Thinking about plants, and birds and animals.

It’s a wild and windy day today here. The sun keeps trying to come out but I was rained on when I went out first thing this morning. Yes, I know we need the rain but preferably not on me. 

They’ve been having a flower festival in Manchester this weekend. Very nice. 

And here’s a photo of Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens back in he 197s, before they paved it all over, built a huge wall in the middle of it, ran trams round it and generally made it a really ugly place. 

So it’s great that they have a flower festival and deck a lot of streets with flowers and plants but it’s still a shame that they messed up Piccadilly Gardens. It was a nice place to sit, a bit of a green lung in the city centre and another example of bits of beauty everywhere. Now I can’t imagine anyone wanting to sit there to have a picnic lunch. 

I think I’ve already written about our local heron finding a place where people will feed him fish. We often talk about “bird brains” but it seems they can be pretty savvy. Here’s something I read about intelligent, even crafty, birds: 

“It is a tactic worthy of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt: wait until a beeping pedestrian crossing indicates a traffic queue has formed then use the line of cars as cover to reach your target. But this isn’t a scene from Mission: Impossible – it’s the behaviour of a young hawk.

The discovery is not the first time birds have been found to make use of an urban environment. Crows, for example, are known to drop foods such as walnuts on to roads for cars to crush them open.

However, the researcher behind a new study says it is the most advanced case so far of raptors making use of traffic patterns.

“When I figured out what was going on, I was really impressed. I didn’t expect that,” said Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee and author of the study. “On the other hand, every time I study some animal species it proves smarter than I expect.””

Never underestimate the birds and animals.

That’s all for today. I have a family dinner to organise.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!