The Chiff Chaff

Someone mentioned the Chiff Chaff the other day. Was this really the proper name for an English bird? I found out that the Chiff Chaff is a kind of Leaf Warbler which breeds throughout the temperate parts of Europe and Asia.

And then yesterday as I was looking at the BBC web site, I found a most interesting page about the Dawn Chorus. I have never been able to recognise a bird by its song. This is one of those subjects where I do not feel that I have a starting point and so I began to learn how to do it. "Want to identify a dawn chorus bird? Hear the songs of eight of our most common, and listen to naturalist Brett Westwood explain how to identify them by their looks, songs and behaviour"

The best thing about this web site is that you can do three things at once. You listen to the bird singing, you can listen to an interview about the bird and at the same time you can read a fact file about each bird. This would be impossible without Broadband.
Now I have a starting point to build on. And by the way, Chiffchaffs are active birds and constantly flick their tails and wings while feeding. They are one of the earliest migrants to arrive in the UK, appearing in mid-March and often staying into October. And you can hear the Chiff Chaff sing and read more about it if it has not yet arrived in your part of the country.

The Falklands War

I was not able to visit the Falkland Islands on my trip to Antarctica. We were several hundred miles away. After 25 years I had forgotten much of what we saw on television during the Falklands war. I was therefore very interested when I received a telephone call this evening. My friend thought that I would be interested in the
The Archive Hour on Radio 4 at 8 o'clock as it would be about the Falklands War. Unfortunately we were having our supper at 8 and so after supper I went to the Radio 4 site and the Listen Again for the Archive Hour
This programme is most interesting as you can hear the original radio broadcasts to the Falkland islanders as the war was happening, Rex Hunt, the Governor who had to leave the islands and the radio presenter Patrick Watts.
"Michael Nicholson recalls the night of the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 with the help of some astonishing radio archive from the Falkland Island Broadcasting Service. When radio station manager Patrick Watts turned up to present his weekly 60-minute music request show, the programme turned into a marathon 16-hour broadcast as islanders phoned in with their sightings of the invading army."
You can listen again to The Archive Hour for the whole of next week. I hope that you will find that by clicking on this link, you can open up your radio player.

Sally's Antarctic Blog

As we travelled down the Antarctic Peninsula, we heard that there was a BBC South crew on a ship in the Antarctic. They had joined a Royal Naval ice survey ship, HMS Endurance. We had been watching a film about what was perhaps the greatest survival story of all time, the 1915 story of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton who managed to escape in a lifeboat, when his ship also called the Endurance broke up in the ice. We had been sailing near Elephant Island in the north of the peninsula.

I did not make any posts on my blog site while we were in the Antarctic as we had very limited Internet facilities. However it was very interesting to find Sally's Antarctic Blog and to see what can be done with the support of the BBC. Sally had to make her broadcasts. There was a personal touch in her blog as she wrote "Another successful live broadcast into South Today … what a relief!"

Sally had to land on an iceberg with her cameraman to take her pictures. In the picture above it is just possible to see them on the iceberg. In Sally's Antarctic Blog, you will be able to see more pictures including an enlarged one, which shows how enormous the iceberg was. You will also find some 60 pictures on the BBC South site.

I have managed to post some 20 pictures on my site and I hope that I will be able to add some further pictures from others on the Professor Molchanov with our party. The BBC blog provides a good model to aim at. In the Professor Molchanov we travelled further south and crossed the Antarctic Circle and of course we saw a Ross Seal. (as it jumped off the icefloe)