Spring time, nature observations and lo-fi log

Spring is here, beyond all doubt. It can't have been much more at all than one month ago that I remarked to my wife how very happy I was that, without having planned it at all, I had placed my comfy next-to-the-CD-player-and-bookshelf chair in just the right place that in the evenings I could watch the sunset out one of our windows (three stories up). Not the whole glorious thing, just a little slice through a break in the buildings and trees down the end of the street that window faces down. Still enough to be really nice. I was shocked just the other day to notice that this is no longer possible. The reason is that the trees lining that street have now all grown so much green foliage that they collectively block my view of the sky. I am still not, and possibly never will be, used to such rapid and visible seasonal change. Growing up closer to the equator, in a land without many deciduous trees, and then moving to the Nordics is like a mole rat emerging into full midday sun for the first time after years of subterranean living. You never quite get used to it. I am slumming it down at 50-something degrees North these days, alas, but still find the seasonal change striking.

A bit more than a year ago we decided to move from relatively close to the city centre to somewhere a little more on the outskirts. It's still decidedly an urban environment, but it's close to a fairly large green space, with a river, a very large park, and a small adjoining bit of forest all within literally less than five minute's walk from our door, and we couldn't be happier about this. In terms of how large the forest is, how quiet it is, how unmanaged it feels, it is not a patch on what I got used to in Finland and Sweden, but then again I was cycling 20 to 30 minutes at least to get to those places. It's a fair trade-off, I think, to have something a little lesser but still really nice so close to home that you can go there at the drop of a hat. We're pretty happy here. I can cycle to work in about 20 minutes. Most places we need to visit regularly, supermarkets, post offices, that kind of thing, are an easy walk from home. The city centre is accessible by tram when we need it, and the tram stop is right out our window. It's true that can make things noisier than I'd like, both to the human hear and to the ferrite rod - the trams scream electrically at somewhere around 500 kHz when they stop and start and it's really thrown off my NAVTEX DXing game. Still, an excellent and satisfying all-round trade-off when it comes to quality of life.

With spring in full force and all this greenery at our doorstep, we've been taking lots of walks lately, and I've taken to bringing my little Ricoh GR digital compact camera with me. Pushing 20 years, this little fellow is still an absolute delight. At some point I'll write a long-overdue post about my photography taking a bit of a digital turn, but that isn't this post. I have been collecting photographs of the tremendous variety of wild flowers that have been springing up recently, in the park, in the forest, along the river banks. My wife has the PlantNet app on her phone which seems to do a pretty good, but not infallible, job of identifying them. Even as a digital retrogrouch, it's hard for me to deny how cool this is. I have learned the names of dozens of flowers over the past couple of weeks. Some of them are beautiful. Some of the plants are edible! I have read astonishing things on Wikipedia. Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) is "proto-carnivorous": its seeds attract and kill (I'm not sure how) nematodes, microscopic worms, so that their decomposed bodies enrich the soil. The Garden Star-of-Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) is "thermoperiodic": its seeds will not germinate unless their temperature falls below a certain cold temperature threshold and then subsequently rises above reach a certain warm temperature threshold. You won't find them in a spring following a mild winter because the cycle hasn't completed.

English Wikipedia article "Capsella bursa-pastoris"

English Wikipedia article "Ornithogalum umbellatum"

We've been enjoying more than just plants, though. We are paying attention to birdlife and other animal life, too. A few weeks ago, we were stunned to encounter a raccoon in the forest, the first wild one either of us have ever seen. It was up a tree when I spotted it. We stopped dead in our tracks, transfixed, and watched as it leisurely climbed down, shuffled down the river bank and then, no joke, swam across the river and climbed out on the other side. It turns out they can swim just fine, which was a shock to both of us. Not our first shock of that kind, though. In Finland we encountered a deer on a small island, hundreds of meters of water on all sides.

I have started keeping a "Lo-fi nature log" on my Gemini capsule. There's a list of all species of birds, bugs, plants and mammals we have identified so far with some degree of confidence. I look forward to adding mushrooms to the list in Autumn. I've uploaded 640x480 lower quality jpegs of photos taken with the Ricoh, almost entirely of flowers because it has no zoom to speak of and you can't get close enough to take a decent photo of anything alive without spooking it. Thanks to the low resolution and reduced quality compression the image files are pretty small, most of 'em are twenty something kilobytes, but they are by no means unpleasant to look at. We're not talking about anything like Low Tech Magazine's heavily dithered monochrome images here. Just small but clear colour photos.

My Lo-Fi Nature Log