The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A walk in the woods yesterday revealed some natural and unnatural clues.

This primrose, the only one in the area, was unsurprisingly in a south-facing spot. The thick bed of south-facing moss that surrounds it on the beech roots should not surprise us. Moss grows in abundance close to the ground where moisture levels remain generally high, even in south-facing places.

The technique of trail blazing, marking trees to show others the way is ancient, but the chalk markings on this beech tree were a little disconcerting. Apologies, the picture is out of focus as I was hurrying to catch up with others, but hopefully you can make out the following: arrows showing the way, the words, ‘Tom’ and ‘This Way’ and a picture of a sad, perhaps perplexed or even angry face. Hopefully Tom is less sad now, having…

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I came across this story this morning about a pet dog, Sophie Tucker, that was washed overboard in rough conditions during a sailing holiday off the Australian coast and swam five miles to the small uninhabited island of St Bees.

The story focuses on the distance swum, which is incredible enough, but makes no mention of how the dog found the island. We can rule out vision, because she would not have been able to see further than about twenty feet in front of her in those conditions. Even in flat calm a dog would barely able to see the tops of trees five miles away because of the curvature of the earth’s surface.

Smell is the most likely solution, but that points to an even tougher dog, because to follow the smell of land she would have had…

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This morning brought with it a nice thick radiation fog, which the sun will probably burn off soon. There is not forecast to be much wind today, but even a breeze deals with radiation fog, usually anything over 12 knots.

No visible sun, no discernible wind, these are the conditions that remind us that the trees reflect their environment over a long period. They act as a giant USB stick of data about thousands of days of sun and wind. All we need to do is tune our senses and look for it. The thin branch in the bottom left of the picture has been curved upwards by the prevailing southwest winds over time.

I have found myself at airports a lot recently and it occurred to me that there is not very much to inspire those interested in nature about them in general. It does sometimes take a bit of lateral thinking to spot the clues in places like that.

Some man-made structures can give us a clue to help us on our way until nature comes to our aid again. Churches are a good example. A lot of churches are aligned East-West and this can offer a short term hand if all else is proving confusing, not unusual in a built-up area. The problem with a lot of artificial clues like this though is that they are very short-lived, they offer a clue for a few seconds or minutes at best, but then disappear out of sight and leave the navigator on their own again. Airports, with a little lateral and…

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Having spent the morning organising images for upcoming courses, I was reminded of a regular problem with learning anything practical from nature. There is a real tendency to bias. By which I mean when we are learning something new there is a great temptation to either make our observations fit our predictions, or to overlook things until we find something that looks the way we want it to.

Moss on trees and buildings is a great example of this. The popular notion is that moss will grow on the north side. This is sometimes true, but often not and for a good reason. The harsh truth is that moss doesn’t care where north is at all. Moss will grow where moisture is retained and this is determined by rain, sun, wind and other factors. If it was only about the sun then it would be a far better indicator…

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