Saturday 20 August 2016

Why is this garden bird like the River Thames?





When the Thames rises in the Cotswolds, it is called the Thames, and when it gets to the home counties, it is called the Thames, but when in Oxford it is called the Isis. (At least by some people).

Birding can be complicated. I knew this bird in Kenya and Tanzania (or some of its relatives anyway) as the White-browed Robin-Chat. My Southern African bird books (two, lots of nice pictures, cover several countries but not Malawi) call it the same. My Malawian bird books (no pictures but a lot of distribution maps) call it a Heuglin's Robin. They do something similar for other Robin-Chats too. Wikipedia can't tell me why there is a difference so I guess no-one knows,   probably including the bird.

PS for the geeks: Heuglin was a 19th century explorer/administrator in NE Africa best known for his ornithology. Several birds are named after him. The Latin name is C. heuglini and the Afrikaans name is janfrederiks.

Saturday 13 August 2016

Oops - 2 (costly)





Internet is a bit expensive and intermittent here. I accidentally deleted my email files (letters and addresses) and when I checked my back-ups I found the system hadn't backed up since I arrived, because of the intermittent connections. It took me 2 days to retrieve most things from other files.

It got me thinking; even if it worked properly, backing up just my email file to the cloud (which I do at home without thinking about it) would cost about £5 in internet charges. That's bad enough for me, but this is a poor country and about 70% of the population have less than that to survive on for 6 days.

Oops -1





This is what I saw at about 12.30 when I drove down my road. How it even got there is a mystery to me, let alone how it overturned. It hadn't been there at 11am but then it wasn't there when I returned at 5pm. I guess they got a lot of blokes to clear the soil and then push it back on its wheels.