Little Hadham Birding: Monday activity

Morning all,
Wow, what a fantastic Sunday. We were in the garden all day and managed to get some new species on to my Self Isolation garden list. A pine ladybird was a first of the year and a coal tit was heard calling nearby before it came to the bird feeder in the garden. I also trapped my first Emperor moth of the year. It came to a pheromone lure I put out about 1pm and attracted 2 moths about 5.15pm Stunning moth. Photo tomorrow as it is still in the fridge, ready for a photo and release when the rain stops.

Today's Activity:

A puzzle involving zebras I saw on Facebook reminded me of an activity I have done with children before. It helps explain why sometimes camouflage patterns seem to be so wrong. A zebra being a perfect example. Burnt African plains are shades of brown and green so why would a zebra seem so obvious with black and white patterning? Try this:

Draw an outline of a zebra on card and cut it out to use as a template. Make it about 8 cm long and 4 cm high. Draw around it on paper, add the stripes and colour them black. Do this plenty of times until you have about 15 zebra pictures. Now, take a piece of large plain paper and stick them on to this as if they were in a herd. i.e. on top of one another, spread out so they are overlapping. When all have been stuck together, colour the rest of the piece of paper to resemble the African plain. Stand about 4 metres away and see if you can count the zebras.

This is basically what a lion sees. It doesn't see 15 zebras, it just sees a shape of black and white stripes and cannot define a single creature. If they were solitary they would be very visible. Clever, eh?

Over the weekend I cooked a butternut squash and dhall curry. I have now dried the seeds of the squash, the green pepper and the scotch bonnet chillies for planting out when it becomes a little warmer. Also, a few photos of what I saw in the garden over the last 2 days.

Request:

If anyone took photos of butterflies in their garden this weekend I would be really grateful if I could use them in my next Bishop's Stortford Independent article which I shall be putting together early next week. Only stipulation is that they need to be in excess of 2Mb and the larger the better. My next article is about identifying garden butterfly species and, whilst I have loads of photos, I shrink them to keep on the laptop and consequently, they are too small for inclusion. Be very grateful if any readers can oblige. Full credits given in the paper. Many thanks. jforgham"at"hotmail.com using the @ symbol not the at word. I just do that to stop web scraping sites from gathering my email address.