Six Things, Volume 87

Terns | Skating | 10,946 | Network | Peoplepainting | Gulls

Nov 23, 2024

Just a reminder that to celebrate the second birthday of Six Things I’m giving away books, and that the window for entries closes at 23.59 (UK time) on Sunday 24th November. That’s tomorrow (if you’re reading this today), or today (if you’re reading it tomorrow). If you’re reading this after that, then you’re too late and can skip straight to the Things.

Winners can have their choice of Taking Flight, Into The Tangled Bank, or Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? The books will of course be signed in the usual manner and, if you like, dedicated.

To enter, you need to:

– be a Six Things subscriber

– email your own Six Things to me

– tell me which of the books you’d like in the event that you win

That’s all! It’s simplicity itself.

Here’s the small print:

– your Six Things can be as short or long as you like. I usually go for a bit of variety, but you might want to write six 1,500-word essays on your favourite 19th-century Italian operas, or present six photographs of different shades of vermilion. Bear in mind, though, that those are probably less likely to meet with the approval of the judge.

The winner will be no more and no less than the entry I like the most.

Right, enough of that. On with the things.

Thing 1 – Terns

Take yourself to an island. Specifically, Inner Farne, one of the Farne Islands, a group of islands off the east coast of England.

You get off the boat and walk up the path to the visitor centre. Short though the walk is, it’s not uneventful. Lining the path, and flying around in a state of some agitation, are many small-to-medium seabirds. They’re Arctic Terns. And they are FURIOUS.

Here’s an example of how furious they are (forgive me – I’d only just discovered the slo-mo function on my phone)

The reason for their fury is straightforward. They come here to breed (taking time out from their extraordinary migration schedule, which is another Thing altogether), and as ground-nesters, they’re particularly vulnerable to disruption and predators. Seen through this lens, their fury is quite understandable. No wonder visitors to the Farnes are advised to wear a hat.

The curious visitor might ask a simple question. Why, if they’re so furious, do the birds not simply nest somewhere else on the island, where they’re not going to be disturbed by a steady stream of human traffic?

The reason is simple, if somewhat counterintuitive. They use us as protection. The larger gulls – your Herring, your Lesser Black-backed, your Great Black-backed – stay away from the areas with heavy footfall, so the terns nesting by the path have higher breeding success than those nesting elsewhere. Furthermore, when human activity on the island was curtailed by the pandemic, the tern colony on Inner Farne plummeted, while the larger gulls had a bonanza. Humans returned to the island in 2021, and it was opened to the public as normal the following year – the subsequent recovery of the colony seems to be related to our return.

Our relationship with nature is complex, but it’s reassuring to know that sometimes, even if inadvertently, our presence is beneficial – it would be all too easy to assume otherwise. Needless to say, the gulls might hold a different view.

The full story is here.

Thing 2 – Skating

I don’t get on with ice. Not since The Incident.

The Incident took place about forty years ago. Here’s an equation to represent how it unfolded.

i + b + s = u —> h

Explanation of terms:

– i: an impromptu ice hockey game on a frozen flooded meadow

– b: an ill-fitting pair of wellington boots

– s: a healthy dose of youthful stupidity

– u: 20 minutes of unconsciousness

– h: an overnight stay in hospital.

(If you’re desperate, you can read the full account of The Incident, as well as 39 other slices of nonsense, in Music To Eat Cake By.)

My aversion to ice means I would be a poor candidate for Nordic skating, which is a real shame, because it looks and sounds absolutely brilliant. Here’s a lovely short film featuring mathematician Märten Ajne, who, at the time of the film’s making, had visited 1800 bodies of water from Norway to North America in 40 years of Nordic skating. The film was made five years ago, so he’s probably topped 2,000 by now.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have spent the first couple of minutes wanting to shout (or perhaps even actually shouting) “BUT WHAT IF THE ICE BREAKS?” So here he is talking a little bit about that, the relevance of mathematics to his hobby, and the importance of the art of listening.

“The ice bends – the thinner it is, the more it bends.”

“The first crack is a true warning signal.”

“The ice gives a sonorous, beautiful, eerie tone which immediately tells me how thick it is.”

If it weren’t for the whole ‘thin ice aaarrrggghhh no no no no no’ thing, not to mention my general clumsiness and total aversion to anything even vaguely dangerous, I think Nordic skating would be right up my street, an impression confirmed by this film, which gives extra prominence to the remarkable sound world these skaters inhabit.

I like the bit where Ajne makes a hole in the ice and measures its thickness with calipers.

“Forty-five millimetres – more than enough.”

REALLY? BECAUSE THAT’S LESS THAN TWO INCHES AND I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU BUT THAT SOUNDS REALLY THIN TO ME.

But then I’m not the one with forty years’ experience.

Thing 3 – 10,946

10,946 is a short film by Los Angeles animator Darren Jannace. Every day, for a year, he drew 30 drawings on Post-it notes. Then he animated it to a soundtrack of things he’d recorded on his phone in that period. The result is odd, charming and quite mesmerising. Apart from anything else, you can see the ideas developing and becoming more sophisticated as the year goes on. Well worth six minutes of your time, and a reminder of the importance of doodling, as well as the intrinsic value of apparently pointless creativity.

And it reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut quote:

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

And while we’re on Vonnegut, any excuse to share his ‘the shape of stories’ clip

Thing 4 – Network

Kurt Vonnegut appears in The Network of Time, a fun ‘Six Degrees of Separation’-type tool, through which you can trace links between people in photographs. So say, for example, you want to make a connection between, I dunno, the Dalai Lama and Shane Warne (it only takes three photographs), or Alexander Graham Bell and Pelé (four, and involving two US presidents), you can do it.

Obviously the network is limited by the extent of the photographic database and the number of people identifiable in those photographs. I’m not on there, for instance, and – unless I’ve seriously miscalculated the reach of this newsletter – neither are you (do write in if I’m wrong about this).

Anyway, it’s a fun thing to spend a few minutes trying to concoct pairs of people as distantly connected as possible, and to see the contortions required to link them. Maurice Ravel and Michael Foot (five photos). Benjamin Disraeli and Snoop Dogg (seven). Charles Dickens and Cher (eight). The possibilities are endless.

Thing 5 – Peoplewatching

Artist Joe Fig painted people looking at paintings, and it’s rather lovely.

Thing 6 – Gulls

And so, with the inevitability of an Arctic Tern pecking the bejesus out of a human head, back to seabirds.

Researchers fitted 27 gulls near the Belgian coast with GPS trackers. The results were largely as expected – most of the birds foraged locally, on farmland and out at sea. But seven of them – all Lesser Black-backed Gulls) made lengthy daily excursions to a place called Mouscron near the French border.

It turned out they were visiting a potato chip factory.

Thanks to James Barr on Bluesky for sharing the original post by Brooke Jarvis. And here’s a bit more on the story.