It’s all too easy to think of wildlife as something that lives somewhere else. Living in a built up area, we can imagines ourselves as inhabitants of an artificial, purely human environment. Yet nature is all round us all the time, no matter where we are and even in urban areas, there is often a great deal of non-human living matter, especially plant life.
It’s all too easy to take the living world around us for granted, to not even notice it and to consign nature to designated parks, zoos or far off lands. This neglects the riches of the ecosystems lying close at hand, sometimes unheeded for years. Near where I live in England is a beautiful beach called Weston Shore that is often thought of as a simple stretch of pebble-strewn shoreline.
Through a local community group that I belong too, we’ve been in contact with a professional ecologist called Phil Budd and he’s been kind enough to take us on guided walks along the shore. An amble like this with Phil is a revelation. Even early on in our trip to the beach, his knowledge wakes you up to how the plants and animals in your local area form part of an ecosystem as vibrant and intricate as any tropical jungle or temperate forest.
On the tide line at the shore is a common type of seaweed called bladderwrack. This is a habitat for the imaginatively named Seaweed fly and these flies in turn are eaten by some of the birds that visit the area. Those birds in turn are eaten by birds of prey like the sparrowhawk. Similarly, a beautiful plant called sea purslane is a habitat for insects such as the lesser marsh grasshopper, which again leads to higher steps in a food chain.
I was intrigued to learn that a number of the plants on the shore are perfectly edible (subject to washing, boiling or steaming as appropriate). Sea purslane goes well with fish, for example, or in a salad. Another common plant on the shore is sea beet, the wild ancestor of plants such as beetroot, sugar beet and Swiss chard. It can be eaten cooked or even raw – although none of us were brave enough to try it there and then! Other plants found on the shore can be used in herbal teas or as remedies. These plants have the potential to be something of a treasure trove to foragers.
An interesting subplot to Phil’s description of the animals and plants were that a surprising number of them were ones that had been introduced to the area by human activities, such as the Manila Clam. Originating in Asia, this was now quite happily living on our English coasts.
We’ve had some fascinating and fun visits to the shore and we’re looking forward to more. To have such a familiar area opened up in this way is an exciting look into a new world of knowledge. As well as finding out about similar experiences in your area, it is also possible to download apps that can help identify trees and plants and there are plenty of books and online guides on the subject as well. The riches of the natural world are there for everyone to enjoy and to marvel at.
In his announcement about his plans for Mars, Musk listed advantages that the red planet has over our Moon. Yet it is clear that, as both a stepping stone to further exploration of space and a destination in its own right, Luna (another name for the Moon, which I prefer) has some very practical advantages. It is of course, much, much nearer than Mars. The Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) distant. At its nearest, Mars is 55 million km (34 million miles) away; that is around 143 times the distance to the Moon. As it circles the Sun in its own orbit, Mars spends a lot of time much further from Earth than that.
My last entry in this list of advantages is solar energy. Luna is on average the same distance from the Sun as Earth, but its atmosphere is so tenuous that it may as well be described as a vacuum. The solar energy hitting a panel on Luna would be more than that on Earth as a result. Mars on the other hand is further away from the Sun than either Earth or Luna and so the solar energy it receives is rather less.
This is litter – the curse of modern living; something that is so ubiquitous we often fail to consciously register it is there. Litter is usually all round us everywhere – a seemingly inevitable by-product of the sublime efficiency of our industrial world culture. Yet there is a growing movement, assisted and inspired by the internet’s rapacity for communication, that aims to face up to this incessancy.
As an environmental issue, litter can have devastating effects on wildlife. There have been videos and photos of turtles with plastic forks and straws stuck in their noses. A dramatic case is that of Peanut, a red-eared slider turtle, who became stuck in a six-pack can binder as a youngster and grew up deformed as a result. Not only did this affect the turtle’s internal organs, it would have also made her more vulnerable to predators as it affected her mobility. Similar cases involve pelicans, albatrosses and other sea birds. Recently, thirteen sperm whales that died after becoming stranded on a beach in Germany were found to have stomachs full of plastic. Seals can become caught up in old rope, netting or fishing line and drown.
Thankfully, litter’s very visibility has lead to many people wanting to take action. Groups all over the world regularly carry out litter picks and clean ups and it’s no surprise that these have become popular in recent years.
Litter picking as an activity has grown in popularity in the age of social media. It is often a very visual subject for the camera and sometimes can be rather bizarre. Diamond (or more likely, fake diamond) studded dog collars, bits of alarm clocks, toys of all descriptions, innumerable golf balls, parts of cars, the complete range of types of clothing – all have been found on litter picks. This makes for a good subject for instagramming, tweeting and so forth.
A similar movement is #2minutebeachclean. The idea here is to do a little and often. A two minute clean up really can help and spreading the meme helps more get done.
With a sense of achievement from this type of activity, facing up to the greater challenges seems more reasonable. If we can make a difference here and now, maybe making a difference with these more profound difficulties is not so impossible. Just maybe, there is good reason to hope after all.
The specific model was a Bushnell 78-9003, which appears to be quite representative of the type of telescope that can be purchased relatively inexpensively for use at home. Examining it, my first impression was of how beautiful this instrument was, the shining chrome and circular lenses arranged in a mathematical perfection. I’m not naturally a practical person by inclination, so carrying out the assembly work that was required was an enjoyable challenge.
It looked large enough in the Finderscope, but when I used the low power 20mm lens in the main telescope to view it, I had a shock. The top of the post had a rubber stopper on it. In the eyepiece of the main telescope, this was so close I could see every wrinkle and crease in the stopper’s orange surface. This magnifying power was impressive! I could easily imagine how astonished the telescope’s original inventors might have been.
One thing I noticed immediately was that a telescope such as mine is very sensitive to the slightest touch or wobble. Whenever possible, I tried to lock it into position as much as I could to prevent this, but this proved somewhat tricky. The act of tightening the telescope’s adjustment screws could move the main eyepiece off target. Looking through the eyepiece had to be done delicately as pressing too hard could easily move the telescope the tiniest fraction, thus taking the view off the Moon.
We quickly set to work arr
Elizabeth is learning a lot of science of course. For instance, she now knows that sodium chloride is of course salt, that heating solutions speeds up the dissolving process and that sugar crystals are yummy. Almost as useful are the practical skills involving a certain manual dexterity – the pouring, holding and measuring. One of the themes of the booklet with our set is predicting (or at least imagining) what the results of any particular experiment might be beforehand and this is a valuable exercise in itself. Not only is it part of the learning process; this experience I’ve found brings you right into the world of your child as you share the way they think about what is happening.
As we progress through the experiments, we’ve talked about further science adventures with sets involving physics and electronics and even a computer kit. Both of us are learning so much and I’ve loved how “doing science” has become a happy time for us as father and daughter.
By 
ructed on carrying out experiments and observations at home and I have a distinct memory of setting up a homemade spectrograph on the dinner table. Some of the course used material on a CD ROM, especially intensely studying an area of woodland and analysing the data from observations from the site and there were also the TV programmes which are a famous part of OU culture.
Everyone wants to be happy.
I used to keep a New Yorker cartoon taped to my printer. It showed a hooded death figure, scythe in hand, standing next to a writer seated at a typewriter. The caption was something like “Oh good, I’m glad you’re here. I can never get anything done without a deadline.”
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