Don't mess around with Water Buffaloes

Ok, this is not York stuff, but I thought it would be good relief following the depressing post of The Sinister Duck.

A pride of lions thought they had easy veal when a buffalo couple with their calf walked straight into their path.

Or so they thought. The response from the buffaloes was impressive, and nothing short of dramatic.

No wonder buffaloes are respected by the human societies where they are found in.

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.

Lake District

Just came back from a three days visit to the Lake District. As its name suggest, the area has lots of lakes. The interesting thing is that the lakes all radiate out like the spokes of a wheel, with its centre at the highest point, Scafell.
View Larger Map

If you have ever visit New Zealand's lakes in South Island, or the lakes in Canada, the scenery is not unlike these places. But the difference is that the region is just a compact thirty miles across, so it takes less than 30 minutes to move from one point to another.

I'll talk about the specific places that I visited in separate blog entries.

The scenery is nice enough, but as many of the trees are still in their wintry brown, I think it will be better in late spring or summer when they turn green again. The white swans there impressed me though. There aren't any resident white swans on campus, so this is the first time I get a really closeup look at them, and they are much bigger than I had imagined. The adult swan, when it straightened up, reached up to my neck level. They could easily peck out my eyes if they want to. Their chicks are the size of ducks, so you can imagine the size of the adult. When they fly, the sound of their wings whooshing against the air can be heard 30 metres away. Impressive!

Overall it was a good break. One good thing about going on this tour is that it forces me to leave behind my daily routine. The second good thing about this tour is that it gives me lots of exercise. I am on my feet the whole day except during meal times, with lots of climbing. At the end of it, my body was feeling rather ached, not unlike the "high" I feel after a long run.

So, here are Yeow Cheong's tips for a refreshing break:
1. Don't bring your work along.
2. Engage in prolonged physical activities of substainable intensity, until you feel some slight aches in your body.
3. Avoid mental activities that stresses the body (like planning how to re-mortgage your loan)

Have a good break.

Spring babies!

Though it is already spring, the weather is still quite cold here. So it was a surprise today when I saw gooslings on the way to the supermarket. The honour of being the First Family belongs to the Greylag goose.

Spring seems very romantic to us: seeing the flowers bloom, the wildlife pairing up and babies sprouting from the union. But, there is an ugly side to it. All the water fowl here: the mandarin mallard ducks, moor hens, coot, geese etc, chase and fight each other for territory and mates. It is sad to see the weaker birds being attacked by the strong ones. And they have to cope with the unpredictable weather, like snowing on Easter. So don't envy them for their seemingly carefree life. It is tough surviving out there. Let's hope the weather will turn warmer from now on, otherwise a lot of babies may die.

Here is my album of wildlife babies, as I photographed them throughout spring and summer. Do remember to visit it regularly for more updated photos.

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!

Earthquake!

Of all places, one would never expect an earthquake to happen here in the UK. Afterall, if you look at this map here, UK is far away from any of the major fault lines, much further away than Singapore is from the Sumatran fault line that triggers the 2006 tsunami.

So it was a surprise when I felt the earthquake happened last night at around 12.55am. But I quickly remembered that there was once when nobody in Singapore ever believe we will be affected by earthquakes either. So never say never!

The earthquake felt like two very short bursts of vibration, separated by about 10 seconds. It is quite unlike the gentle swaying I felt in Singapore from my 17th floor flat from the tremours in Sumatra. In fact, I almost mistook it to be from the gusts of strong wind blowing at that time, if not for the fact that the vibration was coming from my cupboard, and not the window.

The earthquake has a magnitude of 5.2, and the epicentre is about 80km away from York. Because of the relative closeness of the epicentre, the vibration is stronger than what we experienced in Singapore, even though the magnitude is much smaller than the Sumatran earthquakes. I am staying on the 2nd floor (which is the 3rd storey, the British count floors starting from 0), and I can feel the shaking. In Singapore, earthquakes are mostly felt only above the 10th storey.

So if UK is so far away from any fault lines, what caused the earthquake? It seems that there is something call the Midlands Microcraton. This is an enormous block of rock running through Central England. The softer rocks on either side of the microcration are disturbed by the tectonic pressures that originate in the Atlantic Ocean, and this cause earthquakes when the pressures build up to a point where the rocks slipped. So, I supposed the mechanics of the earthquakes here are different from what we have in Singapore. It certainly felt different.

Well, according to the British Geological Survey, this type of earthquake happens only once in 30 years! So how lucky I am to feel it (must go buy 4-D!). But as I said earlier, never say never, who knows what other rare occurrences will I yet encounter?

Saturn!

I think I've mentioned somewhere in my blog before that I am in the Astronomy Society. The society meets every Saturday night. If the sky is clear, we'll proceed to the observatory （picture on the left) for some sky gazing. Well, as you might have guessed, given UK's kind of weather, it is not often that we get a clear sky, chances are even lower when you restrict it to just Saturday nights. Most of the time, we just make do with partly cloudy skies.

So it is a very rare opportunity last Saturday when the sky was completely clear of clouds. I had actually planned to attend a Chinese New Year Gala concert at York's Opera House, but a clear sky on a Saturday night is probably rarer here in York than CNY, so I decided it is not a chance to be missed. And boy, did I made the right choice.

First of all, the society's telescope wasn't working quite well, so the Astro Soc chairperson decided that we will use the main observatory telescope, which is several times more powerful. It seems that the professor in charge of the scope is quite particular about people going up to the observatory, so usually we just make do with the society's scope, placed outside the observatory. But last Saturday was just too clear a sky to observe the rules! But not to worry. The chairperson is a student of the professor, and is trained in using the main scope, so it's not like we are going up there and messing things.

And we were not disappointed. Not only is the main scope more powerful, it is also controlled by a computer, so all you need to do is to click on the object you want to observe and presto! the computer will point the scope in the correct direction.

So the chairperson brought us on a tour of the most interesting sights of the night sky: Crab Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy, Seven Sisters, Betelgeuse, Sirus etc. But the most magnificent of all is of course Saturn. It is really fascinating to see Saturn surrounded by its rings, and its moons. It looks something like the picture below, which was taken a few years back by the society. The angle of the rings was different this time round, and we were also able to see two of Saturn's moon. And of course, seen with your very own eyes, the image is much sharper.

Another pretty sight is what is called an open cluster. It is a group of faint stars which you can't see with the naked eye. So there is a patch of dark sky there, and you are thinking "ok, so why are you pointing the scope there?". Then you look through the scope, and you see so many points of light that look like jewels shining in the dark. Really amazing! The picture on the right, from Wikipedia, shows something like what we saw, but through the scope with your own eyes, it is much more fascinating.

In contrast, the nebulas and the galaxies are rather disappointing. They appear as blur blobs. One reason, I supposed, is because York suffer from light pollution like all urban centres, so the sky is really not dark enough to observe these faint objects. And of course the pictures we usually see in astronomy magazine are usually filtered to produce those sharp, magnificient colours. Through the scope, they all look more or less black and white, with reddish or bluish hues at best.

What a night! What a unforgettable 年初三. Now I know how the early astronomers felt when they see through the scope for the first time!

Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year comes at a wrong time here, when we are finishing our first block of subjects for this semester. So, over the CNY period, I have 3 assignments and 1 group project to tackle. In fact, I have to give the CNY dinner organized by the Singapore Society a miss, because we had postponed our project meeting till late afternoon so that the Chinese students on the team can call home.

But not to worry, I didn't really miss home or CNY. Perhaps because there is no atmosphere of CNY here at all, so there is nothing to remind me of it. Or maybe it is because I know I'll just be here for one year, and I'll be tied to TP and Singapore for the next 5 years when I get back. So subconsciously in my mind somewhere, it is telling me that I'll have more CNYs in Singapore than I like when I get back.

However, this experience makes me realise that CNY is not something you can pass by with just having a party with fellow country man. What I consider as CNY is really the whole atmosphere that comes with it: the pasar malam and festival goods that are only on sale during that period, the new year songs in the air, the smell of pineapple tarts baking and bar-kuah BBQing, the traffic jams near flower markets, the air of expectancy as the day draw nears, the busy markets which opened through the night, the quietness on the street during the Reunion Dinner hours, the sight of bright coloured clothes on the MRTs and buses on the first and subsequent days etc.

These are the things about CNY that cannot be re-created here. These are the things that are missing, and without them to remind me, I don't think of CNY at all.

新年快乐，万事如意!

British weather - take 3

(River Ouse, which flows through York, flooding its blanks)

Why were the British so adventurous, exploring the world and building "the empire where the sun never sets"? It is because the weather here is so bad that they just have to get out of here and find somewhere nicer to live. Well, even the ancient Romans (who ruled Britain for a while) complained about the weather here in their records, as has every foreigner since. On Monday, during our RSD lecture, the sun suddenly broke through the cloud during a pause in the rain, and shine right into the lecturer's eye! The lecturer, who is from Germany, and had earlier just complained about the persistent rainfall, was so exasperated that he exclaimed "Now what's wrong with the weather in this country?"

Since the excitement of the first snow, it has been raining non-stop, until middle of this week. It was almost like Singapore's end-of-the-year rainy season. As the rain comes in from the Atlantic Ocean, riding on top of the warm ocean air, the temperature has been warmer than usual. Even after the rain stopped, the temperature has remained well above 10 degrees, whereas the usual temperature at this time of the year is about 5 degrees. Is this just a weather anomaly, or is global warming truly upon us now?