The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

‘Courting bustards’ is not an excellent new profanity, something that would sound good with rasping voice and sent in the general direction of a parking warden putting a ticket on your car, it is actually a reference to the romantic habits of the male great bustard bird.

Researchers from the IE University School of Biology in Santa Cruz, Spain, have found that the male bustards align themselves with the sun when trying to attract a female. Their white feathers, the bustard’s equivalent of an Armani suit/Ferrari/pair of Reeboks – delete as applicable, show up better when aligned to catch the sun’s rays. Dr Tommaso Pizzari, an ornithologist from Oxford University, observed that although it made the birds more vulnerable to predators, it certainly made them more visible to females. ‘That’s why we think these puzzling traits evolved and are specific to males.’

Although the bustards have been found to do this more…

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There is a good photo of the Great Lettuce, Lactuca Virosa, with its leaves aligned north-south on the Adur Wild Flower website. If you do use this to find your way then make sure you don’t eat too much of it as it is reputed to have psychotropic qualities. You are likely to head off in the right direction, walk in a circle and then find yourself back in the same spot, shouting something like, ‘Great Lettuce, Batman!’ I digress.

Apologies all blog readers. Firstly the last post wasn’t really fair. The picture quality isn’t good enough to be able to tell that the grasses have been blown in the direction that the picture is being taken or that the distant horizon is bright. The photo was taken a few weeks ago in Wensleydale looking ENE towards the dawn light.

Secondly, I’ve been out of touch longer than hoped for as I’ve been travelling in some nearby, but strangely wild places recently with limited options for internet access, including deepest darkest Brittany and a hut on some rocks in the Channel Islands called Les Ecrehou . Back soon and normal service will resume hopefully!

I took this picture a week ago. It shows the lower fair-weather cumulus clouds against the upper cirrus clouds. It is not at all unusual to watch the lower clouds and upper clouds move in different directions and to feel a third wind direction on your face at the same time.

The Gooleys were camping on the Isle of Wight over the weekend. It was great weather, the few hours of rain that are necessary to make it feel like proper British camping kept themselves to late at night and early in the morning, which was considerate. A few observations will creep into the blog in due course, but to save me a bit of time as I work to catch up on some emails, below is one that artfully saved me the need to blog properly. Thank you, Rob.

Tristan,

I hope you are well.

Emily and I attended your course at West Dean some months ago, and since then we have spent much time working out north from south based on the “tick” shaped branch formations.

I recall you showing us many pictures of trees and asking us to determine directions based on the tick shape. And I have now something to add…

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My thanks to Richard, who sent in this picture from a lad’s walking weekend along the Jurassic Coast. He was given a private course as a birthday present and was on the lookout for natural signposts. Wind and trees don’t scream direction a lot louder than this. He also spotted sand blown only over the northeastern edge of a horse training area and found Polaris, but then struggled to see it from the inside of a pub.

This morning was filled with a breezy walk up to Halnaker Windmill. The sun was out for most of the way up the hill, but the sky also had a generous share of cumulus clouds.

Natural navigation is a mixture of art and science and this can be felt very strongly when the sun disappears behind the clouds. Science allows us to understand the direction that the sun will be and there is an art to reading the cloud edges to reveal the direction of the sun, even when we cannot see it.

The low trees on the exposed hilltop had been groomed by the prevailing southwesterly winds. There were green, grey and gold lichens layering the various sides of the brick.

One of the keys to navigating with nature is appreciating scale. It is vital that we do not spend too much time focusing too narrowly or widely. In this photograph, taken in the South Downs on Monday, our eyes are naturally led to the fallen tree. It would be very easy to miss both a bigger clue to direction and a smaller one.

The heart of the tree is marginally closer to our side of the tree, which hints that we are south of it, looking north.

If we peer through the undergrowth and bare tree branches we can see that the land falls away to lower country in the distance. The South Downs are a predominantly east/west range of hills and so any time that we can see a long way down into lower land it suggests that we are looking north or south. The hills are also close to the…

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It’s 8.15am this morning out on the Downs and this sheep’s shadow tells us that we are looking south. Her wool, or ’sheep fur’ as some would have it, is blowing from the same direction as the sun and gave me a constant reference all morning.

On a completely unrelated note, there is an article about the RGS in today’s Telegraph that I have somehow appeared in.

This isn’t about the Force, although I did read recently that a lot of Scottish policemen have put ‘Jedi’ down as their religion on their work forms.

More days than not I spot an example of the sun influencing nature in a way that is new to me in some way. In general terms it is fairly old news that a place that receives no direct sunlight will appear different in some way. It is in the detail that the novelty is to be found. The more obvious signs might be that it has different plants growing and an abundance of mosses and lichens.

The more fascinating signs are subtler, created by factors that are minute but combine to create an effect. The first picture shows how broadbrush nature can be. Despite looking in one direction towards a single hillside, as many as six different bands of colour are visible.

The second picture…

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