counting coots

You may or may not have noticed that apart from the Coal Tit patch tick bonanza, there has been little of note recently, or perhaps more accurately, little noted. It’s the familiar story unfortunately – a string of high tide situations when I’ve been out and about, bumped up with a shit load of rain and you have a recipe for a birdless patch.


Thankfully Mrs Thing recently gave me a two inch thick biography of Charles Darwin so I can yack on about that for a bit, and hope that some weather and birds and tides come together in the next day or so. Or this blog is going to turn into Counting Anecdotes or something.

So Darwin nearly didn’t get on board The Beagle because he had a lazy nose. He wasn’t even the first choice for the position. He wasn’t even the second choice. He was the third choice. Once he accepted the offer it turned out that FitzRoy had offered it to his mate instead! However, this offer was turned down and eventually Darwin was able to take the position for himself.

The next few pages had me in stitches. I never thought that this book was going to be a laugh riot, but the lead up to the sailing was a catalogue of delays and problems. And then once they eventually got going Darwin spent the first few days doing nothing but puking.

So they are off and sailing, The Channel, Atlantic, Biscay, Canaries, vomiting. The usual stuff. The Canary Islands (and Tenerife in particular) was the first scheduled stop. Now, before the offer for the Beagle came about, Darwin was trying to sort out an extended trip to Tenerife to survey the geology and the natural history. He had become fixated with the tropical vegetation that he had read about, the rocks, the mountain the wildlife – everything. I don’t think it unreasonable to state that he was in besotted with the place – he dreamed and yearned to go there but all his plans to get there had fallen apart. The fact that The Beagle was going there was a major bonus, and he was looking forward to it. A lot. So The Beagle arrived offshore and dropped anchor. They contacted the locals and were told that because there was some contagious disease in England, they were not allowed onshore for two weeks.

‘Bugger’ thought Darwin.  Probably.

‘Up jib’ said FitzRoy (that’s the naval equivalent of ‘Fire up the Quattro’).

‘Double bugger’ thought Darwin. 

And after all his longing to reach Tenerife all he saw was a distant view when at anchor. Darwin was not a lucky man.

Imagine if one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known was a blogger. It would make interesting reading, no? Imagine if this scientist was the scientific officer on a massive world trip in a boat named after a species of dog and every now and then he blogged for your interest, and just for good measure the captain of the boat did too. Sounds good doesn’t it? Imagine if that captain was called FitzRoy and that the scientist was Charles Darwin. Sounds really good now doesn’t it? You may well be scoffing at the idea – Darwin is long dead and they didn’t have the interweb in 1835 and nor do we have time machines now.


This is all true, but through the magic of pens, paper, time and somebody else’s computer you now can follow the travels of Darwin in real time – Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary. What a bloody brilliant idea!

Lets have an anectode.

From ‘The Beak of The Finch’ by Jonathan Weiner

“When Darwin met Captain FitzRoy for his job interview, the Captain took an instant dislike to Darwin’s nose. The Captain was an amateur phrenologist and physiognomist, and prided himself on his ability to judge the character of his men by their skull bumps. FitzRoy felt sure that he was looking at the nose of a lazy man. He almost sent Darwin home.”

[Edit:  Thanks to Harry for holding the link]

Whilst I was on my sick bed I did a bit of reading. Day time television leaves me quite empty; in fact I would rather scrape my eyes out with tiny little rusty pins than watch most of what is on offer. So I spent the time in between bouts of mucus expulsion finishing off half a dozen of the books that I had meant to finish some time ago. I then managed to make a start on The Beak Of The Finch by Jonathan Weiner, which is quite simply stunning.


Many UK birders will have heard of Peter Grant, the bloke that knew a fair bit about gulls but died too soon, but is still rightly credited on the new Collins guide. The very observant will have noticed that he is referred to as Peter J Grant. That is because there is another Peter Grant working in the field of ornithology, and he is arguably the more important. He, and his wife Rosemary, are the main human subject of the book Darwin’s Finches (you can probably guess which birds take up a lot of the space). Without going into too much detail, they carefully picked an island in the Galapagos, and studied all the finches on it. For nearly twenty years. They didn’t just study them by walking about and watching, after a few years they had almost every bird on the island ringed, weighed and measured and by continuing this they produced a staggering amount of data across many generations, which showed how evolutionary factors were working in real time and this is the most important part of the book in my opinion.

Evolution deniers are stupid. Note that I am not referring to creationists - that’s a whole different rabid beast of mentalists. No - evolution deniers. You may come across them, and there are arguments that will be presented around misinformed rubbish like ‘you can’t see evolution happening’ and ‘evolution theory cannot be proven’ and you may wish that you had the counter argument. This book, essentially the work by the Grants, is the proof in real time.  It shows the vicissitudes of the forces that impact on the lives of these birds in a very restricted arena (a metaphorical Petri dish if you like) and the reaction of the species, the interaction of similarly related species and how they respond in the short term to environmental forces that in the study period swayed from prolonged drought to an exceptional El Nino occurrence. In short, it proves evolution. It makes you realise that evolution is going on all the time, everywhere – but we cannot see it. The Grants, because of the beautiful and savage isolation and containment of the finches on Daphne Major, could see it.

If you have any interest in evolution, get this book and read it. It is very good indeed and I cannot recommend it enough.  It didn't win a Pullitzer prize for nothing.

As we are in the throws of Darwin year, I thought I would proffer my favourite Darwin tale...

Although Darwin was a clever man, and some say a genius, he was much flawed but so often this is the case with scientists of the age, especially if we look back at their behaviour with modern tinted specs. If he wanted a closer look at something, he shot it. Simple, straightforward logic, I need to see that bird close up and it will not stop moving, so if I shoot it (for the good of science, natch) then it will stop moving and I can see it close up. Another thing to remember is that on long ocean journeys, there were no convenient places to buy food and top up your clubcard points. So the members of the ship that was there had to find food wherever and however they could. As you probably know, this was the problem for the Dodo. Easy to catch, big and tasty enough.

So it came to pass that Darwin (and his shipmates) had been on a regular diet of Rhea. I have no idea what a Rhea tastes like, but like most birds it is probably quite edible and I understand that Darwin thought so too but he probably didn't have to shoot it. One day, he was munching away on a drumstick, when he realised that the leg part that he was enjoying was smaller than the previous Rheas that he had been eating. When he twigged this, he rushed to the chef/cook/galley dude to ask what they were eating...

"I dunno guv, it's just a Rhea - same as yesterday, a sort of Cassawory casserole"
"No dear man, it's smaller - it could be a different species"
"Well if you don't like the size of the bloody portions you big beardy - "
"No, no, that's not the point - where are the remains of the bird?"
"Out the back guv, where Seaman Willie is having his fag break"

"You boy, where are the remains of tonights repast?"
"Dunno guv, it's just a Rhea, same as yesterday - chef says its a sort of - "
"Are you being funny, son?"
"Not me Mr Darwin, no Sir - erm, it's here in this chum pot that we've got for the pelagic trip later today"
"Well shiver me timbers, look at this - it's a completely different species, and new to science - fuck me I'm brilliant!!"



And that, dear reader, is how Darwin discovered a new species of Rhea. Verbatim.