Paul Lawston's Wild Space

The original plan was that this entry would be all about finding those first signs of the on-coming Spring. Well winter, if you could call it winter, has had other ideas, and the theme in Bushy Park this month has been storms. And lots of them! The park is currently saturated with water, with pools and puddles dotted everywhere on our side of the park, and branches and trees blown everywhere. It’s been so bad that Royal Parks decided to close the park when Storm Ciara came through, probably a wise idea given the number of tall trees in there. In between the howling winds there have been calm periods though, and I have managed to get in a couple of times to look for wildlife and also to do some astronomy. Usually this time of year is when the crocuses and the daffodils come out in huge stands in the woodland gardens, but I wouldn’t know having not managed to venture in there since January! The Longford River just before Storm Ciara. In fact most of my visits to the park ...

Just lately, owls have been In. Long seen as a symbol of wisdom, they’re a bird that are familiar whilst being quite mysterious. Denizens of the night that make unearthly noises and fly soundlessly through the darkness, they are seldom encountered by most people which is a pity because they wonderful birds to watch. Barn Owl quartering at Elmley NNR Owls were originally associated with Athena in Greek myth, the goddess of wisdom, and that’s why they're supposed to be intelligent. Make no mistake, owls are among the stupidest of all the birds – natural selection has produced an animal that’s sole purpose is spotting small moving things, catching them and eating them. Most of their brains are taken up with the visual processing system leaving precious little room for anything else. What makes owls such perfect hunters? Well the eyes are their most striking feature. Huge in relation to the rest of the face and facing entirely forward giving superb binocular vision, they...

Mercury is the forgotten naked eye planet because most people have never seen it. It’s one of the least explored worlds in our solar system but in the few times we have visited, we’ve found out that it’s not a place you'd want to live. We know it’s the closest planet to the sun and it orbits in 88 days while one rotation of the planet on its axis takes 59 days. That day would be quite uncomfortable though. At night the temperature plummets to below -150 o C but during the day it can reach well over 400 o C, which is hot enough to melt lead. There’s no atmosphere either – that got blown off by the fearsome solar winds, and without an atmosphere it has been constantly bombarded by meteors so its surface is heavily cratered. Mercury - Image from NASA Seeing Mercury is difficult, even though it shines brighter than most stars in the sky. Its proximity to the sun means that its light gets drowned out by the twilight glow but every so often it steps out far enough from our per...