The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I have been reasonably self-disciplined with my writing over recent weeks. It is helped by the fact that I like to get up before anyone else, and so there are fewer distractions on the way to locking myself in the study. Even so, trips to the kitchen/loo/garden to feed the chickens need to be carefully monitored, lest they become games of football with the kids/random phone calls/endless grazing. I have managed to maintain some sense of purpose most of the time, but this morning a pair of mating dragonflies ambushed my attention for long enough to earn a spot in the blog.

Surely there can be no navigational information derived from the sight of a male dragonfly seizing the female’s thorax with his anus? I hear you cry. Dragonflies are normally found near freshwater. In this case our garden pond most likely.

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which…

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There is a scene in the 80s spoof movie Top Secret where Val Kilmer is busy painting the scene from a moving train. We later see the result of his work: a blur of green.

I was reminded of this as we made our regular short and longer drives around the Brittany countryside. We covered 1500 miles in just over a fortnight and the number of times that the trees yielded all their navigational secrets to me in our moving car were vastly outnumbered by sights of leaves and branches blurring into one. Sometimes the collective sight of trees leaning to the east from the wind, or the rare silhouette detectable through summer foliage gave an excellent snapshot. All too often however the green of summer made things trickier.

I reminded myself of the bleeding obvious one one occasion as I allowed my curiosity about a tree that appeared to…

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