The Miscreant

Escaped Pelican at London Zoo

In my last post, I mentioned that when I visited the Penguin Beach at London Zoo there were two naughty Eastern White Pelicans who sneaked into the penguin enclosure; here's a picture of one of them. Apparently the pond that the pelicans usually live in had frozen over, so they were moved to temporary accomodation next to the penguins, from which they promptly escaped, climbed onto the roof of a shed by the penguin beach, and proceeded to jump over and flap across to the pool.

Various keepers were on hand to herd the mischevious pelicans back to their temporary home, and they were both recaptured fairly quickly! It was highly entertaining though, I must admit.

Tree Trunk

Oh, how I wish this was in better focus! It was just a bit too dark for the camera to cope well with it, but the colour of the wood was what I wanted to capture and using the flash just deadened it completely. So it remains, a teeny bit too blurry to be good, but still alright, I guess. This was a particularly cool piece of fallen wood, anyhow, and the red ferns and blue-green lichen are an interesting contrast. I guess I shall just have to return to the tree trunk on a sunnier day.

Winter Berries

Lovely red winter berries on a sunny (yet extremely cold) day. It's enough to make you want to cook some kind of delicious red berry strudel.

Except I didn't know whether or not they were poisonous.

Crystal Angel

Photograph of a crystal angel which my family was given as a Christmas present last year. We were actually kind of anxious about putting it on our tree this year because it's kind of precious and breakable, but it seems silly to have a beautiful decoration but never display it, so up she went after a suitably stable branch had been selected.

The photo makes the angel look rather massive, but it's actually teeny. And difficult to photograph...

Warped Bauble

Gold Bauble

This is a photograph of me taking a photograph of me taking a photograph of a bauble. There is quite a lot of recursion going on here, and if only I had been holding a big mirror instead of my camera, it could have gone on forever.Nevermind.

Sadly it's very far from the sharpest picture ever, owing to the rubbish quality of light in my house in December. Oh well. Roll around spring and it'll be back to lovely flower photos...

I believe that this is the first photo I've posted which actually has me in it! Obviously I am terrified of stalkers, although if you can identify me from my spotted Christmas fleece I would be fairly impressed as well as scared.

Say What?

This curious fellow is a face in a tree :D

Apparently the phenomenon of seeing faces or shapes in objects like clouds or trees is known as pareidolia. Carl Sagan theorised that seeing faces like this is common because we're hard-wired to recognise them; but precisely because we have the ability to distinguish faces at a distance and in poor lighting, we end up seeing faces when they're not there. Hence we see faces here and here and here... even though they're not there. Unsurprisingly, when faces are distinguished they're often given a religious slant, hence all the bizarre stories about jesus appearing in a bit of marmite. Or a chapati, depending on where you're from.

People who can't recognise faces correctly suffer from prosopagnosia.

Canopy

I like the contrast between the texture of the tree bark and the smooth black surface- I assume the tree was damaged and had to be sealed to repair it or something. I don't know much about treelore, alas! This is a sibling of the hollow tree I showed a picture of recently. Or maybe not a sibling but just a neighbour. Who knows? I'm sure they have been

Ooze

I have been traumatised twice by this fungus; firstly when taking pictures of it and secondly when having to look through loads of pictures of hideous fungi in order to identify it. However, I believe it to be an Oak Bracket Fungus, a.k.a. Inonotus Dryadeus, identifiable by its weird amber oozings. It has several other excellent names of course, my favourite being Weeping Conk. What can I say, it's a week for good words. And speaking of good words, this fine site describes the fungus as "finely hairy at first, becoming glabrous", which sounds like a highly undesirable shipping forecast.

Anyhow, its a mean old mushroom and causes rot of the tree. I've not been able to find much information about the strange oozing substance.I imagine a scientist would tell me that it's not oozing stuff purely to be as revolting as possible, but as with jellyfish I am highly suspicious. I bet they just want to freak me out.

I don't like fungi; when I was quite young, I was playing hide and seek with my parents and sister in a wood near our home one autumn. I thought I had found the perfect hiding spot in a bush and was perfectly concealed as the seeker bumbled past. Then I turned around and saw an absolutely huge toadstool, bright red with twisted white warts, sitting right next to me. To my parents' initial confusion, I leapt out of my cunning hidey-hole, shrieking at the top of my lungs. And to this day, I remain scarred by that experience.

It seems most likely that the toadstool I saw was the famous fly agaric, although the internet tells me it's usually 8-20cm across and I'm confident that the mushroom I saw must have had a diameter of 30cm, even accounting for the fact that I was quite small at the time. Maybe it was freakishly large, or maybe it was another species, or maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but it sure surprised the hell out of my younger self.

Lichen

This tree was insanely bedecked with hangers-on of all shades.

Interestingly, what we think of as lichen is actually a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photosynthetic organism like a green alga. Who knew? It's like when I found out that a Portuguese Man o'War is not a jellyfish.* Except lichen doesn't have 50 metre long tentacles. For which I am sure we're all thankful.


* It's a siphonophore, a collection of different organisms called zooids. So. Now you know.

Guest Photographer

I did not actually take this picture! My boyfriend did. But it's such a nice shot it had to go on the blog, and I'm sure he won't mind. Plus I did hassle him about making sure he got a picture of the cool hole in the tree, so. I totally contributed. Even if he had already taken one >.>

 This particular tree lives in Killerton House, in Devon, another stop-off on my travels there.  As well as attractively hollow treetrunks, Killerton sports the Bear's Hut, a curious little cottage in the grounds. It has a roof lined with pinecones, a stained glass window and a floor made out of the knucklebones of dead deer; one of the family kept a bear in there in Victorian times, hence the name.