so that we could get a parking space at the Stonebridge car-park. It was 8.4C and the sun was slowly rising. We saw skeins of Canada geese flying over us at Newark. We hit the 8.30am rush hour traffic at Lincoln and drove past Lincoln Cathedral shrouded in the haze. We stopped at Wragby for a comfort break and had coffee to warm up because it was freezing.
We arrived at the car-park at 9.45am and it was nearly full!!! After parking and wrapping up very warm, we finally waddled our way to the viewing point. It was freezing and the high winds didn’t helped either. Babe was very lucky to have spotted and photographed this cute Gold Crest flitting among the foliage, foraging for food when we walked past the bramble bushes. It was UK’s smallest bird, and was characterised by its yellow-orange crest. It was hunting for tiny morsels like spiders, moth eggs and other smaller insects.
As we trekked along the chestnut-paling fence that ran the entire length of the viewing area, pups of different stages of growth with their protective mothers were scattered along the beach, among the sand-dunes and reed-beds. Their whimpering cries were echoing around us. We checked out the board and there were 415 pups born so far, along with 652 cows and 284 bulls. It was still early in the season and the number changes every day with new cows and pups arriving.
There were plenty of heart warming scenes where mothers were nursing their pups. Females were the sole providers of care for their pups while the males provided no parental care. It was lovely watching the intimate interactions between them. A bond was formed between mother and pup at birth, and she could recognised her pup from its call and smell. Pups with their mournful cries were often heard calling to their mothers. Mothers were encouraging the pups to feed by scratching their faces. Pups suckled for 3 weeks during which their weight tripled and gradually lost their pale coat. In the meantime, the mothers lost half of their body fat during lactation as they weren’t feeding.
Each pup we encountered was cuter than the one before, looking at us with their glossy black eyes like coal, lolling on the tussocky sand. Appearing in shining white colour when born, called languno, kept them warm until they developed an insulating layer of blubber from their mother’s milk. They kept this distinct white coat for two weeks + when the fur darkened and began to shed as they matured. After 16+ days, at the weaning stage, the pups lost their white coat and had the unique grey/dark grey pelage and patterning that remained the same through adulthood. These adorable pups were very close to the fence, checking out the visitors who were busy checking them out, under the watchful eyes of their possessive mothers. If anyone got too close, the warning hisses, growls and waving flippers were issued.
We had missed out on the bulls fighting as most of the territories had been staked out by now. The males tended to be darker than females and had the noticeably arched ‘Roman‘ nose and thickset shoulders, wrinkled appearances and very dark, finely mottled coats. When the females were ready, their uterus developed a fluid-filled sack containing an egg and hormonal changes made her receptive to the advances made by the males. Grey seals were ‘capital breeders’. This was a term which meant that not only do they spent a short time with their offspring before weaning, but also that during their stay on the colony, both males and females fasted, obtaining all their energetic requirements from the metabolism of fat reserves or blubber. Their fast could be more than 20 days for females and over 50 days for males.
From time to time, skeins of Pink-footed geese flew overhead in their characteristic V-formation. As they flew in and out of the mud-flats, we could hear their loud, honking calls.These geese were winter visitors to the UK, feeding on the nearby farmland, selecting stubbles, managed grasslands, cereals and root crops. They then flew back to the sheltered coastal bays to roost. They flew here from Greenland and Iceland in October to spend the winter, and returning back in April for their breeding season.
The radio scanner crackled and we could hear some loud rumblings high up in the sky. We scanned the sky above us but we couldn’t see any aircraft. Whatever military craft was flying was doing its practice run in the sea. The wildlife were unfazed by the planes. They were used to it as Donna Nook was an active military range since WWW1 and was established as a protection point from Zeppelins trying to enter the Humber area. The seals didn’t bat an eyelid. The waders and wildfowls were much more aware of raptors such as Merlins, Marsh Harriers and Kestrels flushing them up into the air. Large charm of colourful Goldfinches were busy feeding on the teasels and orange sea buckthorn on the dunes.
Then it was a slow walk back to the car. We stopped and took hundreds more photographs which was a challenge because more people were pouring in. I couldn’t imagine the numbers on the weekend when the narrow lanes, car park and viewing area became very congested. As we walked past the bushes, we spotted this Red Admiral enjoying the late autumn sunshine. We’d a picnic in the car before heading home. When we drove past the farmer’s land which was used as a car-park, the parking charge had risen to £4!!!. What. That will be a nightmare for the Trust as visitors would start parking on the very narrow lanes, blocking exits and entrances.
The next day, we stretched our legs with a visit to Slimbridge WWT. We must be loco after yesterday’s long distance drive. We left the casa at 9 am and the mercury was at 8.5C. It was bright and sunny, a lovely day to be out and about. We headed straight to Rushy Hide where hundreds of Northern Pintails greeted us. The Pintail was nicknamed “the Greyhound of the Air” due to their swift & elegant appearance in flight. Male ducks, known as drakes, were due to their long tapering tails, which have central feathers. Drakes had beautiful breeding plumage, with chocolate brown heads and white stripes draping each side of their neck extending into a white patch on their breast. Their backs and sides were grey, with black stripes on their wings and shoulders. Their bills and legs were bluish grey in colour. Females had a brownish colour and a uniformly grey head, and their tail feathers were significantly shorter.
It was unthinkable that Pintails were a 'quarry' species, meaning that they could be legally shot in winter. They were not very vocal most of the time, but when they were the females vocalization was a hoarse “quack”, while the males was a whistle-like “kwee” sound. They were usually among the first birds to begin migrating in the fall and spring. Northern Pintails were enduring fliers and were known to make trans-Atlantic flights, as birds tagged on the east coast of North America had been found days later in Europe. They were dabbling ducks, primarily feeding on grasses, aquatic plants, and plant seeds, and also eat invertebrates, crustaceans, insects, frogs, and small fish.. The long neck allowed it to dabble for food that may be up to 1 foot under water, which is beyond the range of several other dabbling ducks, like the Mallards and the Pochards.
I was so pleased to see about half a dozen Pochards foraging nearby. We’d not seen them for ages. Most of the birds in the UK came from northern and eastern Europe for the winter, with just a few pairs staying to nest. The males were very distinctive with bright reddish-brown head, a black breast and tail and a pale grey body. Females were more easily confused with other species; they were brown with a greyish body and pale cheeks.Females gave hoarse growls. Males had whistles cut off by a final nasal note aaoo-oo-haa. They fed mainly by diving or dabbling for aquatic plants with molluscs, aquatic insects and small fishes.
We then checked the rest of the hides but there was nothing much about on the tack field except for the usual Lapwings, Pintails, Canada Geese, Teals and Tufted ducks. The tide must be out and most of the natives were feeding on the mudflats. We checked Willow Hide and wasn’t disappointed when the usually secretive and shy Water rail turned up. At first, it was extremely hard to see, preferring to stay hidden in thick vegetation. It foraged for food by wading through shallows in and among tall reeds, occasionally appearing at the edge. The long, red bill probed the soft ground or shallow water for insects and seeds from the bird-feeder. Suddenly, it disappeared once more into the sanctuary of the reed-bed, showing off the white flash beneath the cocked tail, before the bird disappeared once more into the sanctuary of the reed-bed.
We headed back to Rushy Hide to see if anything turned up. The Pintails, Shelducks, Pochards, Teals and Gulls were having a siesta. A Redhank was busy foraging along the water’s sedge, hunting for insects, earthworms, molluscs and crustaceans by probing its bill into the soil and mud. As its name suggested, Redshanks' most distinctive features were their bright orange-red legs. They had a medium-length bill with an orange base to match, brown speckled back and wings and paler belly. Large numbers of Redshank fly here from Iceland to spend the winter around our coasts.
After a picnic in the car-park, we made our way home. As soon as we drove across the Patch Bridge that crossed over the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, we came across a very long, line of cars parked on both sides of the road. We crawled slowly and suddenly nearing the village, there was a massive gridlock. No one was moving. After about 20 minutes, we began to move very s-l-o-w-l-y. As we drove past the St John the Evangelist Church, I noticed "Ghostlike" sculptures in the churchyard. Since the traffic was stalled, I quickly ran out with my camera and snapped a sculpture standing silently, outside the village hall.
How I wished I’d seen these sculptures on the drive up but I guess, it hadn’t been installed yet. They were sculptures of life-size figures of 11 soldiers who died in World War One. Sculptor Jackie Lantelli had created them out of chicken wire, looking like ghosts and were positioned at the foot of graves of the fallen. The art installation had caught the public's imagination with its simple power, and people had flocked to the village church to see it. What a poignant tribute to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the war for the Armistice Commemoration. There were 11 soldiers for the 11th month of the 11th day of the 11th hour.
We also attended Coventry Lord Mayor's Annual Peace Lecture given by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown at the 14th century St. Mary’s Guildhall. Located in the city's historic Cathedral Quarter, the magnificent medieval interiors and fine artworks offered a window into Coventry's glorious past, where we joined Mary, Queen of Scots, and Shakespeare on the long list of visitors to have passed through its doors. But we weren’t here to admire the surroundings. We were entertained by the Worldsong Choir as the audience took their seats. It was nearly 8 pm when the lecture started. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a renowned journalist and author and a well-known commentator on immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism issues. She gave a good lecture and also was marketing her latest book. We didn’t stay for coffee because it had been a long day for me.
