Summer

How time flies! All my lessons have ended, and I am now doing my dissertation. Well, in case you think that it is now time for me to sip lemonade on the beach, think again. My MSc project is to describe the Be File System as Formal Specifications. If you have forgotten what that is, here is a re-cap. So, time to start squeezing brain juice again.

The nice thing about summer is the long daylight hours. The photo on the right is taken at 9.15pm "at night". It's still so bright, isn't it? With the sun setting so late, there are still a few hours of daylight to enjoy after work. The only hiccup is that most shops here close at about 5.30pm, latest 6pm. It feels quite weird to walk around the city centre after work, when it is still so bright, but the shops are all closed and the street deserted.

The late sunset also makes it difficult for the Astro club's activities. We now meet at 10.30pm, but even at this hour, the sky is still too bright to see anything but the brightest stars. It is quite a quagmire actually. To see the stars, we need clear skies, but when the sky is clear, the sunlight is able to linger over the horizon even after it has set. Last week, we waited until 11.30pm, but still could not see much.

Most of the gooslings have grown up, and the campus is now quite crowded with geese..... and geese droppings. The geese are quite big birds, so their droppings are not in small piles either. Well, one can't always have the best of everything.

Of course it is not just the animals who take advantage of the warm weather and long sunlight hours. The other thing I like about summer are the wild flowers, which seems able to grow anywhere grass can. It makes me want to lie on the grass among the flowers, just what the locals like to do when the sun is shining.... until I remember the geese droppings :) Well, I'll make do with enjoying the flowers from afar.

For the duck lovers, here is something to cheer about after the events of The Sinister Duck. Some ducklings did manage to survive, and have now grown quite big. Their mother ducks have kept them well hidden, and they have emerged now that they are not so vulnerable. The picture below shows a mother duck casting a watchful eye over her almost grown up ducklings. These ducks are certainly better mothers than the ones I describe previously. Firstly, they are bigger in size, and presumably able to fight off marauding drakes. Also, the father drakes are around to help look after the young ones. Some of them are even brave enough to quack at me when I venture too close. Well done, ducks!

The Sinister Duck

If you have been wondering about the progress of the ducklings since my last post, well, I have bad news. None of them have survived.

The reason is that there is actually a very sinister side to a duck's character. To be more precise, the species of duck commonly found here in the UK, and on the campus, is the mallard(and not the mandarin duck that I mistakenly wrote in my previous posts). In fact, the mallard is considered as an invasive species in many parts of the world. But the reason why the ducklings didn't survive has got to do with the mating behaviour of the mallard.

Firstly, most male ducks (proper term is drake, duck is the female term) will leave the (female) duck once the it has laid the eggs, so the drake doesn't help protect the ducklings. Then there is a gang of drakes here on campus which do not have any mates. So what do they do when they spot a duck? They will gang up and start chasing the duck continuously until she is exhausted. At which point, they will take turns to copulate (rape is the more appropriate word, really) with her.

In the process, the ducklings are separated from the duck. The cries of the lost ducklings attract other drakes, which promptly pick each up one by one, and submerge them underwater to drown them! It is really heart wrenching to watch! On top of that, according to the barber, the ducklings are also picked off by crows and magpies. Well, if it is any consolation, it is the thought that some of the ducklings will grow up to be like these drakes!

But of course it is not that bad for ducklings every where, otherwise mallards would not be so common here. When I visited Castle Howard, I saw many ducklings there growing up quite well and nice.

The gooslings, on the other hand, are growing up very well. Both father and mother geese take very good care of the gooslings, and would hiss and chase at you if you get too close to them. The first gooslings are almost grown up now. You would not have recognise them as the gooslings of two months back if not for the fact that they still call with a squeak instead of a squawk. See how much they have grown!








The youngs of the Swans, Canadian goose, Coot and Moor hens have also hatched. See my photo album for their pictures!

Ducklings!

I have been walking around the campus these few days, hoping to catch sight of more spring babies. And I was not disappointed. The mandarin mallard ducklings have hatched, and they are swimming around with their parents.

Their parents are cute enough, and the tiny ones are simply adorable. And they are tiny indeed, especially after I have seen the gooslings and the swan chicks(anyone knows if there is a word for this?). But though they are small, they swim and run very fast. So fast that my poor little camera could only snap blur images of them.

And they have to. In such a crowded environment where swans, geeses, moor hens, coots and ducks are jostling for limited nesting places, they can be chased and pecked to death anytime by another adult bird. Already this evening, a Canadian goose was chasing after a batch of them when they swam too close. Only the presence of a human, that is me :), prevented the goose from chasing them all the way up the bank.

Each mother duck has about 10 to 12 ducklings, and it is quite amusing to see so many of them swarming around the mother. 12 ducklings per clutch seems like a lot, until you consider the hostile environment they are in. Besides the nesting birds, there are also those weaker birds who have lost the fight for territory, and the victor's ducklings seems like a natural target to reduce the competitor's gene pool. The weather here is very fickle too. Today the temperature is 17C, but this weekend, we are expecting a below 5C cold spell. So I don't expect most of ducklings will survive beyond summer, otherwise there should be more ducks than what I am seeing here.

Easter Snow!

I know, snow goes with Christmas, not Easter. But this is the British weather, just when I have started tagging my photos on flickr with "spring", along comes a heavy snowfall early Easter Sunday morning. Hey, heaven! You are supposed to snow on Jesus' birthday, not on his re-birthday!

This time round, I was awaken by the glare of the snow into my room. I actually woke up about the same time as the previous snowfall, but this time the sky is already bright. It is past the spring equinox already, mind you, so the sun rises at the "normal" time now.

Anyway, it is a good chance for me to shoot some photos of places that I missed the previous time. And it's an unexpected photo opportunity for the many families from overseas visiting their children this Easter holiday.

Yes, the spring semester has already ended. We are into the second week of the easter vacation already. The campus is quiet, as many of the local students have gone home, and overseas students for their holiday trips. But unlike Christmas, most shops remain opened, closing only on Easter Sunday, when many people here have gatherings with their families.

For me, I don't really have time to go for long trips (but for 3 days to Lake District next week). It has been a very busy spring semester, as you may have guessed from my lack of posts. Our group project is way behind time, and unfortunately, I am the only one in the group with any substantial skills in Java programming. So it is up to me to move the project forward. This vacation is the time for me to catch up with the schedule. Well, I don't really mind doing most of the work. This is perhaps the last time, for a very long time to come, that I will have a chance to do some real coding. A good opportunity to get familiar with UML, junit, eclipse, Linux and CVS too.

Before I go, something on Easter eggs. They are actually egg-shaped chocolates, same as the "Made-in-China" chocolate eggs that we enjoyed as kids during Chinese New Year. I never realized that they are actually used as Easter eggs until I come here! How sua-ku! At one of the chocolate shops in the city centre, they made Easter eggs, the biggest the size of rugby balls, and you can have icings with the names of the person you are giving it as a gift to. Nice!

The University

The university is built around a lake, so the scenery is very pretty.

And there are lots of wild ducks (mandarin ducks mallards, mostly), geese and some other birds which I do not know the names of, and this is already nearing winter. One of the speakers during orientation joked that he's not too sure about York's ranking in the league table, but he is certain that we're top in ducks vs students ratio.

I was told that when spring and summer comes, there'll be lots more birds and we'll be able to see ducklings in tow too. Well, the downside of this is that we have lots of droppings on the pavement, and it is quite yucky as it is impossible to avoid stepping on them.

See my photos of the campus http://www.flickr.com/photos/puayc/sets/72157602296012322/