The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Happy Winter Solstice One and All!

Here’s an interesting solstice fact for you: the Earth is actually receiving more solar radiation at this time of year than at any other time. This is because the Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse. In the northern hemisphere winter the Earth is at its closest to the sun, a point called ‘perihelion’, but in summer it is at its furthest point, or ‘aphelion’.

The Guardian have published a little article on the timing of the winter solstice.

However, my favourite solstice image is on a different page. The same technique used in the photo on that page, from the same position, but on the summer solstice would probably not catch the sun at all, or perhaps just a glimpse of it in the top corners.

At this time of year the sun is always…

Read More...

We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that gets pointed regularly at the birds.

Some of the routes used by the pioneers of the Pacific match the migratory routes of the birds exactly.

The route used by the Maori fleet that sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century and settled there is the same as that taken by the Long-tailed Cuckoo each September.

I like to think of these earliest navigators. I imagine them gazing up as flocks of birds head uniformly over the horizon in one direction only to repeat the exercised in the opposite direction half a year later. It does not take great leaps of the imagination to deduce that the birds are not doing this great exercise for fun, QED, there must be something in…

Read More...

I thought you might enjoy this picture I took a week ago of lichen and moss growing on a disused fountain in a garden in the south of France. Nature doesn’t make compasses much easier to read, but just in case you’re experiencing a moment of doubt: the photo is taken looking from the south side of the fountain looking towards the north.

Trees are the easiest plants to read to find direction, but one of my chilli plants is also doing a fine job. It has been growing in a greenhouse and so shows only the effects of the sun and no combing from the wind. It could not be much clearer.

The plant is dramatically heavier on its southern side and it is also displaying the ‘Tick Effect’ across its stems – more vertical growth on the northern side, more horizontal on the southern.