If a plane is this high above Hebden it’s already well on its way to wherever it’s going. On the other hand, I haven’t been on a plane since April 13th, coming back from Ascension Island, and won’t be setting foot on one for the rest of the year unless something quite unexpected happening. I guess the carbon footprint is benefiting.
Whatever it is that pigeons do to communicate the information that it is time for a collective take-off, they do it well enough, and quite frequently, too. They will then fly around for a couple of circuits, come back to land (or roof) again, and wait a few minutes before doing it all again. Perhaps it’s just training.
Having had the chance to survey reasonably large portions of Ulster, the Irish Sea, North Wales and bits of north-west England on my flight home — I would like to declare that at 11:15 this morning, Llandudno and the Great Orme, both definitely depicted here, constituted the only part of this whole slab of the world that could possibly be seeing any sunshine.
This is certainly one of the bigger flocks of geese I have seen. I reckon there are upwards of 250 visible on this photo and I didn’t even get the head. How do they co-ordinate this? Who makes the decision to go at a particular time and place? What if one of them heads off and no one follows, does it get annoyed or feel like a bit of an idiot? So many things we do not know about the animal mind.
Rainbows are, technically, optical illusions, but they are illusions that the camera also sees. This one was definitely touching earth somewhere around the Old Lees Road/Hurst Road area of Hebden Bridge this afternoon. The geese wouldn’t have seen it though; they were flying in the opposite direction.
The community of pigeons that live in Hebden Bridge town centre sometimes act as one, particularly when it comes to their group callisthenics. They take off en masse, circle round for a while, then all land again. This flock was so large that here you see both the ones nearby, and those in the distance, already further round the circuit. Military exercises spring to mind — the ducks must be worried.
Yes folks, after 615 consecutive days on the island of Great Britain, I have finally left it. It was February 2nd 2020, in Bucharest, that this blog last featured anywhere outside England, Scotland or Wales. You know the reasons why. And yes, I appreciate travel can be seen as a privilege, and I’m grateful that I’ve finally broken the run, for all that the last 20 months have, at least at times, seen plenty of interesting sights.
This is not my final destination: instead this was taken on my first descent, into Keflavik airport, where I and the family were last seen waiting out the 12-hour flight delay that EasyJet (never, ever again) subjected us to in July 2019. I changed planes here and moved on. You can tell it’s Iceland, though — only that island has random burned bits like this, huge lumps of volcanic cinder that just seem here to be a normal part of the landscape.
If this fake owl sitting at the top of a building on Bridge Gate ever did deter the local pigeon troops from settling there, it’s long since stopped working. In fact, this photo was supposed to be of a whole bunch of them sat around and on it. But a second before I clicked the shutter, one of those intangible signals went through them all and off they flew, leaving me just with these last two in take-off mode. But I like it, as it makes it appear as if they have in fact decided to abort a landing — maybe, just maybe, because of the ‘owl’.
Today was the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day. But seeing as I’ve been north of the Arctic Circle since Saturday morning this was a regression, in daylight terms. No problem with that however. The 24-hour daylight was nice in some ways but it could become monotonous after a while. Shot taken from above Manchester on the final flight home: the city centre is just visible down there in the haze.
Well, there’s the views and then there’s the chance to get wine 24 hours a day (and sometimes for free). Oh yeah, and the occasional decent movie. (Watched The Ides of March today. Recommended.)
This photo was taken 5 minutes after take-off from Domodedovo airport, Moscow.
Being 42 