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Sarah West

A ball on a stick

13 January 2010

I had a nice disturbance from computer work this morning as a group of long-tailed tits landed on the tree outside our office window. These have got to be my favourite birds, they are so charismatic. The RSPB page about them describes them as a ball on a stick, as their tails are longer than their bodies. They moved too fast for me to get a photo, but the RSPB site has some drawings and audio clips of their distinctive calls.

Here's a nice lichen / long-tailed tit fact for you: Long-tailed tits use 3000 pieces of lichen to help camouflage their nests...The big question is, who on earth worked that out??!

Great day out

4 January 2010

I went to The Deep in Hull for the first time yesterday. WOW! What an amazing place that is! It was built in 2002 as a Millenium Project. This is a photo of it from the outside - a very impressive building!.

According to The Deep website it is home to over 3,500 fish, and is "the worlds only submarium". Sounds great!....What's a submarium?..... Off we went to The Deep to find out. 4 hours later we'd seen thousands of fish, lots of sharks, a few frogs and a couple of Giant African land snails (part of an exhibition about Slime I think, I was a little confused by their presence!), and heard a lot about the exhibits from Tony Robinson on the audio tour, which was also a little bizarre. I really liked the fact that at each big tank, there was an interactive screen with keys to identify the fish species you were interested in learning about, and then lots of supplementary information about the species for people like me who always want to read everything available!

All in all, a great day out. Still no clearer to knowing what a "submarium" is though....

 

OPAL Yorkshire and the Humber

I'm Sarah West, OPAL community scientist for the Yorkshire and Humber region. My blog will keep you up to date with all the fun stuff we’re doing across the region.