All posts by Stephen Bolwell

Stephen Bolwell is a photographer, painter and writer. His blog - 'Take a Picture - Save the Planet' deals with both serious and light hearted environmental issues; he has a background in wildlife documentary filmmaking for television and posts short wildlife clips on YouTube.

Denaturing: The Fast-Track to Economic Growth… and the Snow Geese Bucking the Trend.

June 11, 2021 Stephen Bolwell 4 Comments

When I first moved to the Lower Mainland of British Colombia I wondered what Canadians did for a living; as a child brought up in Britain, I was led to believe that what they mostly did was chop down trees. I remember Monty Python singing a song about it: ‘lumberjacks’ apparently were O.K. — but as the verses progressed a different story emerged — all nonsense for comic effect, but even in the real world things aren’t always what they seem and mostly not quite so funny.

*There are very few trees like this on the Lower Mainland.*

A couple of hundred years ago the coastal lowlands of British Columbia were covered in unspoiled temperate rainforest; but all of that was gone at least a couple of generations before I was born. I’m a Canadian now, but the tag is presumptuous: in my English imagination, men in red checked shirts still chop down trees somewhere close to home, although I’ve never seen them doing it… But of course, I should have twigged — there are no ‘grand old trees’ still standing in my neighbourhood, and in consequence lumberjacks in tartan shirts, looking to get things done, are few and far between… Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen a mounty ride by on a horse… When you start looking closely, life is full of little disappointments.

Once the trees were felled, people made a living farming the fertile land where the trees once stood, but even that wouldn’t last. These days, there isn’t very much money in farming, unless it comes as a subsidy for not bothering to grow anything. Profits are mostly tied to land values; and it’s no surprise that speculators are buying up blueberry fields, giving the impression they have suddenly become fruit growers, what they are really doing is submitting planning applications to re-zone agricultural land for residential use, and cash in on the current housing boom. There’s a lot of money involved, and a variety of ways to hit the jackpot.

A green belt area in West Sussex. U.K.. Green belts in Britain are not as secure as they once were, but when environmentally sensitive areas are threatened, local opposition often proves successful. Considering the number of people now living in Britain it is surprising how much green there is.

Having lived most of my life in England I am used to green belts that can’t so easily be re-zoned; which makes sense, because in future food will need to be grown closer to where it is consumed. Unfortunately, the chances of doing this where I live now are rapidly decreasing, as much of the arable land across the Lower Mainland has become urban sprawl, and I don’t think there are any plans to discontinue the policy.

The long term future of the area looks bleak, although there are many who don’t see it that way, as few are inclined to stifle an apparently successful economy, even when it’s built on the false premise that we can all live off the back of a housing boom. The Lower Mainland is expansive but continued development between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains is finite, and always at the expense of agriculture and the natural world.

*Seattle is an interesting mix of old style and modern.*

In the Pacific North West, Vancouver and Seattle are maritime cities that have evolved historically as ports exporting locally felled timber. But with the old growth forests long gone, both have taken on new roles that include thriving film industries and tourism. Vancouver is especially well placed as it is possible to be on a beach in the morning, then lunch in the city and get over to the North Shore mountains for an afternoon ski, or a walk on the wild side, depending on the season.

*Vancouver is scruffier than it once was, it has a homeless problem, and like many places on the Lower Mainland has an abundance of rats, but the overall impression to visitors is of a vibrant city.*

*When I came to the area 10 years ago Surrey had 3 high rise buildings, but high density living has become a feature — a year ago these towers didn’t exist.*

I live on the Canadian side of the border between the two impressive cities, and every day the natural world moves a little further away. My nearest city is Surrey which hasn’t a lot going for it — landlocked, and developing rapidly, it remains uninspiring.

The land that surrounds the city has been utilised principally for the purpose of building houses, fuelled by a never ending influx of people from elsewhere (myself included): there is a plan to have more people living in the area than live in Vancouver within 10 years. One might think the urban sprawl is driven by quick money rather than any sustainable plan for a long term future. Presently, little is produced other than housing, which has resulted in a service industry — but what will happen when the available land runs out? Not everybody will be able to make a living working in a shop or driving a taxi.

In only one respect does the city follow in the footsteps of Vancouver — increasingly, as more people flood in, local people are priced out of the housing market; or at least have to live in far less space. When more people are crammed in, there is inevitably less natural space, which is detrimental to health, but probably still good for council coffers. I remember a time when people lived in places they actually liked, but now the priority is to simply find affordable accommodation… and if you don’t like high density living, then that’s just too bad — your loss will always be somebody else’s gain.

There are of course many houses that are not crammed in, but such benefits are reflected in price. This development was completed in 2015 — a year earlier it had been woodland adjoining a nature reserve, providing an important natural buffer.

Early in 2020, experts predicted that house prices in Canada would drop as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but this turned out to be about as reliable as the predictions that our computers would crash when 1999 turned to 2000; and more recently there were those who told us that Donald Trump was unelectable; then came Brexit with warnings of dire consequences if Britain left the European Union — and we’re still waiting on that one. Not surprisingly, in April 2021, when it was predicted that Canadians house prices would fall dramatically, they did exactly the opposite and rose at the fastest rate on record. Unfortunately, we don’t remember those who gave us all the duff information, if we did we’d never listen to them again… Instead we just keep getting fooled… In the worlds of Homer Simpson… ‘Dooh!

Predicting the future is never easy, but there’s little need for pundits to get mouthy about what my local city does best — it orchestrates the urban sprawl that surrounds it; and with more vehicles come traffic jams and a decline in air quality, while infrastructure barely keeps pace with the rapidly increasing population: predictions are unnecessary because ‘progress’ (if you can call it that), is moving at break-neck speed.

*A local corner plot developed for town housing during late summer 2016, which led to higher density living and fewer trees.*

A few designated areas provide wildlife respite, but most are quite small and do little more than service the burgeoning dog population’s pooing requirements. There are only a few links between ‘natural’ spaces; but in my area this means little more than weaving between dog doos under a buzz of electric pylons — pointless really, because the nature route is low priority and incomplete. All of this is unfortunate, but for reasons that are puzzling, Canadians are reticent to complain as things around them get steadily worse.

Despite the dismal outlook, there is something to be grateful for: despite the extensive and rapid development across the Lower Mainland, local coastlines provide important habitats for large numbers of migrating birds, with many remaining quite natural along route. Move away from the city towards the mountains or the sea, and the human population often drops away, especially in low lying coastal areas where the possibility of rising sea levels dissuades many from attempting to live there.

Wherever the land touches the sea, the tidal zone offers one of the most difficult and expensive areas for humans to conquer, with the result that long strips of mostly undisturbed natural habit are still intact. We don’t always appreciate the large numbers of plants and small invertebrates that live in such places, but the waders, ducks and geese that come flying in to feed on them certainly do.

*Goldeneye are winter residents; arriving during the fall they leave in the spring.*

On the Lower Mainland as winter approaches, it is difficult not to notice the steadily increasing numbers of migrating ducks and geese flying in, but their arrival is not considered consequential: the local economy will always take precedence with the birds considered only for their amenity value. Unfortunately, as our economies become more globalised the natural world hardly features at all.

Getting the best of nature has become second nature to us. When a site is designated for a new airport in places where birds have been flying along migratory routes for thousand of years, the natural aviators become a sudden inconvenience and efforts are made to ground them. In dealing with the natural world, our hypocrisy can be breath-taking, especially when there’s a dollars to be made.

At some stage, we will be forced to re-evaluate our absurdly homocentric views towards every natural environment we come into contact with: presently we consider such places as just waiting for us to repurpose them. We start by asking what benefits conserving them will have for us, and if there is uncertainty, fall back on that old favourite: ‘You can’t get in the way of progress’. So locked are we into following the money, that on coming up against wilderness, habitually, our first impulse is to destroy it — the natural world gets a reprieve only when we can find no immediate economic reason to exploit it.

Fortunately, large numbers of birds continue to migrate through many of our coastal regions. In the Northern Hemisphere the birds usually travel along migratory routes that run from north to south in the fall, and in the opposite direction during the spring; the resultant spectacle is one of the great natural wonders of the world. I consider myself lucky to live close to a major migratory route — ‘The Pacific Flyway’ involving a great many species and an enormous number of birds: everything from hummingbirds to songbirds and waders, are making their journeys, but it is the swans, ducks and geese as they skein above us in orderly patterns that we are most likely to hear, see and notice.

*American Wigeon are common winter residents on the Lower Mainland*.

At the approach of winter many birds are looking to move away from the harsh weather conditions they are experiencing to the north. The solution is obvious: fly south to where things are easier and return to traditional breeding grounds as spring arrives. Many birds will come all the way from the Arctic but not all will move on to warmer climes; indeed, some will not go much further south than the Lower Mainland where temperate coastal conditions provide a manageable climate for overwintering. It is essential to protect the traditional feeding grounds annually visited by birds arriving in the fall — because if these are lost, the repercussions for the natural world, inevitably, will extend far beyond local areas.

*Large numbers of waders moving along a local coastline in winter.*

The coastal regions of the Pacific North West have extensive inlets and large numbers of islands providing almost endless opportunities for migrating birds to feed. However, not every species can exist exclusively in the tidal zone: many wildfowl also require grasslands for their survival, and if extensive reserves are not available then winter farmland lying fallow remains their only alternative.

In years when winter birds show up in numbers, food supplies can sometimes become limited by extensive grazing and this can prove destructive to agriculture; although on the upside, bird droppings usually increases soil fertility. When bird numbers stay within certain limits, the relationship between migrating birds and local farmers can be a good one, especially if farmers are compensated adequately for the losses caused by visiting grazers. In fairness to the birds, it should be remembered that their ancestors were utilising local habitats long before these were repurposed for agriculture; an argument that hasn’t worked well for native people in the past, and is unlikely to prove more successful in the conservation of native birds.

Trumpeter Swans feeding on open grassland in winter. When their heads are up and bobbing, the photographer is probably too close; and when the birds start honking, most likely they will take flight. Managing energy expenditure is a feature of life for many birds especially those that migrate — because unlike most of us, none of them will be going back to warmer conditions for a hot meal at the end of the day.

Because I lived much of my life outside British Columbia, the birds I didn’t get to see in the wild before coming to live in Western Canada hold a certain novelty value, with snow geese amongst my favourites.

*Snow Geese are a spectacle as they arrive on the Lower Mainland in numbers — it is always a privilege to spend time with them.*

Migrating in from Arctic regions, the snow goose journey is epic in nature: most of the birds that overwinter on the Lower Mainland migrate from summer breeding grounds as far away as Wrangel Island, Siberia. They fly across The Bering Sea and North Pacific before moving down the west coast of North America. Many bird species will continue further south on their extraordinary journeys, but the snow geese arriving during November will stay for a while, then move a little further south to graze on grasslands in Washington State before flying North again as spring approaches.

*Photographing wild geese can be a bit hit and miss, but in years when adults have been particularly successful in rearing young, the large number of arrivals makes doing so easier.*

Snow geese provide the best opportunities for photography when they are feeding; and are most easily approached along footpaths where people regularly walk fence lines. Providing nobody attempts to enter the field the birds remain calm unless they have been recently shot at. It is however natural for the birds to move away from you as they graze but if too many heads are raised and stay up, and the geese get agitated and noisy, as with the Trumpeter swans mentioned earlier, it is best to move away before the birds take flight.

*Better in the sky than the china ‘ducks’ I remember seeing on a living room wall when I was a child. For a while they were naff; they moved on to being kitsch, but now they are ironic.*

There is no excuse for disturbing wild birds even when there are so many it doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes wild geese will feed on local parks and golf courses; and just because we might walk in these places, there’s no reason to put them up for fun, or for a picture. Birds that are forced to keep moving on deplete their energy reserves rapidly, and this may prove consequential on colder nights. The fewer unnecessary flights they have to make the easier life becomes. Developing a sensitivity to wildlife should be encouraged, although such behaviour doesn’t come naturally to everybody. It’s never too late to learn though — and if it costs us nothing, why not behave appropriately? When I was young I’d have been in trouble for chasing the ducks, but many people think it cute when their child or dog chases a wild animal; and perhaps therein lies the problem to ‘wild goose chasing’… and quite a lot else.

In a world where positive stories about wildlife are increasingly difficult to find, snow geese are running against the trend, with their numbers increasing dramatically in recent years, in part because over the last half century, more arable land has become available across their winter feeding grounds — the general view is that there are now too many birds to support. In Arctic regions, summer temperatures are increasing and as so many young birds are being reared successfully, grasslands across Arctic feeding grounds are also becoming overgrazed and this is now a major concern. In consequence, there has been a relaxation of the number of birds that may be shot annually to allow habitats to recover.

The only shooting I’ll ever do is with a camera, but appreciate the potential for a snow goose problem. Nevertheless I remain an admirer of any bird that can fly at high altitude over great distances to achieve hard won success. A snow goose may live for 16 years and if you can imagine following the progress of a single bird over the course of a lifetime, you’d likely feel upset if your bird ‘got the bullet’. It is however necessary to maintain a realistic attitude as to how nature is balanced: predation and culls seem shocking, but they are often better options than birds eating themselves out of their available food source, with disease and loss of condition inevitably causing birds to suffer as they starve to death.

*Watching a flock of white birds at sunset communicating vocally with one another is a wonderful experience.*

The migratory cycle appears to be a successful and never ending process, but as migrating birds rely on so many habitats during their passage, they could easily disappear as quickly as the native forests of the Lower Mainland already have. For millennia birds have utilised large numbers of individual feeding grounds as they make these journeys, and if our actions destroysjust a few essential places, the viability of many bird species could be thrown into question. There are no mystical guiding forces; the longterm future of the natural world is entirely at our disposal — disposal being the operative word.

We can open small nature reserves as easily as we create zoos in an attempt to maintain species, but in the longterm it is the conservation of natural ecosystems that is most important; and in future we will need to develop more effective ways to live alongside nature. Extending our reach to every region of the globe to support ever expanding economies is unsustainable; ecosystems are finite and complex beyond our wildest imaginations and once gone cannot be recreated. There can be no doubt that presently, we are disrupting many natural environments beyond repair.

Birds are part of the many complex ecological systems that surround us, and are not simply flying around for our amusement — but if we can’t get past that notion, it is as well to consider that migratory routes are defined entirely by the ecosystems they pass through, their success or failure an indicator as to how sustainable and healthy is our world — and if we choose to disrupt them… we do so at our peril.

Owls — Not Quite as Clever as We Think.

February 21, 2021 Stephen Bolwell 4 Comments

You know how it is, you’re having a perfectly normal conversation with somebody you think you know, and suddenly they say, ‘That’s just not like me, I’m a Capricorn’, and you’re thinking, ‘I hadn’t realised you were as daft as a brush’…

The great thing about owls is they aren’t like that — millions of years of evolution have honed them into ultra-efficient killing machines and none will make a judgement based on your star signs. Probably what they’re thinking when looking at you is, ‘I’m sure that thing’s too big to eat; but I’ll keep watching in case it’s dangerous?’

All that owls need to do is catch and kill prey on a regular basis; find a mate, then a suitable place to nest and rear offspring successfully; and for all of these things natural selection has adapted them well… otherwise they’d be extinct. Survival doesn’t require cleverness in the way that we think of it; no owl will be entering a pub quiz any time soon, because that’s not what ‘wise owls’ do.

Here’s ‘a wise owl’. Certainly this one’s fairly cute for a killing machine, but clever?…That’s a different story.

The impression we have is that owls are thoughtful, because unlike most birds they have flat faces and as predators need to judge distance using binocular vision; consequently, their eyes are located at the front of their heads, and these organs of vision are usually so big and adorable they are a super stimulus for our brains and this encourages us to like them. Add to this, beaks that look a bit like noses and suddenly we’re thinking, these creatures look a bit like us, so they must think like us… but that’s really stretching it.

When I turned my wife into Christina Robin for her birthday, the joke wasn’t so much about her mild mannered attitude towards childhood friends, but rather, that none of them were very bright — Wol couldn’t even spell his own name and he was supposed to be the clever one; and despite not being a stuffed toy like the others, his general lack of knowledge suggested that it was a close run thing.

*An owl that has hung on a bedpost for more than 25 years was a gift to my son.*

Various animals seem to grab our attention — mostly mammals; but frogs, toads, parrots, owls and even snails have their fans. Owl enthusiasts will surround themselves with imagery relating to their favourite subject — pictures on the wall, place mats on the table and cuddly toys in the bedroom.

*My grandfather’s collar-stud and cufflinks jar is on a shelf at the top of the stairs, and with more than 100 years of use, is beginning to show its age.*

For the love of owls...

I don’t see myself as a rabid owl enthusiast and yet after a head count I’ve noticed quite a few dotted around the house. Rooted somewhere deep in our psyche these unusual looking bird are just waiting to come to mind, but over the years my relationship with them has been mostly practical: every now and again I’ve been required to film one, and suddenly they’re part of making a living.

The first owl I filmed for television was for a documentary on the wildlife of churchyards — it was a barn owl… or to be precise, it was three barn owls, and they taught me something… These are beautiful birds but have a habit of making their surroundings surprisingly dirty for all their hauntingly pristine whiteness. Clearly, the magic hold that owls have over our minds turns almost everything that they do into a positive.

*A beautiful bird, but not one of my favourites*

Owls push out waste material from both ends, which you really start to notice when you spend long hours working with them. Most creatures excrete from their rear ends, but owls also regularly throw up pellets — waste materials of digestion that attract flies and other small creatures to feed and lay eggs upon these macabre little parcels.

During the spring of the project I was suddenly looking after three young captive barn owls, converting my Victorian outhouse into a film set, and constructing a window from which they would hopefully emerge as if from a church tower.

In reality churches haven’t had owls or even bats in their belfries for a very long time, because those responsible for maintaining the interiors of churches prefer to avoid accumulating bat poo, bird droppings and owl pellets.

*The front of the outbuilding beside my old Victorian house, becoming a church tower window.*

For years now, the chances of finding owls spending their days hiding away in church towers has been reduced to almost zero, as most windows have been meshed to prevent birds from entering.

However, if owls had still been living a church going lifestyle, the only other option would have been to build a scaffold next to a church tower from which I need to film a single shot, and that wasn’t very cost effective. Back in the 1980s, it was easier for me to build a church window set and film captive owls coming and going, even if in reality they’d be unlikely to do so.

Wildlife film-makers rarely admit to deception, but we all have to own up to the realities of what is possible in a world that is rapidly disappearing. I don’t think it matters one hoot whether an owl exits a real window, or a fake one, because nothing about the bird’s behaviour changes. Nobody questions an edit in a natural history film, because if an audience wanted to experience natural events in real-time they’d be waiting for days. However, as soon as you tighten up the progress of events the result is a story; and the real problem with telling a story is the disappointment of the viewer should they discover the deception.

So, there I was… faking it; building a facade on the front of my outhouse and using the outdoor toilet next to it as a hide to film from, essentially by knocking a small hole in the wall. On the outside of the set window was an outdoor enclosure into which the owls could emerge, but they never did. Even sitting in the window would have been helpful; and if flying was beyond them, just hopping out of frame would have been enough, but they wouldn’t do any of these things. It was a complete waste of time, and I ended up feeding the birds inside the little room they’d adopted as their home, a home that I never managed to persuade them to leave.

All that was needed was the grouting between the bricks, and the scene, when lit for night, would be quite believable; but as not a single owl ever exited through this window, my efforts were a waste of time.

The outhouse was next to the kitchen, and the flies coming to visit the mess the bird’s created was disagreeable. The owls weren’t equipped to fly any distance; and after a couple of months I returned them to the person who had reared them in preparation for release into the wild. I am aware that most owl enthusiasts would be singing the praises of experiencing such wonderful birds first hand, but I couldn’t wait to see the back of them. They whole thing had been a time consuming failure. I’d been unintentionally mislead about what these owls would do, and was a long way past the point where I was going to train them to fly through my phoney window. They were the wrong birds for the job and never again did I make such an expensive mistake.

*‘One Man’s Owl‘ Bubo, when a young bird.*

Soon after my year of filming in graveyards, I moved onto another film project for the BBC in the backwoods of Maine where I would meet a great horned owl destined to become one of the most famous owls in natural history writing. I returned to Maine on several occasions over the course of the next year and a half, spending much of my time high on a wooded hill at the camp of scientist and writer Professor Bernd Heinrich. The thing about Bernd is that he is not only an exceptional naturalists but one of the most impressive zoologists of his generation. He’d rescued a fledgling great horned owl from the snow and the bird was always somewhere close to his cabin, either sitting on a log, or in a tree close by. He had been named Bubo: if you can name a hobbit Bilbo, then why not an owl Bubo, after all it is latin for his Genus — the New World horned owls and Old World eagle owls make up the genus Bubo.

Eventually, after many hours of observation, Bernd wrote ‘One Man’s Owl‘ which like most of his books became a classic of natural history writing. The bird was semi-wild, and would come to Bernd without much trouble; better than that, he would fly to food in a manner that was entirely predictable. One day Bernd dangled something dead and unpleasant just behind my head and young Bubo came swooping in to take it, providing a shot I could never have achieved in the wild. We repeated this several times, the owl on each occasion dropping from it’s perch just a little way off and then gliding towards the lens, dipping low enough to appear as if he might be about to crash into me, but rising at the last moment to a position just above my head — each time I felt claws brushing through my hair, but they didn’t close until locked onto the free lunch that I couldn’t exactly feel behind my head, but could faintly smell. When a bird of prey’s talons touch prey, they usually snap closed as a reflex action and my hair got pulled, but it was nothing personal. If an owl really flies at you with intent… then you certainly know about it.

A great horned owl has a pounds per square inch (psi) grip of around 300 — 500, whereas most humans manage a grip of just a few pounds per square inch.

A few years later I found myself in the high mountain woodlands of New Mexico filming the small nocturnal flammulated owl. It was a surprise when the scientist working with the birds told me he could chainsaw out the back of the tree they were nesting in and they would remain entirely undisturbed. If you needed to observe or weight young birds this was perhaps an effective way of doing it, but I was sceptical. Chainsawing a tree before the owls started nesting seemed a better option, but how many trees would you need to cut into to guarantee a nest being present later in the year? Predicting such events is very hit and miss.

This picture was taken to reference an owl in place: it is obvious that the sudden daylight was inconvenient, and although woken the bird wasn’t stressed. It is important to read an animal’s demeanour, because that will indicate what you can or cannot do. The film sequence involved more directional lighting, with a suitable exposure to create the impression that the bird was tucked away in the tree; and tightening up the shot to reveal only the interior made the sequence believable.

A flammulated owl watching from a nest hole in a broken off pine tree. The bird can be seen looking out about 10 inches above the top of the ladder. Mostly, I would secure the ladder to the rear of the tree to film the nest internally.

The section removed from the back of the nest could be taken out when filming, then set back and wired into place very quickly. There are probably a dozen good reasons why this wouldn’t be done today, one of which is that flammulated owls are now endangered in some areas of their range. For the most part this has been down to habitat loss. After being set up by the bird biologist, I filmed the owls both during the day and at night using artificial light — but standing at the top of a ladder tied almost perpendicular to what remained of an old conifer miles from anywhere, in otherwise total darkness, was rather spooky.

The filming occurred more than 35 years ago when a great many species were far less threatened than they are today; but even back then if I hadn’t been confident about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been filming; and in this case, certainly not without the supervision of a scientific advisor who had been working closely with the birds. I haven’t named him because many will consider this kind of intrusiveness unacceptable; but as none of his birds ever seemed disturbed and the information gleaned went into conserving the species, I didn’t have a problem with it. Nevertheless, I am not sure we need to see every wild bird on the nest just for a television programme, although there is no doubt that this kind of media exposure is the best way to get a general audience informed and proactive in conservation… But don’t try this at home… you might lose an eye! The alternative is to film captive birds on sets and there are many people who are equally disturbed by this alternative dishonesty.

Using artificial light attracted more moths that I have ever seen at any one time outside of the tropics. The owls were easy going, but there was always the potential danger that an adult bird arriving back at the nest might get spooked and launch into my face. Owls have inflicted serious damage to people who have worked this closely with them in the wild, causing facial damage and even the loss of an eye.

I was filming less than a foot from the bird, and couldn’t believe how tolerant the flammulated owls were, although I only worked with birds for very short periods, never more than 20 minutes a night before leaving them to get on with their lives. The success of the project was mostly in the planning; followed by working quickly without any sudden movements that might disturb them. I used a variety of techniques to minimise disturbance: a light source that could be turned up rather than one that could only be turned on, and dark gloves to prevent sudden glare from my hands. Simple things but very effective.

Unless a hide has been set up and birds are entirely unaware of your presence, the 20 minute rule is a good one. I’ve worked in this way with several bat species including vampire bats at their roost as well as variety of nesting birds, but you can’t do this with every species.

Some birds are not troubled by this kind of exposure, but many will be, unless you have almost unlimited time to get them used to a new experience; most importantly you can’t just try it out to see, and that is why such filming endeavours work best if they are associated with a research project that has already clearly defined the ground rules.

*These flammulated owl chicks were filmed successfully from the back side of the nest.*

It would be impossible to list every owl I’ve filmed or photographed because there have been so many — some have been captive, but most have been truly wild.

This tawny owl sitting on a camera in my studio was a star. If there was ever an owl that made me question my view that owls aren’t especially bright, then this was the one.

I have in the past been fairly mean when using film stock and there are many occasions when I didn’t wind on far enough before taking pictures, resulting in a light leak that affected the first frame of the roll. For some reason when I photographed owls this happened rather a lot, but I often quite liked the results. I could claim that these were artful pictures, but I won’t go that far — although the random nature of what turned out was often quite interesting.

‘Tawny in Red’ was a resident at the Hawk Conservancy Trust at Weyhill, Hampshire and it was an extraordinary bird. This owl would fly to wherever was required and land to order; and rather usefully could fly slowly alongside a moving vehicle so that it might be easily tracked by a camera. Straight away I must admit that owls are capable of remarkable things, but in fairness this birds super abilities were to some degree down to handler and Trust Founder Ashley Smith, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was a very special bird.

*A Rothkoesque image of a burrowing owl — a species that I’m fond of.*

This wild burrowing owl was photographed on open grassland, and had the habit of standing tall, stretching itself up to gain a little extra height when it was trying to make out anything that was moving, often at some distance. This was accompanied by complicated head movements, giving the bird a comic demeanour. The behaviour however was strictly functional, allowing the bird to judge distance. The owl would react this way when anything new came into view: this might be an old bag blowing in the wind, a coyote, or just a human who hadn’t yet noticed the owl was there — in the reverse situation the observations were seldom as acute: people just don’t notice as much as an owl does; certainly any owl that takes the trouble to monitor its surroundings is more likely to survive than one that doesn’t.

*An old pipe is a very suitable home for a burrowing owl.*

Everybody has favourites, but more often than not, mine are functional. Burrowing owls are high on my list because they are active during the day which gives a film-maker at least a chance. In the mid 1980s I worked with these delightful birds on a site in New Mexico and became quite enamoured by their behaviour.

They would sit outside of their burrows during the day, or on top of a dead tree stump or power line pole, but unlike most owls, were more inclined to present more interesting daytime behaviour. Many species remain at rest during daylight hours, giving you little more to film than a rotating head and the occasional blink; but burrowing owls are different — they are generally more dynamic, even if sometimes this involves little more than moving in and out of their burrows. Movement is essential to a television audience’s experience; and usefully the most dramatic activity these owls would perform was to dive-bomb walkers and joggers; joggers being the preferential targets, perhaps because they were moving faster and considered more of a threat.

A young burrowing owl exercising its wings. Perhaps because I’ve been involved with moving pictures for most of my working life, I also like to see some movement in my stills, although achieving the appropriate amount of blur can be very hit and miss. I hardly ever use flash photography, although doing so provides a sharper image which is preferential to some, but it isn’t a priority for me; and I wouldn’t in any case use flash with owls because they are such light sensitive creatures.

Several years after filming the flammulated owls, I took a road trip with my wife Jen across Route 66 and made a slight detour to re-visit my old favourites. Unlike so many animals I have returned to see, the owls had not been swamped by development or disturbance. They were living their lives pretty much the way they had been on my previous visit when I’d had the luxury of being paid to be in their presence and could give them far more time.

Jen photographing a burrowing owl on an old pole using an unsuitable lens, but she was happy with the result, because she had photographed an owl without disturbing it. If she needed a closer shot, I’d most likely already taken one on a telephoto lens.

Good telephoto lenses are expensive, and increasingly photographers are getting far too close to wildlife trying to get a better shot, and they are often doing so using mobile phones. As a group, photographers are becoming a nuisance and it’s way past the time when we need to be thinking about our priorities, because no matter how hard we try, somebody will always have a better picture of the animals we are trying to photograph than we are ever going to get on the inappropriate cameras and lenses many of us are using. Clearly it’s time for all of us to ease off a bit and give what remains of the natural world a bit more space.

*A picture given to me by John Northcott in the early 1980s He’s may well have grown up by now and lost this skill.*

When working with animals I’ve always attempt two styles of photography. The first and most essential is to record events at a specific moment in time: it is rewarding to take a great picture but on occasions this isn’t the point. The second kind of picture is taken with a view to getting an attractive image, usually playing with framing and exposure to create a mood, and this isn’t as difficult as it sounds, and most of us can manage it with a bit of practice. However, now and again something special comes together — an animal is in the right place at the right time and suddenly the lighting comes good and you grab the moment, which is about as authentic as it gets for a photographer.

I presently live in a Canadian suburb, which isn’t the best place to take pictures of wildlife, but even developed areas have something to offer, especially if you can find a bit of woodland that hasn’t been felled somewhere between all of that housing. In my case, ‘a river runs through it’ with natural woodland on either side: this is a byway for many animal species, and there is no telling what might show up. Recently a beaver took up residence and started chewing down small trees. Now and again I see a barred owl that likes to sit in a particular stand of trees. My son walks a different route and he sees a different owl. Yesterday his owl was sat in its usual place, but on this occasion it was being mobbed from above by a heron. The owl on my walk seldom has anything that interesting going on, but a couple of years ago the owl was sitting unusually low in a tree close to the path. The sun was going down and I could see the light would come good in just a few minutes and all I needed to do was photograph it, but I wasn’t carrying a long lens. The question was, could I jog home, pick one up and get back in time? It took fifteen minutes to turn that around, and when I got back the owl was still there, and suddenly looking at me wondering what all the fuss was about.

The sun was casting its rays through the branches and there was very little life left in them, but there was enough. The owl bobbed her head at me, trying to work out what I was doing. I imagined she was thinking, ‘What are you up to you fool?’… but that’s just the’ psych bending power of the owl’ driving me to put human thoughts into her skull. She soon lost interest and turned her head to one side and I took my picture. My preference was to think that she’d worked it all out — the meaning of life and all that goes with it, but that of course was preposterous. Everything that was clever about this owl was inside my head. But never mind that — there before me was the most extraordinary creature… and that should have been enough, because this was as good as it was ever going to get.

In memory of my father — Elliott Keith Bolwell. 22/8/22 – 22/1/21.

Some Days I Just Can’t Tell my Ground Squirrel from my Marmot.

January 2, 2021 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

Pre-covid, but not so long ago, Jen and I took a trip to Manning Park in British Columbia intending to visit upland meadows in full flower; but you know how it is with the natural world — get your timing out by a week one way or the other, and you’re either too early and there’s nothing to see, or you’re too late and everything’s gone to seed. It’s a bit like life really — there are plenty of opportunities to miss.

*Visiting mountains in summer is a wonderful experience, even when the period between consecutive winters is* *disturbingly* *short.*

Living on the coast as we do, the time schedule for many natural events runs seasonally ahead of events further inland. The nearer to the sea, the more temperate and mild it is. Go north (or in the Southern Hemisphere, south), or anywhere where altitude increases and natural events are playing catch up. In the case of Manning Park not only did we travel inland across a great land-mass, but we also rose well above sea-level, consequently the upland meadows hadn’t quite reached their best; but when you’ve come a distance, you’re duty bound to find something interesting. In our case it was ground squirrels; and not just because they’re cute; there was also a good story.

My first awareness of chipmunks as a small child living in Britain can from cartoons. — *My first awareness of chipmunks as a small child living in Britain came from cartoon characters.*

But before we got acquainted with the local rodents; we would need to deal with the disappointment of what we wouldn’t be seeing — a delightful expanse of upland meadows with colourful flowers waving in the wind.

A trip to the visitors centre is always the best place to start when a park is new to you and there we obtained a map marked with flower meadow locations and set off to see them; but not before I’d asked the pleasant park official if there had been any recent bear sightings? She said she had never seen a bear in the park, and I responded by saying, “You need to get out more.” The kind of remark that is better thought than said in these enlightened times when to say almost anything can cause offence. I must try harder, or failing that, stop leaving the house. Fortunately, this is Canada, and the woman concerned wasn’t the least offended; either because Canadians are such polite people, or because you have to say everything twice to be sure they are listening… I notice the hole I am digging is getting deeper…

The Meadows on Strawberry Flats were just coming into flower -- it was clear we were a little to early — *The Meadows on Strawberry Flats were just coming into flower, but it was clear we had arrived too early.*

Very soon we parked up close by an alpine meadow, and before we’d walked 20 metres a couple emerging from a nearby trail told us there was a black bear on the corner, but by the time we arrived the bear had moved on — bears having the advantage over plants by not being rooted to the spot.

*All was not lost though: the red columbine Aquilegia formosa was at least in flower.*

*A longhorn beetle feeding and pollinating flowers.*

Bear free we inspected the meadows more closely. There were certainly flowers and insects to photograph, but the general paucity of flowers encouraged us to move on to a nearby beaver pond because the presence of fresh water always ups the chances of seeing something interesting.

Adding another habitat type invariably increases diversity, and water is exceptional at increasing the species count and the effect can be very noticeable.

We soon come across a rein orchid Platanthera dilatata which prefers boggy upland conditions, along with a dragonfly we don’t so often see on The Lower Mainland.

I’m probably the only person happy enough to trade a bear sighting for a dragonfly, especially if it’s a species I don’t regularly see — for some reason I find these extraordinary insects more interesting than bears and there’s no shortage of them here and a great many are rattling around. We take time to photograph any individual that land close by; and the calmness of the open water encourages us to spend more time by the pond than we might have done.

*The Crimson-ringed whiteface Leucorrhinia glacialis was the most common dragonfly* *present*.

We spend a pleasant hour observing creatures that haven’t changed much since before the time of the dinosaurs, although some dragonflies during the Carboniferous Period were far larger than those flying around us today, back then the oxygen content of the atmosphere was higher, allowing them to supersize. Thankfully the ones landing on us are far smaller and less terrifying than would have been the case in a similar boggy conditions 350 million years ago. Once the novelty of being perched on by these harmless little predators had worn off, we returned to the vehicle.

Entering the car park there was a scurry at my feet. Such an event would usually be a disappointment where we come from, indicating the presence of a rat, but this particular scurry was far too delicate. We sat in the car and ate our lunch, in the hope that the scurrier might return; and it did so almost before I’d had time to get the lid off my sandwiches. The rapid response rodent in question turned out to be a chipmunk; more agreeable than a rat, there are few creatures more pleasing to observe than a little munky going about its business.

A motorised procession of visitors to the car park had taught the chipmunk to forage in close proximity to the area, as a potential meal might be shared by a visitor. Strictly speaking it is wrong to feed wild animals in national parks: certainly feeding bears will encourage them to hang out where there are people and this can be a death sentence for a bear, or even a visitor; but chipmunks usually get the better of the situation, although eating food that doesn’t come naturally may put an animal’s health at risk, because humans so often provide ridiculously inappropriate food.

*Coming out of the forest at the edge of the car park, the ground is more open, providing a suitable habitat for various animals including chipmunks,* *particularly* *in places where trees have gone over and provided low cover.*

Fortunately, we don’t need to feed the chipmunk to get pictures; other visitors had already done that, and we’d interrupted the chipmunk’s searching. As we eat our lunch I photograph the little creature, and encouragingly she is finding food growing naturally. This seems rather unusual, as I’m accustomed to seeing wild animals eating anything but natural food in and around car parks — usually it is something sugary and sticky attached to a plastic wrapper.

I started to imagine a scenario relating specifically to car parks and their surrounding ecology. In could see in my mind mature fruit trees and other non-native plants growing about the place, having established themselves from the scatterings of various seeds and fruits tossed from car windows and missed by local animals. I imagined a new species of chipmunk evolving under these circumstances, one that could only exist around old car parks, entirely reliant on introduced fruit trees for their meals; but it was a silly idea — we are far better at destroying useful habitats than creating new ones… our speciality is to reduce diversity and cause species loss.

*At higher altitudes flowering plants become sparse, and anything in flower grabs our attention.*

*A red paint brush Castilleja miniata, growing at altitude.*

We move on to a car park higher in the mountains, where the air is much cleaner than we are used to, and walk across the screes of an alpine desert. Our route takes the usual form of a circuit, but I have difficulty in making progress because there is so much to photograph in an environment that is entirely new to me. The walk is not strenuous, but it takes time to get back to the car park, where things are getting interesting.

*Some ground squirrels come into the car park through drainage holes.*

I noticed at once a golden-mantled ground squirrel that seemed a little bigger than the ones I was used to seeing. It wasn’t the newly evolved form I’d imagined earlier so reliant on car parks, but there was no doubt that these squirrels were accustomed to getting free meals from visitors. Further investigation revealed that the ‘new’ rodent was a cascade golden-mantled ground squirrel Callospermophilus saturatus, a species close to becoming endangered with a very restricted range.

*The most confident ground squirrels come over the top.*

To see ground squirrels amongst the smaller chipmunks was a surprise and although I’ve photographed a good many during my 40 years travelling around North America, today the challenge would be to get both in the same picture to demonstrate the size difference, but try as I might I couldn’t manage to do so despite an hour of trying.

But everything would change for the better when a girl drove into the car park and began attracting attention… in particular from the rodents I was trying to photograph. Very quickly they left me and went over to the young woman who had arrived carrying appropriate food — a mixture of seeds and unsalted nuts, and very soon she was feeding both species next to her car causing the little creatures to show up in numbers.

*The young woman feeding a rare cascade golden-mantled ground squirrel: although to most people it’s just a monster chipmunk, but this squirrel doesn’t have stripes on either side of* *its* *head running to the eyes.*

From an animal welfare perspective she knew exactly what was safe for ground squirrels to eat. I asked if I might take photographs and she had no objection, but I won’t reveal her identity because there are rules about feeding wild animals in national parks, even when doing so provides a rare and vulnerable species with a little extra food to help them through what, up in the mountain, is a long harsh winter: the ground squirrel will be up and about feeding through summer for little more than four months of the year.

Usually, people who scatter seed indiscriminately (mostly for song birds), will do more harm than good because any surplus food will attract vermin; frequently rats will show up to the party and there is a direct link between increasing rat populations and the damage they will do the following spring raiding bird nest in increased numbers. This makes over-supplying food in a previous season counterproductive; but if the time between feeding and nest raiding is over a long period, it becomes difficult for people to link the two: feeding wild animals is certainly a mistake unless it is done sparingly.

The chipmunks are to the left of picture; to the right is a single much larger cascade golden-mantled ground squirrel — clearly it has different markings with fewer stripes along it’s body; and in the sunny area in the background a chipmunk is approaching; obviously a much smaller animal with the face stripes the ground squirrel does not have.

The young woman provided only what the animals could carry away, no more and no less, and although some purists might disagree; her actions probably were not too much of a problem; and certainly she provided the added bonus for me of pictures. If I’m honest about 20% of my career has been spent photographing wildlife that is hanging around close to car parks. In such places animals become accustomed to the presence of people and pick up an opportunistic meal, although in most cases a not especially healthy one.

*Like a pet hamsters, a ground squirrel fills its cheek pouches so that it might carry food away to* *consume later*.

Trails can be equally productive at attracting wildlife, especially when they cut through a forest. Along the borders of woodland, some species become easier to find than in the forest, perhaps visiting a tree or shrub that is flowering or fruiting in the more open conditions and such places are ideal for wildlife photography. When I have time I wait and allow wildlife to come to me, but more often than not the best results are achieved by a stake out. Sometimes, the open trail as you walk along it is enough in itself. I’m usually on the look out for reptiles basking in the undergrowth in sunny areas on either side of a path, and such opportunities can also work out well for seeing small mammals.

*Ground Squirrel habitat along the Athabasca River in the Canadian Rockies.*

A few years ago Jen and I were walking a trail high in the Rocky mountains, when we noticed a ground squirrel that seemed very accustomed to people showing no signs of fear as we passed by. So we hung around to see how close the animal would come to us. After a while the chipmunk came right up to our feet with the intention I believe of gaining what he or she had obtained from other walkers – a free meal, but we had no suitable food to offer; in any case the chipmunk was clearly very well fed and did not need a supplementary feed, although this didn’t stop the little creature from making a thorough seach of the camera bag put down beside the trail.

After we had been watching the squirrel for quite some time, Jen crouched down to get a closer picture with her small point and shoot camera and the squirrel which had still not been offered any food took its chance to do a search of her clothing, and pretty soon was up in the hood of her coat, doing a fair bit of damage to the lining, just in case she was hiding contraband there of an edible nature; then perhaps frustrated by finding nothing to eat started and intensive investigation of her hair which involved pulling at it. I of course asked Jen to just put up with the situation, while I took a series of photographs.

*Offering only what I can find on the trail is a mean trick.*

We were with the little munky for perhaps 20 minutes and then thought it best to move on. The squirrel followed us for a while, until she decided we were a lost cause and started off back along the trail to where we had first encountered it, to no doubt wait for the next muggable passer by. The scenery we walked through that day was extraordinary, but in retrospect it was the memory of a small rodent engaging with us in the hope of finding an easy meal that we remember… How pleased we were to not have engaged in similar fashion with a bear.

*A chipmunk foraging; the cuteness factor probably down to small size.*

High in the mountains ground squirrels have only a short period of time to forage for food before going into hibernation. As chipmunks are small they would find it difficult to get through seven or eight months in full hibernation, so they store food in their burrows during the summer months and regularly wake up to feed during the winter. The larger ground squirrels however build up fat reserves through the summer and hibernate right through without waking to feed, surviving entirely on accumulated body fat.

I won’t pretend that the identification of ground squirrels is that difficult once you get the hang of it: chipmunks, ground squirrels and prairie dogs are all part of the same group and known are known as marmots. The Columbian ground squirrel that we are familiar with is one of the mid-sized squirrels and has a similar distribution to golden-mantled ground squirrels, with a restricted range that runs down from the Rocky Mountain region of Alberta and British Columbia into the USA.

I have photographed ground squirrels in several States of North America, but the last time I spent a lot of time filming them for television was way back in the mid-1980s, in and around Albuquerque where they were common on flat expanses of open prairie isolated by surrounding development; but in recent years things have been breaking bad for the ones I filmed in Albuquerque; as their habitat has been steadily over-run by urban development.

*A prairie dog making the best of things.*

On open plains these animals spend a lot of time standing on their hind legs watching out for predators which makes it difficult to approach them to get a picture, because out on a prairie they usually dive away into their communal burrows when they see you coming and living communally they will kick up racket and warn others of your approach.

Many people call almost anything that lives underground a gopher — there is even a gopher snake, but a true gopher is from family Geomyidae and not closely related to the ground squirrels mentioned here. They have prominent incisor teeth, bare tails and rarely come to the surface… which is probably why I’ve never managed to photograph one.

It isn’t worth getting too worked up about terminology: when it comes to members of the ground squirrel family Sciuridae: they spend only part of their lives underground as opposed to true gophers which live most of their lives below ground. The climbing squirrels most commonly seen in and around trees are not easily misidentified. You don’t usually see ground squirrel’s bouncing around high above in trees, so they do not need big tails for balancing, these would in any case prove a nuisance underground and are consequently much reduced in size.

*On the open prairie standing tall to view whatever is approaching usually gives ground squirrels an advantage over predators.*

The smallest members of the family are the chipmunks, the medium sized ones are usually termed ground squirrels and the larger family members such as the prairie dogs are commonly described as Marmots. Filming the bigger ones, especially groundhogs often becomes ‘just another one of those days’. The process can be bleak because you have to repeat the same day over and over again until you film a sequence right before you can give up and go home… and when you’ve been doing that repeatedly, you sometimes feel like killing yourself.

*Thirty years ago I photographed this black-tailed prairie dog clearing out the entrance to its burrow in the Sonoran* *Desert* *region of Arizona.*

Prairie dogs (of the Genus Cynomys) are herbivorous burrowing rodents and were once widespread across the plains of North America, However their numbers have been much reduced in the last hundred years or so because they are considered to be a pest by many and have been much persecuted, despite being a native species very much tied to the landscape. In semi-desert areas their burrows allow rainfall to get more directly to the water table before it can evaporate; and their nibbling ways stimulates the growth of several plant species making the squirrels an essential part of the prairie ecosystem. They do compete with grazing livestock, but this is a recent phenomenon, and unlike cattle and horses, have a very long association with the prairies of North America.

My favourite family member will always be the chipmunk which has a widespread distribution across the continent. This little creature seems to be always busy, always inquisitive, and with such endearing behaviours it is not difficult to see why chipmunks are amongst the most well liked members of the rodent family.

Forest Dump.

November 20, 2020 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

For many years I travelled to interesting places to film wildlife, and would usually pointed my camera in the direction that would achieve the most agreeable results, because if I turned in the opposite direction it was often impossible to hide the impact of human activity: sometimes there would be plastic flapping in the wind on a barbed-wire fence; or a forest with its under-storey eaten bare by livestock, perhaps even a forest being felled. My job it seemed was to give a positive spin to the way the natural world looked, even when things weren’t quite right.

Turn the other way and things don’t always look so good. This is rainforest clearance on Island Malaysia for a palm oil plantation back in 1984. And how are things today?… They’re very much worse. Palm oil has accounted for 39% of forest loss since 2000 and the trees are still rapidly disappearing. Recent figures estimate forest loss for palm oil at 65%, which makes it impossible to continue looking the other way, because soon palm oil might well be stretching away in every direction.

As time passes, getting agreeable results when filming wildlife has become increasingly difficult with many natural environments now so degraded they can no longer support complex ecosystems. This unfortunate situation suggests that it’s time to tell things the way they are, even when the audience doesn’t want to hear bad news. It seems there always has to be a positive spin to keep people watching, but rescuing a handful of orangutans will not make a meaningful difference to their impending extinction. There is no doubt that our minds are like little story boxes that prefer the dishonest comfort of happy endings rather than the truth, even when reality runs against our beliefs.

I live not far from a park which is close to a Canadian city centre, but despite this, it still manages to look fairly natural, although everything that surrounds the park has been developed. I say looks fairly natural, but the truth is, all the old growth forests was logged out by the 1930s; but the environment still appears agreeable when viewed uncritically, because the damp, temperate local conditions encourage the growth of fungi, mosses, lichens and ferns, which make the place look quite photogenic, despite there being no original forest left standing. The parks present appearance fools most people into thinking that it is useful natural environment, when in reality the young secondary forest lacks the diversity of the once expansive virgin forest that covered the region less than 150 years ago. Our preference though is to remain ignorant of information that makes us feel uncomfortable: the logging caused the destruction of a complex habitat over a very short period of time; and for very short term ‘profit’. Most of us accept this as ‘progress’, but there is an environmental cost that many of us fail to recognize.

**In the park, the stumps that remain from the original forest can still be seen.**

One might expect this small remnant of woodland to be much appreciated, but it is not respected by all who enter. The question is: should we be surprised, with today, so many North Americans losing contact with both the natural world and with reality; although in Canada, people manage to do it very politely.

The increasingly poor state of natural environments is a warning sign: when we fail to respect the natural world it inevitably bites back. Presently, the spread of COVID-19 is the most pressing problem we face, with infection rates once again rising, but a few miles to the south, across the border in the USA, things are very much worse.

In the US the leader of the free world has just been beaten in an election by a Democrat, but he remains holed up in the White House in denial. Two weeks after polling, the President has still been claiming victory, venturing out only to play golf and with nothing much else on the to-do list; this at a time when COVID-19 has totalled a loss of 240,000 lives, and with ever increasing rates of infection, people have been dying in record numbers. It would not be unfair to say that President Trump has not been especially proactive in responding to the epidemic anymore than he has in dealing with environmental issues, and yet he has still managed to achieved almost 74 million votes, that’s close to 7 million more than he achieved when first elected to office in 2016. There is something odd about all of this though, because many of his supporters would traditionally be expected to vote for a Democrat, but many feel let down by recent Liberal priorities, and have gone with what they consider an outsider to politics. Certainly Trump supporters are disappointed that he has lost the election; but it is odd that so many found it necessary to stand outside of polling stations in militaristic dress, carrying automatic weapons as if they were living in a banana republic, rather than what they consider to be the greatest country in the world.

Four years on from Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency the tables have turned, and now Democrats are thinking it is their turn to drain the swamp; the problem is the electorate is polarised with both sides believing the opposition to be dangerously unreliable and many draw their conclusions without reference to the facts.

The Democratic candidate Joe Biden is President Elect having achieved close to 80 million votes in the recent 2020 election — more than any other president in US history, but he is having trouble gaining co-operation from the present incumbent. Historically after most elections the change of power has progressed through a transition period in a smooth and civilised manner, but not this time. There is talk of civil war, but dissent is both fragmented and disorganized and hopefully it won’t come to that.

Despite the enormous political divide, after the election Joe Biden attempted a unifying speech in Delaware and referred to important issues being guided by science, particularly COVID-19 for which he is setting up a task force. However, Biden only managed to speak for around 5 minutes before quoting the Bible, and over the course of a 15 minute speech made more than half a dozen references to the supernatural; including angels, an uplifting hymn and various blessings from God. The American Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention God, and it is therefore surprising that a supernatural being is featured in all the individual state constitutions; and many Americans do not find it incongruous that their politicians frequently refer to science and religion in the same breath, given that one discipline is based on rational thought and the other isn’t; but then I’ve spent most of my formative years in Britain where any mention of God by a politician is usually considered political suicide.

**Back in ‘the old country’ (as Brits who no longer live there fondly call it) the figures for COVID-19 are** worrying. Taken as a percentage of population they are even higher than in the USA, with the number of deaths recently passing 50,000, the highest figure amongst all the European countries, with a record 33,470 cases in a single day (12/11/20).

Essentially the disease is not being effectively dealt with in a great many countries, and the recent news that three vaccines are to be made available next year (one claimed more than 90% effective, the other two 95%), has offered as a ray of hope to what has become a truly depressing run of the disease. Despite the good news it has been suggested that 25% of people in developed countries may decline the vaccine because they prioritise conspiracy theories over science, despite the latter providing most of the improvements achieved in health and living standards over the last 120 years.

The point is, that if this is the way things are with a global pandemic, what hope is there for species loss and climate change, both of which are presently very much on the back burner. The question is: will we ever overcome our superstious natures and innate tribalism to work together more co-operatively on troubling global issues; or are we destined to stumble along plagued by superstition with so many of us searcing out ‘alternative facts’ of which there of course none. Sadly if the prevailing stupidity continues we might be destined to go the same way as my local forest, which is certainly not as it should be and in consequence may have limited long-term viability.

**Sometimes we just can’t see the wood for the trees.**

It could be that humans are not programmed for planning ahead on a global scale, with our powers of destruction outstripping our ability to think rationally. So, perhaps it would be better for my state of mind, if I continued to look the other way, just as I once did when filming nature, and ignore the obvious problems around me. The trouble is, as with palm oil plantations, there are increasingly fewer directions to look for a positive view, and so it is necessary to start making excuses not only for all the crap that’s happening in the natural world, but also all the crap that’s going on inside our heads, because very little appears to be changing for the better.

The secret of remaining sane in these troubled times, is to think delusionally… no problem, I can make this change straight away as I assess the trip I recently made with my wife to the local woodland I referred to earlier, where we spent a pleasant afternoon walking around taking pictures of all the things that weren’t quite right.

Into the woods:

The entrance to the forest park was made far more interesting than I could have hoped for, with a set of worn car tyres thoughtfully discarded by a motorist. Presumably the owner had new tyres fitted, and we just got lucky when the decision was made to bring the old ones here rather than leave them with the retailer for recycling. This stroke of good fortune certainly added to the foreground interest of what might otherwise have been a very dull picture.

Once in the forest, our walk seemed to lack a diversity of colour; we noticed a lot of unnecessary dun browns with altogether too many shades of green, when what was really required was the complimentary colour red (from the opposite side of the colour wheel), to set things off nicely. A painter might easily add a traveller wearing a red jacket to his landscape, but for the photographer in the woods, red is not always forthcoming, unless there are berries… but only if they are red berries.

Then I saw my opportunity.

**Before me** was, not only a splash of red to invigorate the landscape but also a dash of blue, and in plastic! Nothing is better than the vibrant colours of polyethylene terephthalate to make a picture pop; and when the rains come these wonderfully buoyant containers will no doubt be carried away to the Pacific Ocean where over a number of years they will breakdown into micro-particles that will be eaten by fish — if there are any fish left in the sea by then, because plastic breakdown takes a little time; but in the short-term these wonderfully buoyant objects might just make it as far as ‘The Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch’ which in itself is remarkable.

A little dog poo on the path keeps you alert to the wonders of the nature, but how much more colourful it is when somebody takes the trouble to preserve this agreeable organic material by sealing it in plastic.

A splash of blue amongst the leaf litter… Usually these wonders are cast into the trees where they remain hanging for months, tantalisingly just out of reach. How I sympathise with the encumbered dog walker who simply flings his pet poo into the branches for others to enjoy — this is liberating for the dog walker and a visual treat for the rest of us… What a pity there aren’t more dogs out there that need emptying in the woods; and here’s hoping for a greater variety of bag colours?

**The stag horn fungus has got it right — doing its best to look like cheap plastic.**

Many years ago the British naturalist William Gilpin extolled the wonder of a tree, by pointing out how each is formed by circumstances of environment and weather into a unique individuals — no two are ever the same; but these observations were made long before plastic was invented and had Gilpin the good fortune to be confronted by the many varied forms of the plastic bag.

Liberated into the wild they are carried by wind and water to wherever fortune takes them, travelling in their millions to every part of the globe, raising our spirits as an international symbol of freedom. You can’t help but admire the wild bag o’ the forest — it fits right in.

It was also a delight to discover a discarded umbrella — if it could talk what stories an old umbrella might tell. This one has become so much part of the landscape. it might be considered as nothing short of a work of art.

**Who amongst the art community could fail to appreciate this as a sculptural form in the landscape. If it were bigger, connoisseurs would consider it monumental.**

Fallen leaves will fade away, but Polypropylene ribbon soldiers on for 20 years or more before falling to bits and contaminating the environment, but perhaps this colourful strip is better off here, because as a material it remains unrecyclable.

We were fortunate enough to also see a woodland bird, a varied thrush, which we don’t see as often as we did when we arrived on the Lower Mainland 10 years ago. This is because during that time, woodland areas have been reduced; but I’m not sure it matters. There’s a good deal more colouful plastic to look at now than there used to be, and the thrush’s plumage can’t compete; if the bird should disappear, there will be no shortage of colourful plastic on the forest floor to replace it.

Colourful plastic, or dull old varied thrush? I know which one I’d choose.

This looks like one of those back packs that can be used as a small child carrier; left on a bridge post it added yet another beautiful blue to the forest landscape. But why would such a thing have been left by a woodland stream — I can only think that by some miracle, a child was carried in and then suddenly developed the ability to walk and toddled cheerfully out of the forest to the delight of its parents.

**A daring splash of blue that must leave even the most casual observer wondering… Why???**

Jen stops to take a picture of a group of toadstools growing on a log by the path, and it occurs to me how colourful her jacket of Perfluorocarbons appears in a woodland setting, and I at once make a suggestion.

“Why not leave your jacket by the side of the path” I ask her, “as a visual treat for others? So many visitors are thoughtfully leaving their plastic items to cheer up this dreary woodland”. But she is not that selfless and refuses, complaining of the cold.

**What better place to discard your PPE as a mark of respect to local healthcare workers — like a round of applause it will cost you nothing.**

Back in the world where we don’t need to put a positive spin on just about everything, it occurs to me that if we aren’t that bothered about the dumping of plastics in the only natural space close to the city, then something as urgent as climate change; the destruction of natural ecosystems, and the threat of COVID-19, might prove us to be really too stupid to save ourselves.

Certainly it’s easier to look the other way, than fight the large scale indifference many of us have adopted. After all, who wants to face up to bad news and put a lot of effort into making things better when all we need is ignorance and a positive attitude. Let’s all go for a walk in the woods and in the face of what might now be insurmountable problems, go down indifferent but smiling.

Death In The Morning.

October 19, 2020 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

October in the New Forest in Southern England is the time of the fallow deer rut and I thought this might be a good time to consider an unusual event that I witnessed exactly 20 years ago today in the early hours of the 19th October 2000.

It was shaping up to be an almost perfect New Forest morning; dawn was approaching, birds were singing and there wasn’t a breath of wind to disturb the air. Ideal conditions for sound recording I though, but still I picked up my camera bag from the back of the vehicle, doing my best to ignore the tape recorder: sound is frequently of secondary importance to cameramen — maybe it’s brain defect. I looked through the trees towards the horizon and instinctively knew the sun was coming up, but not in a meaningful way — a black bruise of cloud was moodily attempting to eliminate daytime altogether, and it seemed unlikely this was going to be the perfect day I was hoping for. For some time there wouldn’t be enough light to film anything, especially under the trees. Reluctantly I switched to the sound kit, but grabbed a stills camera as a comforter — stuffing it into my jacket.

A week or so earlier I had noticed some early arrivals on rutting stands (animal behaviourists call the sites the females visit where the action takes place – leks). On this stand a buck had arrived attended by two does — this before the ground has been churned up by tussling bucks.

Form many years I had been filming the fallow deer rut on the Forest, rising early through October in an attempt to get footage of the competing males followed by successful individuals mating with attendant does (mature females) these gathered close by the stand while the bucks battle for supremacy. When the bucks are evenly matched the event is quite a spectacle; and the sound of clashing antlers resonating across the forest as the sun comes up is spine tingling experience; and on this particular ‘lights out’ morning sound recording seemed my best option. It would also be a break from filming the activity which in the New Forest can be quite challenging.

***Occasionally early morning light can be exceptional, but in October there are no guarantee: when it is wet and miserable, activity is often minimal.***

Had I been working on this day with the benefit of a modern digital camera I would have certainly managed an exposure even in poor light, but back then film speeds were unforgiving; and to be honest the bracken was so tall on the site I was working, I could hardly see the fallow bucks when their heads were down and locked in battle.

***A buck lying down resting on a stand is not easy to see in dense pine woodland.***

***An active buck is far more obvious, but filming in this kind of habitat can be difficult.***

Usually the biggest, strongest buck on a stand will win the opportunity to father offspring, and the most impressive bucks will usually hold the largest entourage of does as they come into season. When we use the term survival of the fittest, this kind of scenario is what we imagine, but natural selection has many faces, and it is difficult not to think of this fight for male dominance in terms of a brutal victory or defeat.

However, closer observation reveals that this really isn’t about damaging the competition, it is about demonstrating greater fitness, which encourage less well equipped bucks to stand down and live to fight another day when they might perhaps become better equipped to challenge as the dominant male. Usually a buck that is losing ground to an opponent will break away and leave the field of play. This is all very interesting to watch, but on rare occasions things can go wrong, with one buck inadvertently causing the death of another, but such events are very unusual and I’ve witnessed it only once.

Open oak woodland is easier to film in than under the pines.

On this stand a buck begins to call — and this is the best indication that the rut has started. Presently he has two does in attendance, and numbers will substantially increase over the next couple of weeks. The ground will be churned as other bucks come in to challenge, and many males will become exhausted by all the bellowing and battling which occurs both in the early morning and the evening. This buck may or may not be robust enough to retain his real estate over the next couple of weeks. The bigger bucks always have the most impressive antlers and in recent weeks will have achieved considerable bulk. As the rut approaches the largest bucks put on weight and develop barrel chests, this the power house that enables them to drive off bucks of a lesser stature.

Wildlife disturbance was a serious problem across the Forest even 20 years ago, especially for deer. I was once sat quietly by a stand when two dogs came rushing through, scattering the fallow in every direction. Two minutes later and older lady came down the ride on a fine horse. I walked out onto the ride and asked if she once had owned two dogs; she admitted that the dogs were hers and I pointed out where they had run through the deer and seriously disturbed them. “What deer?” she said. “There are no deer here”… And you bloody photographers are an absolute nuisance.” I found it hard to disagree and with her final comment Lady Marjorie Brain-Dead kicked her horse hard in the flanks and sped away into the distance.

***There are fewer red deer (Cervus elaphus) on the forest than*** ***fallow (Dama dama***) and their rut tends to occur on open heathland. They will tolerate a presence providing you are in position before it gets light, but it is necessary to keep an appropriate distance and remain very still. What they don’t like is being observed from two positions at once, and when anybody else showed up, I’d lie down in the heather and disappear.

On the day of the unusual event, to my great good fortune, there were no early morning dog walkers, and as I settled into the bracken, a buck immediately started to roar — although the noise is are more a series of deep resonant belches than a roar and can be quite unnerving if you’ve never heard it before. Then, a sudden sharp clatter of antlers to my left revealed a large pair of bucks, with their heads down and legs braced like two opposing teams in a rugby scrum, engaged is a serious game of push and shove; churning up the mud they were evenly matched and appeared to be getting nowhere. Occasionally they would break off to take stock of one another; then, dropping their heads again, they’d smash their antlers together with explosive force. Even in poor light I could see taut muscles straining across their shoulders and hind-quarters as they put every ounce of their strength into the battle. Then, suddenly, another couple of bucks started up behind me.

I had never witnessed two pairs of bucks battling in close proximity before, but today it happened — obvious because for once, I’d gone out into the natural world without my cine camera — but never mind — I had been in place for half an hour and there was still no light to speak of. A third equally impressive contest then started up way over under the pines in woodland 100 yards to my right; and t first I wasn’t much interested because this was a stand that I’d looked at before, and the bucks there had been young and very half-hearted about things. In any case my preference was to watching fallow beneath stands of oak trees where the forest had opened out a little and there was more light. This couple were in any case deep in the bracken and didn’t gain my full attention for about twenty minutes, until they eventually arrived where I was, and almost ran over me. I had realised there was something odd about them from the start, and I began to make sense of it: not once had they raised their heads to assess one another, and it was clear their antlers were locked: instead of attempting to gain advantage they were simply trying to break free, bouncing and whirling like energised toys equipped with those special batteries that never run down.

***Suddenly one of the bucks dropped to the ground almost in front of me.***

The the poor animal that went down as if by misfortune he’d been given the cheaper batteries that always let you down in a crisis. Neither buck had been aware of me, and so I moved closer, just in time to see the stricken buck rise up and slam against a tree; but this was now a puppet show, the fallen individual had no life of his own and was moving entirely under the control of his opponents strength, the dead dragged along by the living buck’s immense power. Then the standing buck saw me… more to the point he saw how close I was. I thought my presence might change the dynamic enough to startle the living animal into breaking free — bat stayed a fallow deer body length from the action (for obvious reasons). With a Herculean effort the big buck pulled his head up and to one side and then down, pivoting on his front legs he brought his whole body in an arc across his dead adversary and with that the antlers detached and the stricken body lay like a sack of dead meat on the ground, which is exactly what it had become. Despite the still poor light, I snapped a moody picture of the pair just as this occurred. The less artistic amongst us would describe the image as blurred… But I’d would call it atmospheric. The detached buck once free disappeared into the forest in an instant and I was left at the side of the ride with a corpse at my feet.

The reason I didn’t submit my article for publication was that my pictures were unpublishable: magazine editors can be a dreary predictable lot — but this is the kind of pictures I’d prefer to take — one that reflects the reality of a situation, although it wouldn’t win any awards in ‘The Chocolate Box School of Photography’ category. I could of course have used a flash and achieved a very different image — but that’s a matter of personal choice: what I would describe as dramatic others might consider no more than peculiarity of choice.

I suspected the dead buck had a broken neck, but I wasn’t sure; and I’ll admit my first thought wasn’t, ‘Does this meat belong to the queen’, but rather: “How can I get this animal into the back of my estate” parked as it was 50 metres back along the drive Then I suddenly remembered Woody Allen’s comic piece about shooting a moose in the woods after which he tied the body to his fender and drives home. The moose of course wakes up. Imagine then what might happen if a full sized fallow buck woke up inside rather than outside of your vehicle — probably not quite so funny when you’re driving along the M27. But it was never going to happen: I could just about lift the bucks head by his antlers – without a winch there was no chance that I could get the dead animal into my estate… So, there was a sudden change of plan.

A still warm fallow buck that has died under such unfortunate circumstances is very sad, but I was overcome more with the thought — why waste this? I hardly ever eat meat, but I hate waste and there’s enough here to feed a family through winter, without anybody even having to kill a turkey for Christmas: but the idea that I might move a dead buck by myself was entirely impractical.

So, I went off to visit the keeper who’s beat this was. He knew I was filming nearby, and this was his day off, but he was still pleased to see me… Until I told him my story and said that I really needed him to come and winch the dead buck into his vehicle. We could then take it back to his place, do an autopsy and try and work out exactly what had caused the buck to conk out under the stress he had suffered: fallow bucks don’t eat much, if they eat anything at all during the rut and their physical condition quite naturally deteriorates over a two or three week period, but seldom do they die. It was a long shot to find out and my friend was less than excited about the prospect of cutting up a dead animal on his day off, but he agreed and we took the buck back to one of his outbuildings to take a look at his insides.

The first thing we noticed was an external mark low on the buck’s thorax — this area was badly bruised, but the skin wasn’t pierced; most likely this injury was the result of a sharp prod from the point of an opponents antler. As a zoology student I had become interested in dissecting any dead animal that I happened to find, but through most of my adult life I’ve resisted the temptation to pick up every thing I come across that isn’t road kill, just to find out why it died — The ‘why’ of things has always interested me. This would be the largest animal I had worked on… And as I haven’t since stumbled across a recently deceased elephant… it still is — but there’s always time.

We cut into the thorax very carefully, avoiding nerves and blood vessels and discovered the lungs to be intact and undamaged; but there was a bloody mark on the inside wall of the chest that lined up with the external mark that we had already noted and both marks lined up fairly well with what appeared to be minor damage to the lower tip of the heart.

It is impossible to say for certain, but it seemed likely that the blow the buck had suffered, might have been survivable, had he not locked into a prolonged tussle with another male. The match had gone on too long and most likely the unfortunate creatures heart had given out, and in that sense it might be considered to be a rare battle to the death.

Somewhere in the woods, the champion of this match might have been mating with does that this buck had paid the ultimate price for. There is perhaps a romantic notion that if he had not received a fatal injury, then he might have been the one carrying on his genetic line, but the temptation to say that he had died of a broken heart, even for the anthropomorphically minded, might prove to be a literal step too far.

This is the stand amongst the pines from where the locked together bucks had started on their fatal journey. In 2020 on an early October morning another buck will now be in place waiting for all comers, because holding a traditional stand seems to pass through time from one generation to another. Back in October 2000, within a few days of the unfortunate event, this buck, with a substantial wrack of antlers **had moved in,** and his characteristic barrel chest suggests that he might have ended up as one of life’s winners.

Potoo: The Bird That Was Famous for 15 Seconds, but Wasn’t Really Bothered.

May 27, 2020 Stephen Bolwell 4 Comments

The Story of a Picture.

The writer Lawrence Durrell once told his younger brother Gerald, that an interesting experience should never be wasted and should always find its way into his work; and the advice proved useful because Gerald Durrell would become one of the most popular writers of his generation. Certainly, he knew how to tell a good story, which encouraged me at an early age to read his travel books. Years later though there would be disappointment when I heard him say that what he had written had only been loosely based upon the truth. Naively I had thought that if a book was supposed to be factual then it should glide as close as is possible to the truth, otherwise we might just as well all be reading novels.

Nevertheless, as a child, Durrell’s descriptions of exotic places was inspirational, and pretty soon I began considering that maybe I too might become a naturalist, travelling to interesting places to watch interesting plants and animals do interesting things. But that was little more than wishful thinking, because I couldn’t imagine ever being able to raise enough money to fulfil such lofty ambitions. If I was going to get there I’d need to think creatively, because I knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade other people to pay for my lifestyle choices. Whatever I did, it should at least look like a job. Given my interests, perhaps the most obvious approach was to work overseas as a wildlife film-maker and get television companies not only to pay for my experiences, but also to take care of the necessary expenses… But that would be easier said than done, and a completely different story.

My career as a wildlife film-maker was slow to start, but eventually things began to fall into place; and it wasn’t long before I began waking up in hotel rooms wondering quite literally, where on Earth I was. Then it occurred to me that to do this job properly I’d most likely have to get up very early and most likely miss breakfast – a desperate state of affairs. Then, later in the day, if plants and animals started doing interesting things I’d have to focus lenses and press camera buttons. It was devastating – I was quickly learning that not only was breakfast looking sketchy, but there was also no such thing as a free lunch.

**Working with film is still highly regarded, as are old dinosaurs.**

When filming for the BBC everything I shot belonged to the Corporation, but my contracts arrived so late I hardly ever signed them, so maybe everything I filmed still belongs to me, even the stuff that has long since gone to the tip. Certainly, I owned all of the still photographs that were taken at the time, but these were usually grabbed and secondary to the filming – I had no illusions about my priorities.

As a freelancer I owned all my own gear, along with all the accumulated experiences that the job had to offer, and looking back, some were more extraordinary than I had realised at the time; unlike many other jobs the same thing rarely happened twice, and events were often difficult to predict. Retrospectively, apart from getting paid there was nothing about my working life that seemed normal, and in consequence I ended up with a great many of pictures and almost as many stories, but for years remained far too busy to put the two together.

This picture appeared in ‘Ourselves and Other Animals’ the book of the Series written by Peter Evans. The Series was produced by Jeremy Marre for C4. Sadly I was abroad during transmission and as with much else that I have filmed I never saw my contribution.

My stills pictures were often requested for inclusion in books that related to whatever series I was working on at the time, but as the published work was separate from the filming I wasn’t obliged to offer up any of my stills; and as I never came across a publisher willing to pay a fair price for reproducing my images, I didn’t waste too much time searching out whatever they were asking for. But when I did relent, and send off transparencies (as the format was back then) they would usually get lost, or at the very least damaged – one was even returned to me cut in half and all were reproduced by being laid onto a sticky roller, so that if by some freak of circumstance any did get returned, they were invariably covered in goo. Nevertheless, I did search out a picture for the book based on the Durrell T.V. series ‘Ourselves and Other Animals’, because given how much Gerald Durrell’s early work had shaped my childhood it would have been churlish not to have given up a single picture.

I’d almost forgotten that time when you had to focus a lens… but not entirely – even today I often switch the auto focus off, just to have some small part in the photographic process other than pointing the camera; and it’s a well known fact that photographers spend more time cleaning their gear than using it, but in my case… maybe not so much.

As soon as I got my first stills camera, holding onto it became second nature – I rarely put the thing down. For some people photography is like a disease that never goes away: a bit like malaria: you get over it for a while but it keeps coming back. And now I’m discovering images that I barely glanced at when they first came back from the laboratory: most were immediately stacked away in boxes, and many have remained unseen from the day they were put away, in some cases decades ago. They are history now, but each one reminds me of an event that relates to a particular story.

And just as I was thinking about this I came to a box that said ‘Potoo in Brazil’ and as I began going through the various colour slides, the story and the pictures suddenly came together:

I was in South Brazil carrying my gear across a wide expanse of cerrado (natural grassland) just as the sun was coming up; which was nice because it had been cold: there where termite mounds dotting the landscape away into the distance and I was making my way towards them. Then up ahead, I saw something odd sitting on a weedy old broken stump – the only bit of wood for miles. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but I could see that the top of this broken off tree was sharp and lacking the decrepit woodiness of the weathered base below, it looked altogether rather odd.

I made my way towards what had once been a small tree that had probably been struck by lightening some years before, and was close before realising quite what I was looking at. On the top was an unusual bird doing a great impression of being something other than a potoo, which is the rather odd name this strange animal has been given.

I’d never seen one before, but by its general form it was clear this was a primitive looking creature related to birds called frog mouths, and also to nightjars, birds that I would occasionally see on ‘the New Forest’ heaths, close to my home when living in England – they would fly low at dusk to catch insects… but that was almost half a world away from where I was standing now.

The potoo is in the family Nyctibiidae, but this bird didn’t know it had a proper name and would have been just as much at home in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ doing absolutely nothing, whilst trying to appear more vegetable than animal; and the way the head was pointing vertically up, it was clear that this strange bird was taking being the top of a dead tree stump very seriously indeed.

Clearly the first thing I needed to do was to photograph it, because the bird’s cryptic form was obviously a behavioural adaptation that allowed it to avoid being seen by both predators and prey. That in itself was interesting, but not really the stuff of movies. It occurred to me the potoo was totally confident that I couldn’t see it and was determined to sit tight, at least for the time being. So, I decided that the next thing to do was run the camera and walk straight up to the tree stump and see what it would do next. In no other circumstance would I walk straight up to a wild bird – to do so would certainly cause a disturbance, but this was a potoo and its behaviour suggested that it might just sit tight rather than take flight… and as it turned out, moving was the very last thing on its mind.

The potoo is much less successful when attempting to look like part of a termite mound, but on the open grassland there’s not a lot else to sit on. The white mark on the fore-wing does look a bit like the bird droppings below where it is sitting, but this mark really comes into its own when the sky is pale and makes a big difference to breaking up the bird’s outline.

I was fairly steady back then and could hand-hold a camera without jiggling it about, the secret is to relax and keep everything moving and once close to your subject, avoid stepping forward, or over compensating for any instability – you should just lean in; but when a camera has a wide angle lens up front, it is surprising how much of a bird’s head will remain in frame when you do. I ended up very close, but kept looking through the view finder… and still the bird didn’t react. This was a bit of an anti-climax; clearly something would need to change if things were going to become interesting; presently, as a movie shot it was totally pointless – I should perhaps have though this through more thoroughly. There was nothing here that would make this work unless the bird reacted, and in one sense I was pleased the bird hadn’t been disturbed, but way out in the middle of nowhere, this potoo probably wasn’t going to see another human being for months, and if it did decide to fly to another perch I doubted it would be a tremendous drain on its resources. Probably the bird would simply glide a short distance to a termite mound and sit tight again, but the potoo wasn’t about to do that, and now I was almost touching it….

I was aware the potoo knew I was there, because even with its eyes closed the lids allowed enough light through for the bird to see – it was important for the creature to keep its eyes hidden because once revealed they were all too obvious.

And just when I thought I might be about to break the most important rule of wildlife film-making, and bump into a bird, the potoo finally reacted, turning it’s broad head towards me and quite suddenly flashing open the two delicate lids to reveal a pair of starling greenish-yellow eyes; then it gaped its beak as wide as it could manage to display a startling pinkish-purple mouth interior, which even through the viewfinder appeared quite shocking. For a moment the whole lens seemed to be going down the bird’s throat as the potoo held its beak at maximum aperture for what seemed an eternity. Then having exhausted the full shock value of doing this, it suddenly snapped its bill shut – and did so without scratching the front element of my camera lens, or catching my fingers. This was a bonus to what had been a wonderful display. I gently pulled back and the potoo returned to invisible mode, once again certain that I could not see it.

Now, I’d managed this startling shot, it occurred to me I didn’t have the faintest idea how it might be used. I’d already done some wide shots, but hadn’t established any context to tell a story – there was no natural reason for the bird to behave in this way. If I was to play a predator instigating a second line of defence, how could this be used successfully in a natural history film if in terms of the story telling, I wasn’t supposed to be there and there was no obvious predator. The shot was just a curiosity that would never make it into a programme…. and as I carried on doing the many other things I had to do, this interesting event dropped to the back my mind. But, when much later the producer and editor saw the shot, they weren’t expecting the gape any more than I was, and were determined to use it… the only way to do this, was in a ‘making of the series’ programme: it would become a ‘See what happened to our cameraman moment, when he approached this odd looking stick’ in David Attenborough’s ‘The Making of the Living Planet’ which was transmitted at the end of the ‘Living Planet’ series. I didn’t need to appear on screen because the story was all in the telling of the bird’s odd behaviour from the perspective of the viewer. As for the potoo… The bird had become famous for 15 seconds, but wouldn’t have known anything about it, and I got the feeling that if it had, this strange creature wouldn’t have been the least bit bothered. Potoos just do what potoos have to do – no more, no less. They’re fabulous when they’re doing absolutely nothing, then suddenly extraordinary when doing quite a lot more – and usually when you’re least expecting it.

Dedicated to John Gordon who takes lovely pictures of birds.

COVID-19. Simple Arithmetic and ‘The Economy First Delusion’. PART 2.

April 9, 2020 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

I’d like to think that the most democratic countries have been the best at controlling COVID-19, but this would not be true, although there is no doubt that China did a great job at under reporting the severity of its outbreak, claiming that any suggestion that this was a problem originating out of China as racist. There was little about the way China reported on its outbreak that would help other countries to prepare.

In the U.K. by 8th April over 60,000 had tested positive for COVID-19, with more than 7,000 deaths as a result of the virus. At the peak of the problem the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was taken into intensive care, and the good news is that he is showing signs of improvement. It is a little over a couple of months since the first confirmed case in Britain and today alone there have been 938 hospital deaths with 5,492 new cases announced; although there is a claim that infection numbers have increased because more people are now being tested… and a fair response to that would be: testing? Not before time.

This is a very different world from the one where we were wishing our friends a happy 2020 back in January. For many of us, staying at home has so far been voluntary, but last weekend it was sunny and springlike in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and against official advice quite a numbers of people were out and about with a minority of Brits refusing to conform to anything that felt like an intrusion of personal freedoms. They knew that if they went out for a wander, nobody was going to shoot them – which is a pity: and I’ll leave that sentence as it is… ambiguous. Unfortunately, some things don’t change – there will always be people who don’t have the discipline to act appropriately, and potentially set back the slowing of COVID-19 infections.

France, has a similar problem: on the 7th of April the lockdown became more severe – the first case in France occurred a little over 10 weeks ago, but by the 7th April the death toll had passed 10,000. That was the figure for Italy almost a week ago and there are claims that the French figures have been distorted, with numbers far higher than official figures. France is now one of the hardest hit European countries. Spain’s death toll has passed 14,000, although both Italy and Spain appear to be at the point where infections are beginning to slow.

But how did South Korea, one of the earliest countries to be hit by the virus, manage the disease so much better than many of the Europe countries, limiting the disease so far, to less than 10,500 infections and 200 deaths. This might well have been aided by experiencing an outbreak of the MERS virus in 2018, but more likely it is down to the way things are organised in South Korea. The country has a very good healthcare infrastructure which isa plus; and there is a centralised control of decision making and that has been key to getting things done. The country tracked infected citizens in an authorised manner by monitoring locations for cell phones and credit cards. We are told in the west that such a thing would be impossible, unless of course somebody is trying to sell us something, but when done for public health reasons it is an infringement of personal liberties.

Obviously, the South Korean approach would not work everywhere, and in the long term the disease will re-emerge because so few people have so far been infected – you can’t have it all ways; but if anything is to be learnt from this method, it is that a TEST, TRACE and QUARANTINE policy really does work, although many other countries have failed to do this effectively. The best part of the story is that when things started to go badly wrong, South Korea put scientists in charge, and once clear on what needed to be done they acted swiftly, without any kick back from members of the public advocating all the various alternatives to science based decision making. Alternatives to common sense might be absorbed under normal circumstance, but when thousands of people’s lives depend upon governments making reliable decisions on a daily basis, there’s no time for nonsense; and any fool that refuses to make minor short term lifestyle changes to allow others to stay alive, demonstrates about as much discriminatory ability as the virus that the authorities are trying to contain.

COVID-19 is one of the most difficult global problems we have faced in recent time, but this is no longer because people are carrying the disease by flying to new destinations the way they were just a few weeks ago. Now that most commercial flights have been grounded, air quality has improved enormously and there has been a reduction in Carbon emissions. Ironically, as the virus attacks airways in human bodies, airways in the skies have also been depleted, resulting in cleaner air, which makes breathing a healthier experience for all of those who have so far managed to avoid the infection.

In many places in the world, you might think that things can’t get worse, but not if you live in the U.S.A.. It is difficult to find a better example of what dithering can achieve when dealing with a rapidly spreading viral infection; a problem largely ignored during the early stages of the outbreak. In the U.S. there are necessary checks and balances to ensure democracy, but when decisions have to be made at both Federal and State level, results often lack a co-ordinated approach, and during a rapidly moving emergency as is the case with COVID-19, things don’t always go smoothly. Lacking almost any form of control, the virus sensed its freedom and quickly took off. It didn’t have a green card, but moving so fast, easily avoided apprehension. The virus just wasn’t tested and in consequence the U.S. is on the same trajectory for the infection as Italy was a few weeks ago, and will certainly pass it, which to say the least is unfortunate.

The U.S. has experienced a broad range of criticism over its dealings with the pandemic. Florida disease expert Dr. Dena Grayson made the point that the first case of Covid-19 in South Korea occurred on exactly the same day as the first case in the U.S. Jan 20th 2020. While South Korea had its first tests for the disease approved in a week, the U.S. spent most of February wasting time. Countries that have got onto testing early and in high numbers, have been winning the battle because they have a handle on what they are dealing with: knowing who is infected, the rate of infection, and where it is occurring allows the disease to be targeted. Acting without testing is like stumbling around in the dark; worse than that, it is like stumbling around in the dark in the Dark Ages… Getting testing up and running in the U.S. has been slow, and contributed to the spread and general lack of control of the virus in many parts of the country. But more recently President Trump started talking less about the economy and getting people back to work, and more about dealing with the virus, when previously he had down played the problems – hopefully this won’t have come too late to make a difference.

Certainly things are fairly dire with 10,000 deaths by 6th April. On 8th April 8th the daily figure for deaths in New York state alone hit 799, with almost 2,000 Americans across the country dying on a single day… The same day President Trump swung back to his old approach as he made further comments about opening up the country for business, His advisers said that it was far too soon to loosen up restrictions, and are waiting to see what the President will say next; and it probably isn’t unfair to say that his message on the COVID-19 crisis has become increasingly erratic.

The U.K. like many other places around the world has gone for the personal distancing and isolation for those who are vulnerable or display symptoms, but early on, there was a more relaxed approach. The suggestion was that if enough people were to become infected, ‘herd immunity’ would slow the rate of infection and with less people available to infect, and the infection would drop away; but it soon became clear that with more people getting ill, the health service was likely to become overwhelmed. Britain already had the example if Italy, which was well ahead of other European contries with its stage of infection; and at home intensive care really did mean intensive and often prolonged care, which would become unsustainable as the number of cases increased. It was apparent that some countries had too few respirators and difficult decisions were being made on who lived, and who died. This didn’t go unnoticed by British politicians and there was a sudden change of policy. Maybe there really was an awareness that once an infection rate starts to climb the steep end of an exponential growth curve, ‘things fall apart’ but the decision making might have been more complicated than that, although if they just followed the science it probably didn’t need to be.

The virus was a little slower getting to some parts of the world; and this was the case for Nigeria, where preparations were being made long before it arrived; especially in Lagos, which has around 20 million inhabitants, and is the most populated city in Africa.

In the capital city, one in three households live in poverty which makes dealing with any contagious disease difficult. This is true for any country that has large numbers of people living in close proximity to one another with poor sanitation, problems with clean water, and otherwise difficult conditions. In such places COVID-19 could prove devastating as local infrastructures prove inadequate when dealing with such a virulent disease. There is also a high probability that such locations could become reservoirs for COVID-19, with outbreaks continuing for years into the future.

We learn from every viral infection that has gone before. In 2009, a new flu virus emerged and was given the name (H1N1)pdm09, it would became a pandemic. This flu variation showed up in a form quite different from the H1N1 virus that had been circulating previously, but despite the differences older people appeared to have some immunity to it, perhaps because of previous exposure to the H1N1 virus earlier in their lives, and the disease would primarily infect younger people who had not had the same exposure to the H1N1 virus. Retrospectively, we can see trends with most viral diseases, but when a new one crops up, or returns in a slightly different form, it can be difficult to predict outcomes. One of the options is to closely watch a disease in its early stages, and extrapolate the numbers that the course of infection throws up and act accordingly.

Flattening the Curve.

With infections of COVID-19 doubling every three days both in the U.K. and elsewhere it became clear that if the virus was allowed to run its course without resistance it would overwhelm health services and make dealing with the virus impossible. The solution was to flatten the curve. i.e. to spread the number of infections over a longer period of time to avoid losing control. The policy required people to wash their hands, keep a distance from one other, and for the most vulnerable and the infected to self-isolate for several weeks, thus starving off opportunities for the infection to reach a new hosts. In Figure 1 an individual works away to flatten the curve. Above the red line, high numbers of infections will overwhelm the health service in a short period of time and put hard pressed health workers at greater risk of infection.

If the number of infections can be spread, keeping the curve below the red line as in Figure 2, the load will be reduced and make dealing with the disease more manageable.

On 20/3/20 bars and restaurants were closed in Britain encouraging people to keep their distance from one another – stay at home was the message. But around the world not everybody was listening to government advice. On the other side of the world large numbers of people were out and about in close proximity, enjoying themselves on Bondi beach. Perhaps embarrassed by the publicity, the New South Wales authoritie -, within a few hours of the story emerging – closed beach access. Then came the news that the day after tighter restrictions in the U.K., people had responded by going out in Bank Holiday numbers to beaches all around Britain, with Brighton, Bridlington and Skegness especially busy. People were also travelling from heavily populated areas to remote locations such as the Highlands of Scotland in an attempt to escape the virus, potentially bringing the disease with them. Initially the message wasn’t getting through – clearly some people weren’t taking the crisis seriously and valuable days were lost while government went about trying to provide a clearer message on why in the short term a lifestyle change was necessary. By the beginning of April a sunny weekend became irresistible for some, and ‘the rules’ might need to be more rigorously enforced in future, especially at Easter, when the continued efforts of the majority could so easily be compromised.

**The way beaches around the World should look where COVID-19 is a problem and people are obeying the rules. On the positive side, wildlife has more opportunities with fewer people on the move.**

Maybe there’s a simple way to explain why we all have to modify our behaviours to combat COVID-19, because when simple arithmetic begins to look like maths, nobody wants to know, although in the U.S. it’s math, which makes it even more singularly dull. So, consider a hypothetical viral disease similar to COVID-19: the number of people infected by the disease doubles every three and a half days and it is most infective during the first week after entering a new host, where it gets busy shedding rapidly to optimise the chances of entering other hosts. Under these circumstances a person infected by the disease will infect two other people over the course of a week, and those two people will each infect two others during the second week, and so on as the disease progresses.

For no better reason than vulnerable people in Britain have been advised to isolate themselves for three months, let’s run the course of the disease over the same period and assume a vulnerable person comes out of isolation on week 13. If I was superstitious I’d describe this as the unlucky week, especially if the vulnerable person was to meet up with a ‘couldn’t care less infected individual running in a direct line of transmission from the original source.

Here’s how it goes: Harry is a bit of a twit and doesn’t like following rules; against government advice he’ll take his chances of getting infected. Harry is out and about and he doesn’t care: on the beach one day, in the park another, and drinking with friends in social gatherings. He has the virus in his system but shows no symptoms – the surprise is he infects only two people during his first week of carrying the disease and that’s how things start.

Over the course of twelve weeks Harry’s indifferent behaviour sets off a a progression of infections for which he is the only source; the infection of other individuals progresses week by week starting from the initial 2 infections in the first week, which creates 4 infections the second week, and so on. 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16 then 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, and by the unlucky 13th week, Harry has been responsible for 8,192 infections. Fortunately, the death rate is only at 1% of those infected – I have been generous because The World Heath Organisation gives a figure of 3.4% for COVID-19, but I’m thinking it might not be that high because there must be a lot of people infected who are not aware, due to a general lack of testing in so many places; and there must be a good numbers of people walking around who never get to a hospital. So, with the theoretical disease Harry has killed only 80 people and that’s well above what most serial killers will manage. Infact you’d probably have to go to war to kill that many people and get away with it. If it was as high as 3.4% Harry would be responsible for the deaths of 272 people

What if you were as irresponsible as Harry but you infected 3 people in a week rather than two, and things went on at that rate, tripling up rather than doubling up – a transmission rate that by some estimates would be low for Covid-19. The series would run: 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 288, 864, 2,592, 7776, 23,328, 69,984, 209,952 and if things went on another week, that would push the figure up to nearly half a million. With a death rate of 1% over just the 13 weeks there would be over 2000 people dead. What if 4 people were infected each week?… Perhaps it does make sense to avoid other people for a while…

I will admit to a hole in this model. There will be people not going out in an effort to avoid Harry and other people like him, and so the more people who are behaving responsibly the less contacts Harry will make, but nevertheless amongst Harry’s friends, it isn’t too difficult to infect 2 people over the course of a week. Nevertheless, people distancing themselves from others will starve the disease and the number of people catching the virus will drop significantly. This is the reason models come in for so much criticism, they appear to be all over the place, with the predictive number of infections varying from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands, this not because the model is wrong, but because figures can change dramatically when small changes are made early in the progression of the disease. If we don’t get our behaviours right, the number of infections possible are sobering and demonstrates that simply doing the right thing can make a huge difference; and my figures might be regarded as low – to keep things simple I’ve only considered the number of new infections at the end of the 13 week period and not added in all the previous infections as the process moved along ( i.e. the overall total infection number). The same is also the case for the number of deaths.

**There are only dummies in shopping malls now.**

We could get bogged down with many other aspects of the disease, but for our purposes, all we essentially need to know is the rate of infection, which to some degree depends on how infective the virus is and how we might reduce its spread by our good behaviours. It would obviously be useful to know exactly who is infected and what percentage of the infected are dying, but beyond knowing how many people are behaving irresponsibly, most of the figures are out there, and it’s up to our governments to assess them and implement effective policies to reduce the number of infections and deaths as effectively as possible. We essentially are just the fuel in the equation – numbers on the graph – and need to stay off of the page if we possibly can.

**A Canada Day past: it comes around on 1st July, but this year maybe it won’t look like this.**

Test, test, test has been the mantra of the World Heath Organisation, and some governments have been hopelessly ineffective at doing so (Ontario has the highest number of cases of COVID-19 and the lowest testing rates of all the Provinces in Canada…. Is that a coincidence?). In so many countries, as individuals, we need to stay out of circulation for a while – it’s the very least we can do for medical staff who’s lives we put at risk when failing to do so. Staying indoors for most of the day is inconvenient, but it’s better than being dead or causing the death of others.

Saving the Economy Versus Slowing the Disease – Let’s Look at It Another Way.

There’s a pilot with a dilemma. He has taken a small party of people to do business in a remote area of jungle and has to fly them home in a light aircraft. The plane takes off with everybody on board, but pretty soon the aircraft’s engine begins to misfire and the pilot wonders if he should perhaps land on one of the occasional small airstrips still available below and fix the engine; but he knows the businessmen need to get back, and so he flies on. Suddenly the engine begins to misfire very badly and the pilot reconsiders what he should do because the airfields are beginning to thin out now; but he thinks first and foremost of the businessmen knowing he must get them back to their busy lives of doing business and he flies on. But, he hasn’t flown much further when he begins to notice that there are now fewer airfields below just as the engine suddenly catches fire and begins to fail. By great good fortune the pilot sees one last airfield up ahead… he knows exactly what he must do…… he flies on.

For those entrusted with saving the economy it should be apparent that when dealing with an exponentially growing threat, the best policy is to fight that threat as early as possible, never underestimating the power that could be unleashed if you don’t, because when that happens, the price can be very high.

And maybe it’s worth remembering that money isn’t real, it’s value depends on whatever we convince ourselves it’s worth, whereas death isn’t negotiable. It might be that we have to adjust our economies to line up with the natural circumstances we are all living through, instead of allowing the majority to suffer when the loan sharks decide that it’s payback time. Once through the pandemic we might be forced to live in ways that are less damaging to the environment, even though history demonstrates that major disasters do not in the long term halt our Carbon emissions; and there is no guarantee that the future will demonstrate that we have learnt anything useful from the problems we are now facing.

I appreciate the hardship caused to people who have been prohibited from working, but in part this situation is the fault of the many governments that have let things ride, hoping they could get away with it. They pushed their luck and they failed.

In fairness, COVID-19 is new to us and nobody can be absolutely sure at which point we might have done better as we were passed through it; but the figures should have provided at least an inkling, and at times it seems as if many minds have been busy elsewhere.

We haven’t been dealing with some abstract existentialist threat: just like the world’s airlines, this has been a grounded event – an exponentially growing disaster with nothing hidden from view. If only more politicians had recognised the danger signs earlier than they have, because many of the answers were sitting there quietly in the arithmetic – just waiting to be discovered.

COVID-19. Simple Arithmetic and the ‘Economy First’ Delusion.

April 7, 2020 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

Although most of us now have some idea of how to behave in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, few of us understand how ‘the thing’ really operates, but we can still glean information from the freely available daily figures. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of politicians who don’t understand the virus very well either, despite having access to expert advice and a lot more information. One wonders if perhaps they had spoken more regularly to immunologist rather than economist, whether things would be different now, standing as we are on the pandemic side of the infection – somewhere quite different from that ‘nothing to worry about’ place that many of us were sleepwalking through all those days ago… way back in February!

Facing the lack of political direction some countries are experiencing, it is no bad thing to take an analytical approach rather than just adopting an opinion. Opinions can be interesting, but everything makes more sense when approached from an evidence based perspective.

**Are some of our leaders indulging in blue sky thinking, or is it all just a bit fluffy.**

There have been three ways to go with the COVID-19 pandemic and the approach has varied from country to country.

1: Herd Immunity: Let people get infected and when a large percentage of the population has developed immunity the disease will drop away.

Several countries started out with this approach but abandoned it when rates of infection began to rise and put health services in danger of being overwhelmed. Sweden has held on to one version, but it’s less a ‘herd immunity’ policy, than a watered down version of self distancing, with children still at school, small businesses operating, and no travel restrictions. It might have worked out because Sweden has a low population, but there could be other reasons – perhaps even the cool Scandinavian approach to greeting one another has played its part; but as infections begin to rise, there is pressure building for a more rigorous approach to dealing with the virus.

2. Personal distancing, isolation of the most vulnerable, and in extreme cases a total lock down: people will still get the disease, but the infection rate will slow enough to allow medical services to cope. Britain started with 1. found it difficult to hold infection rates to manageable levels and switched to 2.

3. The South Korean and Taiwanese approach has been to combine technology with contact tracing, and use and aggressive strategy to limit the number of infections – this works well where people can be relied upon to follow instructions, but it doesn’t work everywhere. The danger is that the population will not get a high percentage immunity and the disease will returns from outside at a later date.

Only time will tell which approach gives the best results, but there is an indication that, in the end, all will lead to a similar outcome: rates of infection will vary, and the results come at different times. As yet, nobody knows what will happen, and there’s always a chance the disease could just run out of steam and disappear entirely, but as yet, shows no signs of doing so.

Things we should know when thinking ourselves through the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is helpful to know what is sometimes termed ‘the percentages’ to get a better understanding of how an infection runs. Although it doesn’t apply to all contagious diseases, a basic plan of fifths is a model applicable to many, and appears to work for COVID-19. The general rule for those infected is that four fifths will show trivial symptoms but still be contagious; one fifth will show more severe symptoms and one fifth of those with more severe symptoms will be in a serious life threatening situation.

Viral load doesn’t have so much arithmetic about it, but it is relevant, especially to medical workers. With other infective disease, it has been noticed that the first person in a family to contract a contagious disease will sometimes show less severe symptoms than others members of the family who later become infected. The suggestion is that the level of a virus contracted can increase the severity of an infection. If this story proves to be more than just anecdotal, it might explain why health workers are at such great risk, especially when intubating patients (inserting and removing a tube into the trachea to aid breathing). At such times they are subjected to high levels of the virus. This merits a mention because so many health workers have been poorly provisioned with adequate protective clothing which is entirely unacceptable, considering how long some authorities have had to prepare.

With any serious viral infection one of the most important considerations is to understand what exponential growth really means: it is a progression of numbers that double up over a period of time; this sounds easy to understand, but few people fully comprehend the consequences of this form of increasingly rapid growth. If a disease is increasing exponentially, it is possible to recognise the end game by reading the figures correctly in the early stages: essentially it is a question of identify what you are dealing by understanding the numbers. I have outlined the details of this in a previous article: ‘Take a Picture – Save the Planet. UP, UP AND AWAY. From Ebola to Exponential and Beyond.’ and all I need to say here is, that whenever you see an exponential curve and have some kind of negative relationship with it in its later stages, then ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid’… This sounds extreme, but many of the problem issues we currently face, especially those relating to the environment involve dealing with exponential growth, because when you get to the steep end of the curve things can get critical.

Go back a few generations and consider the affects on our world of such activities as burning coal, oil use and rapidly increasing human population – they all looked very different when our ancestors were standing lower on the curve, well before the steep climb that typifies exponential. Back then many might have rejected ominous predictions about the future based upon the way things were looking, but somebody reading the figures correctly could have accurately predicted the problems that we are now facing. The same might be said for COVID-19, as the spread of the disease has been growing exponentially, but when the virus started out, it didn’t sit on the lower slopes for very long, but immunologist were still able to predict from a very early stage where things were heading, while many a less well informed individual, didn’t anticipate any problems.

**A few quick sketches of graphs demonstrating exponential growth. The shape is a give away, they all look very similar.**

One of the graphs above, shows the U.S. death rate from COVID-19 through March 2020, and another, the release of C02 into the atmosphere between 1800 to 2020: both look exactly the same but they have nothing in common, other than being examples of exponential growth. With the CO2 graph I’ve ignored figures prior to 1800, to make the similarity clearer, but we shouldn’t make a habit of ignoring data, because cherry picking is a frequent misuse of statistical analysis to re-enforce selective points of view. Here it has been done only to demonstrate the shape of a curve with no intention to deceive.

Because COVID-19 kicked off with a vengeance from absolutely nothing and there is consequently no gentle rise of the lower slope of the curve for the U.S. Covid 19 figures, I have added ‘A STANDARD EXPONENTIAL’ curve which is often called the hockey stick curve. This indicates a calmer foothills slope, where the signs of exponential growth can still be read and what lies ahead is easily predictable. The question is whether the problem gets picked up and recognised as the get out of jail card it can sometimes be.

Sadly, by the time of writing (around 5th April), deaths in Britain caused by COVID-19 began to show a progression that looks exactly like most other exponential growth curves. Go back to the 22nd March when the figures were far lower and you might not predict what was to come. Unless they were reading the numbers, and might have been surprised by the steep rise to follow. 30th March: 180/ 31st:38/ 1st April: 563/ 2nd: 569/ 4th: 708/ 5th: 621. The way things have run elsewhere that have shown similar infection rates, the likelihood is that infections and deaths will slow over the next week or so, the numbers are about to plateau but exactly when will to some degree depend on public behaviour. If people continue to stay at home and bring down infection numbers it will certainly make a longterm difference – longterm being only a couple of weeks now as we live through the new reality of virus time.

Any of us can get daily figures on this disease for almost anywhere in the world; the death rate in particular is difficult to misrepresent – although when people die outside of hospital they are not always recorded as a COVID-19 case. Certainly in the U.K. there hasn’t been widespread testing of the general population, and without that it is difficult to assess who is infected; and it skews the percentages in relation to the number of people dying (the death rate is what it is, but the infection rate is probably higher than reported); and this general lack of essential knowledge about the disease is disconcerting.

Nevertheless, predictions for the rate of COVID-19 infections have been easy to make by simply interpreting the day to day figures we do have, as any error in the records will remain constant and make it possible to extrapolate the graphs appropriately. Sadly, many elected officials ignored the finer details of the growth rate and were slow to take action, and this had an affect on the infection rate at a later stage of the disease. Either, they didn’t understand the horrors that an exponential curve represents, or they were wishful thinkers, hoping for better outcomes.

Even the most optimistic amongst us must at some stage face reality: with infection numbers doubling every three to four days it should have been obvious that infection rates would get out of hand unless there was a rapid response: which might include social distancing, self isolation, some form of treatment or a vaccine, although the latter two options are presently unavailable. It is difficult not to feel that in both the U.K. and to a greater extent the U.S., authorities were slow to recognise the exponential nature of the disease, even when they had a clear model of what was likely to occur by observing countries like Italy that were already going through a later stage of the infection. The U.S. had at least a two week jump on some of the countries in Europe, but whatever the case, many countries did not prepare adequately .

There are many examples of exponential growth that are important to us, in particular those relating to the environment, there wouldn’t be a problem if space and resources were unlimited; certainly we run our economies as if this were the case, ignoring the absolute reality that we are living in a finite world. Now we are troubled by the steep ends of so many exponential curves, with doubling times arriving so quickly and numbers so massive, the likelihood that if we can continue the way we are drastic changes with be forced upon us, and some are already suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic is a sombre reminder of how vulnerable we are.

**We are still part of nature, but our technologies ensure that presently many of the rules that apply to other species do not apply so fully to us.**

In the natural world biological systems often run in cycles with a complex web of feed back mechanisms to limit any one thing from throwing the system out of balance. Since the development of our various technologies, humans have to varying degrees been living outside of the general rules imposed by natural systems; but we can’t control everything – there are chinks in the armour of our existence and it won’t be the last time we come under attack from a micro-organisms such as COVID-19. Viruses are reasserting nature’s influence and we’re learning lessons from a simple parasitic organism we cannot see, that is benefiting enormously from our close social interactions and high population numbers, and with deadly consequences.

Immunologists have been waiting for the inevitable, and now it has arrived we should be taking advice from those who saw it coming. This we are told is a hundred year event, but immunologists know better – our lifestyles are very different from the way they were a hundred years ago. Our population, relentless consumption, and ability to travel almost anywhere in the World have combined to make us vulnerable, and if a novel virus had hands we’d be playing right into them. It should be no surprise that we are battling a pandemic; with this perhaps an indicator of the kind of wars we will be fighting in the future.

The last pandemic occurred in 1918, it was caused by a bird related H1N1 virus incorrectly named Spanish flu – and it was never cured, never seen – there were no electron-microscopes back then. This was like no flu ever experienced. In a worst case scenario, a person might feel unwell at breakfast and be dead before their evening meal, but despite its virulent nature the disease eventually burnt itself out, having infected some 500 million people, and caused some 50 million deaths. Every viral infection has its own signature: this one carried off the most youthful and healthy wherever they gathered together, with young men fighting together during the 1st World War especially vulnerable; but this terrible toll on humanity was soon to pass from collective memory. When I was a child, remembering Two World Wars was an oppressive part of life in Britain, but there was never any mention of the virulent and deadly influenza that killed many more people than had died in the First and Second World Wars put together. From an American perspective it killed more U.S. citizens than all of the wars fought by the United States through the entire 20th Century and yet we have chosen to ignore it.

A novel disease like COVID-19 can start from a single infection, and because the new host (in this case, us) has no developed resistance, the infection rate can increase exponentially. How much slower the rate of growth would be if the virus reproduced over the same time period as we do – say 25 years per generation. If we had that kind of time we’d undoubtedly defeat such a disease in its early stages, but viruses work on a different schedule: they have places to be and a natural ability to get there shockingly fast – so we need to move fast to.

**Nobody is wandering through European cities now, and without people they have become shadows of their former selves.**

Once Inside the human body, infective viruses are usually in a rush to double their numbers by dividing, and this leads to our next point of arithmetic interest – infection rates, which are measures of how frequently the virus can be successfully transmitted to other individuals. With COVID-19 infections double up every three or four days, in the U.K.. It took 13 days to go from 1 death to 100. 10 days to go from 100 to 1,000. There are only 5 numbers here; usually far too few to come to a conclusion about anything, but these numbers tell us an awful lot. I could complicate the issue by claiming that after another 4 days COVID-19 had infected another 1,000 people… but that’s predictable… so I won’t bother.

The Ro Value

is the Basic Reproduction Number (or Ratio). Such numbers are usually based on models and often quite specific in their use. We might think of the Ro Number as a general measure of infection, but that’s not quite right; the Ro number cannot for example be modified by vaccines, and is mostly used as a way to ascertain if a disease is developing in a population. If the Ro value is less than 1, the disease will not be spreading because it is in decline, but above 1 the infection will be growing, and the larger the Ro value, the more difficult the disease will be to control. There are other factors when considering how fast a disease can spread, the numbers of people in a population that are vulnerable, there are many factors, but none of them stop an Ro value from being a useful indication of how an infection is spreading.

If we see an Ro figure of 2 then it is rather like watching cell division in a petri dish i.e the growth is doubling up in an exponential manner and after less than a dozen doubling ups the numbers begin to get quite large and the disease may become difficult to control. Whether or not a disease becomes a problem depends on many things, the most obvious being how a disease is spread and how frequently that occurs. Ebola had an Ro of 2 and I’ve considered this disease in a previous article. The Ro for Covid-19 has been given during its history as having values that range from 2 to 3, sometimes 4 and quite a lot in between. All we need to know is that the higher the value the bigger the problem and that ascertaining an Ro number early on is important when estimating a diseases progress.

Dispelling the ‘Don’t Worry It’s Just Like Flu’ Myth.

Unfortunately early in the outbreak Donald Trump compared coronavirus with flu, but this was misleading. In the U.S. between 5 and 20% of people can expect to get flu during the course of a year, 200,000 will become seriously ill, and up to 20,000 will die.

The death rate of seasonal flu we know is typically around 0.1%. but during the early stages of the infection in mainland China the death rate for COVID-19 was estimated at anything between 0.4 to 2.9%; and as the virus could infect between 50 to 80% of a population very quickly, and there was no vaccine or cure, the situation was potentially very serious.

On 24th March a worried Governor Andrew Cuomo said that it was coming across the U.S. like a bullet train as N.Y. cases topped 25,000 with 200 deaths – he didn’t use the term exponential growth, but did say the rate of infection was doubling every 3 days. New York was Ill prepared for the onslaught and the Governor was understandably worried. You don’t need to be an epidemiologist to know the difference between seasonal flu and COVID-19, the former doesn’t put your health service into total breakdown but COVID-19 can do so in a matter of days, particularly when the infection rate is climbing the steep part of that exponential curve – and you don’t have to dither very long before experienceing the full force of the disease.

It’s a Matter of Life or Death:

This has been a time when Governments needed to interpret available information, make decisions and then act very quickly, but they haven’t always done so. Computer simulations have been of great importance in the process, but many indicators of the path that should be taken have been ignored. In the U.K. ex-government minister Phillip Lee has spoken about a computer simulation of a pandemic undertaken a few years ago in order to inform government strategy, utilising an outbreak of a virus similar to SARS. One of the results of the exercise was that it indicated, even when there were both treatments and a vaccine available, there would not be enough ventilators for the predicted number of patients. The obvious question is: why the government didn’t react to this important information? Most likely there was a belief that the chances of a SARS like pandemic was low, but when COVID-19 kicked off, why wasn’t there a more rapid reaction to the emergency? Certainly it has been shameful that very basic supplies of protective masks, goggles and clothing have been in short supply and very limited testing even of medical staff for the virus. This to most people is unacceptable; health workers on the front line need more than just a round of applause. Having witnessed the outbreak in Italy, and even earlier when the virus became a problem in China, there was time to react, but preparations for the spread of the virus were unacceptably slow.

**Spring is in the northern hemisphere, and many feel they are missing on it.**

In Britain there was further criticism because testing is essential for monitoring the spread of the disease and it has failed to do this adequately, even when the disease was running up the steep end of the exponential curve. Some countries have been more efficient in their dealings with the threat. Germany for example was setting up testing labs fairly early on, but Britain did not react as quickly, and put all their efforts into a single dedicated lab – this to ensure standardisation of testing, in preference to using university and other laboratories around the country that had volunteered help. The government project then had problems accessing chemical reagents required for their tests because these weren’t purchased early enough. In consequence the system hasn’t been moving fast enough to deal with even the most basic number of tests – they soon might though, as help has now been accepted from some of those other labs, but it could all be coming rather too late.

Both of these stories came out on the same day that Britain reported 563 deaths from Covid-19. It was April 1st All Fools Day – unfortunately the virus moved with great speed, but of course governments are not usually so good at doing that and the result almost certainly will be be a greater loss of life. A thoughtful person might be wondering how we will look back on this predictable situation that got very much out of hand. Maybe it just hasn’t been a fair fight – the virus has been efficient and has moved very fast, while governments in general… Well, perhaps not so much.

Now is not the time to draw too many conclusions, but at some stage, after we’ve worked out exit strategies from the present pandemic (and that’s a whole other story in itself), there will have to be questions asked. The next time a pandemic occurs, which if nothing much changes is a certainty, we must be better prepared for the fight. We owe that much at the very least to all of those who have so far lost their battle with this deadly enemy.

Next: COVID-19. Simple Arithmetic and the ‘Economy First’ Delusion. PART 2.

A Brief History and Natural History of Coronavirus and its journey to Pandemic.

March 28, 2020 Stephen Bolwell 2 Comments

Is the Coronavirus emergency a dry run for how climate change will be dealt with in the not too distant future? If that is the case there is cause for concern.

Coronaviruses are a group of viruses variously associated with crossing from mammals to humans, which cause novel and often serious diseases when they do so. In general appearance they look as if somebody has taken a potato and stuck golf tees into the surface… a potato too small to eat, and golf tees too tiny for a cart jockey to ‘go chasing whitey’.

On December 31st 2019 China reported several cases of an unusual from of pneumonia in Wuhan, a port city in Hubei province. Some of those infected worked in a local fish market, which was quickly shut down. The virus responsible was a member of the coronavirus family, a new variation on a very basic plan: imperceptible to the naked eye, this tiny organism crossed over from a wild creature to a human being – it wasn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. The original host is still in question, but thought to have been a bat, although the virus may have passed through an intermediary, perhaps a pangolin, which is odd because pangolins are a critically endangered species.

**There are four species of Asian Pangolin all endangered; and poachers are now targeting African species to fulfil demand.**

The Chinese have an insatiable desire for pangolin scales, with the creature’s meat a delicacy. Years ago a Chinese friend joked that if it moved, the Chinese will eat it, which sounded racist even back in 1985, but I couldn’t help myself and said, ‘Just like the French.” We both laughed, but not as loudly as the Belgian standing next to us. We were beneath the shade of a big old tree in Central Africa, with there was nobody around to get offended on somebody else’s behalf. I was trying to buy the python my Chinese friend was fattening up in a sack under his house – he said it would make good soup, but I’m fond of snakes and was doing my best to keep the creature alive. The reptile had grown large and my friend had decided to present it to me just before I flew out on a light aircraft – with a pilot who was extremely concerned, but he needn’t have worried, the reptile escaped without my help. Had I taken the creature on board I might have claimed this the inspiration for ‘Snakes on a Plane’, but there was no chance of that now we’d escaped a potential disaster… It was quite the reverse from how things are today with the recently emerged coronavirus getting on a planes and proving itself infinitely more deadly than any reptile, travelling as it would in the respiratory systems of passengers, almost unnoticed – apart from a few raised temperatures and irritating coughs. This enterprising virus would get to almost any location that a human might decide to travel, and do so very quickly. Persistent and infectious this mutant coronavirus would make any snake related disaster imaginable seem like a minor inconvenience.

The new infection would soon to be taken seriously enough to be given its own name, COVID-19, officially known as ‘Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2‘, or SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the first SARS virus – an outbreak of which occurred in 2003. Initial reports suggested that it had originated from a cobra, but snakes are not closely related to our species making them an unlikely source for a human variant; far more likely that it came from a mammal.

In late February 2020 a research group demonstrated that a coronavirus found in frozen cell samples taken from illegally trafficked pangolins in China shared between 85.5% to 92.4% D.N.A. with the coronavirus that was infecting humans. Another research project came up with a slightly tighter match at around 90%; and yet another study discovered a coronavirus in a bat that shared 96% of its DNA with the human COVID-19 form; but despite a basic awareness of the numerous animal species that carry closely related coronaviruses, nobody knows the precise route the variant took to enter a human host.

When a coronavirus crossed over to become Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS CoV) in 2002-2003, it produced a severe form of pneumonia which probably originated from a live animal market in Guangdong – the bat population from which the syndrome was thought to originate was however only about 1 kilometre from the nearest village and the virus also remains viable for a time in bat droppings and with transmission to other mammals the route it took to enter a human host is still open to question. Nevertheless it rapidly became a problem because humans do not have any developed resistance to new infections that arise from mutated forms that suddenly adopt us as a host.

The SARS virus was found to be present in Rhinolophus bats, the Asian palm civet and a variety of other small mammals – and because of its association with the virus the civet was soon to become persecuted. But wild animals carrying viruses that might cross over to us are not really to blame, especially when they are captured and brought into primitive markets where basic standards of hygiene are a low priority. Here a variety of creatures are brought together in high numbers in cages stacked one upon another bringing together animals, both wild and domestic, that would not usually meet, making it a high probability that COVID-19 originated under these circumstances. China hopes that other nations will not play the blame game, but if novel viral infections are proven to originate from such animal markets and these continue to operate, attitudes to how global trade and travel is conducted must significantly change.

SARS is closely related to COVID-19, but it was contained and died out before a vaccine could be developed. Iin 2012 another Coronavirus showed up in humans – Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) which once again was thought to be transmitted by bats. Scientists compared the virus surface spikes of MERS-CoV to a related bat coronavirus HKU4 which cannot mediate entry into a human, but only two mutations (on the MERS-CoV spike) were required to enable it to do so, thus enabling the virus to enter a human cell.

The coronavirus that recently crossed over to a human most likely came from a horseshoe bat; and it was an Asian fruit bat that transmitted the Nipah virus to humans in Malaysia in 1998. In Central Africa Ebola virus probably crossed over from a fruit bat before reaching epidemic proportions in 2014, and at least 300 strains of coronavirus are now known to be circulating in bats.

Why Bats?

The reason relates directly to the evolution of flight in the order of mammals (Chiroptera). A flying bat has a metabolic rate two and a half to three times the requirements of an active non-flying mammal of similar size. Essentially, flight should be detrimental to a bat’s health – the oxidative stress of a high metabolic rate inducing the release of free radicals which damage DNA. To overcome the toxicity, bats have evolved mechanisms to minimise the problem and also repair damaged DNA; in the process the gene variants involved provide protection by boosting the immune system, allowing bats to carry viruses without serious consequences, which makes them ideal hosts for coronaviruses to inhabit.

The next question is how does coronavirus get into a human in the first place – what is the physics and chemistry of the process: certainly the spiky surface of the organism is an important part of the story. The virus must firstly get into the respiratory tract of a human, once there it has to enter a cell and this is achieved when the oily layer coating a spike manages to combine with the membrane on a cells surface. If fusion occurs the virus may then enter the cell and mutations of the proteins contained on the spike’s surface are important factors in transmissibility – if everything falls into place the coronavirus will infect its new host.

Knowing this to be a basic mechanism of transmission, the advice we have been given to inhibit the infection now running through the human populations makes sense: washing our hands properly with soap and water along with the use of alcohol wipes and sprays helps reduce COVID-19’s progress by disrupting the oily protein layer on the spikes of the virus and greatly reduces the chances of the organism entering a human respiratory system cell, and in a best case scenario will dissolve the virus membrane rendering it inactive.

Viruses are too small to see with the naked eye – there are no optical pictures. The ones we do see are either computer generated images or scanning electron microscope pictures. However as real viruses are smaller than the shortest wavelength of light they do not have any colour. Certainly scanning electron microscope picture are in black and white, but to make them more interesting they are often given a variety of tinted colours: this is not science, so maybe we should call it art.

Finally, there is the question of how frequently mutations occur: coronavirus has a proof reading enzyme which stops too many mistakes from being made during reproduction, reducing the number of mutations of the relevant protein on the surface of the spike. Because mutations are less frequent it has been difficult for scientists to follow the course of the infection, because it is changes in the virus’s make up that provides markers to indicate where the infection has come from. Not being able to ascertain the route has to some degree hindered attempts to contain the infection; but there is also an up side – unlike flu this viruses does not change regularly which at least makes it predictable and important in the development of a treatment.

Covid-19 is thought to have started in a similar manner to SARS, but in this case originating in a wet market in Hubei province and once established in a human host the new viral disease would soon begin its rapid journey around the world. The first recorded case from China was on the 17th November 2019, and by the 11th March 2020, 122,000 cases had been recorded in 121 different countries. The clever thing about viral infections is that they don’t stay in one place for very long, and unless dealt with in the emergent stage, will sometimes become unstoppable.

If when the disease emerged China had clamped down, the virus might have been contained, but the initial decisions were taken at a local level, and it wasn’t until decisions were made further up the chain of command that the disease was dealt with effectively. With a virus spreading exponentially a day missed can result in thousands of infections. Unfortunately, before the government clampdown in the region where the outbreak started, people were moving off to visit family and friends on their Chinese New Year holidays and initially there were no movement or quarantine restrictions – it was a bad start. For a month very little was done to curtail the disease, and by the time more stringent measures were in place, it was far too late, the disease had taken off and moving elsewhere – the problem no longer containable.

In fairness to China, after a poor start, the country has shown an unrelenting commitment to eradicate the virus, and with impressive results. Back in February it was a different story. On 12th. Hubei reported nearly 15,000 cases of infection, with 242 deaths in a single day – figures were being reassessed, officials were being sacked. On 13th there were 5,000 more cases and another 116 people had died. It was disturbing, and by 18th the total number of infections in Hubei totalled 61,682, with the death toll reaching 1,921.

At this stage it was difficult to image that things were going to get better, but a month later on 18th March 2020 it was announce that homeland infections in China had been reduced to zero, which is astonishing given the virulence of COVID-19. If the official figures given for the outbreak were considered on the low side, then this only serves to make the present situation all the more impressive. With restrictions becoming less strict in Hubei, the world now waits to see if the virus will make a comeback, and if it does, how it will be dealt with.

As the cradle of the disease China presented an early example of how the disease might progress and South Korea which I mention later, wasn’t far behind and it was important for other countries to watch and learn from these early dealings with the disease.

For some inexplicable reason, many Europe countries and the United States dithered. China and South Korea were far away – maybe it wouldn’t be such a big problem. In the U.S. in particular it was business as usual no matter the warning signs, few preparations were made for what was about to happen and valuable time was wasted.

On 31st Jan 2020. two Chinese tourists tested positive for COVID-19 in Rome; a week later an Italian man returning from Wuhan in China was taken into hospital and became the third case in Italy. Then things took off. The Lombardy region was hit particularly hard and pretty soon growth in the disease would reach an exponential growth rate. Soon there were too many cases for hospitals to deal with; intensive care units were overwhelmed, and the only products being manufactured were coffins.

To list the figures for the next 19 days isn’t necessary. It is a distressing story, a novel disease would produce something more terrible than a work of fiction and by 19th March 2020 Italy surpassed China with 3,400 deaths from Covid-19, with 40,000 recorded cases, 5,322 of them on this one day. The outbreak in Italy put the frighteners on the rest of Europe, and pretty soon things began to look bad in France, German, Britain and especially in Spain.

For a time, the streets of Italy were deserted with people confined to their homes. To see such a thing is unusual because in spring and summer Italians are very social – often out of doors; but for obvious reasons I was never there and this picture is a bit of a cheat…

Almost a week before the COVID-19 was declared a ‘Global Heath Emergency’ a group of news correspondents in the U.K. complacently suggested that the situation was mostly under control, which begs the question: how much do these people really know, or more to the point – how much of what they think they know is wishful thinking? Wherever we are in the world we know these people – they are the same ones that told us Donald Trump was unelectable and Brexit would never happen. People who find it easy to run off at the mouth despite being incapable of critical analysis – they are prepared to offer their thoughts on just about anything without due consideration for their ignorance; in this case, an immunological problem about which they knew absolutely nothing.

Then there are the politicians who’s priorities it seems has been to keep world economies stable, making this a priority over the health of the people who elected them into office. Of course, it would be naive to suggest that economies are not enormously consequential to us all, but the truth about what we are all likely to experience should not be coming in a poor third to financial gain and political self interest. It is of course necessary to reduce the likelihood of panic, but underplaying the science, which so clearly indicates that COVID-19 will most likely become a pandemic requiring a rapid and appropriately reaction is unforgivable. (Obviously, things have moved along since I wrote this. So has there been an appropriate reaction. In many places around the World the answer has to be no).

**I guess if politicians aren’t going to take the virus seriously, it’s O.K. for me to represent bagpipe style virus in my grandfather’s tartan.**

Clearly the smooth running of our economies is important, but like wars, less important to most individuals than staying alive. If politicians can’t grasp the magnitude of the situation and the disease’s potential because they are incapable of understanding the science and the basic maths that goes along with it, they should listen more closely to what their scientific advisors tell them, even when this is based on models of likely outcomes, as data based decision making is much better than simply guessing, or those other favourites – ‘being hopeful’ and ‘maybe we’ll get lucky’.

There was a point in the disease when many believed that this was just another bout of the flu, so why bother with it? – nature was just clearing out her old sock drawer, but thinking that way was a mistake. The disease is more infectious than flu, moving faster and increasing exponentially over a very short period of time – in some cases doubling every three days – and without a vaccine it could, if unchecked, create total chaos as health services become overwhelmed with patients they will not be able to treat, and with large numbers dying unnecessarily. In many countries there has been inadequate testing for the virus, in consequence knowing exactly how many people are carrying the disease is impossible to estimate because some people show no symptoms. We will of course be aware of the number of people infected in hospitals and the numbers dying because such things are hard to miss; but increasingly it isn’t just the old and vulnerable who are in danger, as younger people are now dying from the infection; and who can say for certain that the virus won’t suddenly mutate and start taking out healthy young economists, the same way it is taking out health workers.

The situation in the USA was sketchy from very early on. On February 26th President Trump was at first dismissive – ‘there were a low number of cases, the people who were ill were getting better and in a couple of days the numbers would be down to zero’. Then on the 28th he said – about those working on the virus – that ‘they’d done an incredible job, and like a miracle it would disappear’. On March 6th he clarified that, ‘anybody who needed a test would get a test and the tests were beautiful’… and they may well have been, but they certainly weren’t available to everybody who needed one.

Rather oddly, on the 20th February when things started to look problematic the President put Vice-President Mike Pence in charge – an individual who thinks Darwin was wrong – a clear indication that this is a man not well versed in science. The President could have appointed an expert medical advisor such as Dr Anthony Fauci The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; a man already on the task force, but he had spoken out on the lack of preparedness of the administration to deal with the outbreak. A comment made when President Trump closed US airports indicated that the president ‘had shut the chicken coop door after the horse had bolted’ – an interesting mixed metaphor, implying that the President had missed his opportunity to react appropriately. Soon after the President gave himself a perfect 10 out of 10 for his dealings with the coronavirus emergency. A U.S. medical expert quickly responded that 10 out of 100 was nearer the mark.

On a more personal note the air travel announcement came a couple of hours after I’d seen my wife off from Vancouver airport to attend her mother’s funeral in the U.K. she had booked to travel via the USA before the virus went global, and her return flight was cancelled; she then had trouble booking a flight back to Canada. Everything was suddenly moving too quickly for most of us to keep up with. U.S. airports had already been closed to travellers from Europe (understandably so because on that very same day Italy had 250 deaths in 24 hours). Now US air travel was being closed to Britain where the death rate still remained low, but nevertheless doubled on the 14th March. There were then 1,100 confirmed cases of infection in the U.K. but the real figure was estimated to be nearer 10 times that figure. Without testing the general population, it was impossible to say and by 26th March no testing outside of hospitals was still the official policy – probably because there simply aren’t enough kits to facilitate doing so.

South Korea is one of a few exceptions to the general trend, and were able to provide reliable figures fairly early on because they were testing thousands of people. By 11th March the USA had tested 11,000 people, while South Korea was testing 10,000 a day for free, with some reports suggesting this figure was nearer 20,000 a day. Five days later it was reported that South Korea had tested some 250,000 people while the USA had managed only 20,000 in total; which is ironic because on the same day The World Health Organisation (WHO) said, ‘You can’t fight a fire blindfolded. Test, test, test’. The clear implication, being that it is impossible to judge the scope of the problem until you know how many people are infected, and when you have done as many tests as possible, it makes sense to identify all contacts from two days prior to the infected persons first signs of illness and test those people as well. However, the increasing number of infections in many countries was by this time, likely to have passed the point where this could be done successfully; certainly this was the case for the U.S.A. because so few had been tested under a public health service that was poorly funded making the number of infected people difficult to ascertain.

The USA had opted to produce its own testing kits, but there simply weren’t enough of them, and many didn’t work very well. It was as if the U.S. wasn’t serious about dealing with the problem. President Trump seemed preoccupied with protecting the economy and appeared to be saying almost anything to divert attention from the problems that a potential pandemic might have on the money markets, and so the country didn’t react when it should have done. Stock exchange values began to tumble and realising the U.S. was not going to escape fiscal pain the President surprised everybody with a U-turn and on 13th March declared a national emergency.

In Britain as of 25th of March people were not being tested unless they were in hospital, and neither were the medical staff who were treating them (although by the 27th there were promises to do so, as health workers were quite reasonably, showing concern). But those who though they had the virus were still being told to go home and self isolate and were unable to get tested by a doctor. To say Britain has been ill prepared for this emergency is an understatement. On 26th March Mayor Giorgio Gori of Bergamo in the Lombardy region of Italy said that Britain had got it wrong – with infection rate two weeks behind Italy, it had been too slow to react which might cost many lives.

In the USA critics considered the administrations reaction to COVID-19 to be all over the place and the markets continued to be volatile. It was Jo Biden (the most likely candidate to stand against President Trump in the Presidential election of November 2020) who on 12th March steadied the ship, with a speech that probably should have been made by the president; and you have to wonder if the electorate will remember the disorganised nature of the current administration’s handling of this national emergency when it comes to November… if the election still happens. On 26th March President Trump was still hopeful of getting people back to work – a couple of days previously he had suggested that could be by Easter, but set against the news on 26th March, that the USA had 83,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, overtaking all other countries to become the epicentre of the pandemic, getting back to work seemed the least of its problems. By the 28th New York was pleading with the government to get started on making respirators as they needed them urgently. The president thought that such provisions were better coming from private industry, but N.Y. needed them urgently…and I wonder how many political turning points you can have as this will to come back to haunt the president if there are people dying through lack of respirators.

The country had plenty of time to consider the seriousness of the developing situation, but still appeared woefully ill prepared. Looking beyond COVID-19, we might ask whether many of our leaders will persist with exactly the same approach to global climate change, and continue with the usual resistance to scientific evidence, inhibiting our ability to react appropriately, and we find ourselves in yet another dire situation of a different making.

The only positive thing to come from the pandemic is a slowing of industrial productivity, leading to a rapid reduction in carbon and other emissions with the consequence that many of us are experiencing much cleaner air. Aerial views of major cities worldwide demonstrate that pollutants have largely disappeared from areas that a few months ago were experiencing serious air quality problems – with some of this the result of a recent reduction in air travel. However, the global pandemic is co-incidental to our climate problems, and probably isn’t the most appropriate way to reduce Carbon emissions.

COVID-19 has demonstrated clearly, that we might be incapable of reacting quickly any big problems that occur on a global scale; as by the time we do, they are out of our control. Just as with climate change, we are too often simply hoping for the best, while our leaders react too slowly to scientific evidence available, in deference to short term economic gain; and if that continues, such actions will not save our economies, but inevitably lead us to a far more precarious future.

I am aware the COVID-19 pandemic has caused suffering in a great many countries and I regret that I have not been able to follow all of them; certainly I should have given more attention to Spain where the virus has taken hold. As I finish writing on 27th March, although the infection rate in Spain has slowed, the number of deaths today totalled 769. Unfortunately the country did not lock down quickly enough and testing for the virus was not adequate.

Around the world the COVID-19 story is changing by the hour, with India now coming into the story: this country has the second highest population in the world – and with people living in close proximity to one another, self distancing is difficult to achieve. Dealing with the virus under such circumstances is a monumental task; nevertheless on 24th March Prime Minister Narendra Modi put the country on lockdown for 21 days in an effort to get to grips with the virus at a relatively early stage when infection rates might still be manageable. It remains to be seen whether India can succeed where other countries have failed. Whatever the case, the World must now act together in solidarity because for the first time in living memory, we are all in this together. On the evening of 28th March Prime Minister Boris Johnson who the previous evening had tested positive for the virus (as was the case for his Health Secretary and Chief Medical Officer), announced a lockdown in Britain; and critics of policies that had previously seemed too vague for many Britains to follow were saying, ‘better late than never’.

Have 11,000 Scientist Got it Wrong on Climate Change? And the Problem of Melting Ice.

January 30, 2020 Stephen Bolwell Leave a comment

Science and Its Relationship to Climate Change:

On the 40th Anniversary of the first World Climate Change Conference (Geneva 1979), a statement was published in the Journal of Bioscience, signed by 11,000 scientists advocating a curb on population growth, a halt to forest destruction, a change of attitudes to meat production, and a reduction in reliance on fossil fuels: all with the intention of combating the climate emergency.

**Harmony in the forest, but for how much longer?**

By 2016 studies indicated that 90-100% of scientists believed that climate change was real, and if climate deniers wanted confirmation of their beliefs it would be best to consult amongst the doubting 10% and avoid those better informed where the census was up around 97%.

Those with a vested interest in climate change, and politicians wishing to maintain support amongst deniers have regularly consulted with those who have the least expertise in an effort to elicit doubt.

By 2016 various papers had been published on ‘Scientific Consensus’ in relation to ‘Knowledge’

and an interpretation of some of them is shown in the graph below. At a glance, the base line looks dodgy: running from POOR to GOOD isn’t a precise way to measure anything, and must be considered unreliable.

Nevertheless, the top end of the graph is supported by other research projects that indicate a high degree of consensus amongst the most knowledgeable – nothing seems wrong here; but at the bottom end where scientific knowledge is poor, precision of measurement becomes more difficult because it all depends on how knowledge is being measured and who is being asked.

With this in mind the graph could start almost anywhere, but despite this there is clear evidence that the closer scientists work to climate change, the more likely they are to agree that it is happening: something in the science must be influencing their conclusions, whilst the less well informed demonstrate a greater bias, or they just don’t know enough to draw reliable conclusions. The abstract Consensus on Consensus. 2016. John Cook et al. looks at the relationship more closely.

We can’t be expected to follow every line of scientific of research, but are always better informed by science than matters of opinion. For those who choose not to accept the scientific consensus it is a matter of cherry picking the evidence to support personal beliefs; visiting the internet is a good way to do this, because what we see there will be ruled by digital algorithms that use our previous search histories to select what we see next.

If we want to confirm our beliefs in really stupid things, the World Wide Web maximizes our chances of doing so; it can even put us in contact with like minded people… Despite this, the internet is not the enemy of rational thinking, but an unfortunate quirk of the way the system operates causes it to search for information in a way that scientists don’t, which reinforces bias. Science works hard to avoid such a thing; prioritising facts over opinions it accumulates knowledge and opens up possibilities. The internet can be equally informative, but used uncritically it quickly reinforces our preconceptions, narrows our thinking and sometimes leads us away from the truth – not that a mistaken or surrealist thought is always a bad thing, it’s just isn’t the best way to deal with global warming – we need to keep it real.

**If it doesn’t seem likely – you’ll find it on the Internet.**

If we fail to confirm our beliefs amongst the scientific community, and can’t find what we need on the internet (which seems unlikely), there are any number of fake scientists and conspiracy theorists who can supply us with alternative views on evidence based information; but those who want to stay closer to the truth, it is best to consult studies that are recognised by others accredited in the field. Over the last four years the percentage of scientists who believe that anthropogenic climate change is happening, has been rising and is now at around 99%.

Quite possibly, we are living through one of the most challenging centuries humanity will face – twenty years in, the likelihood that 11,000 scientists are wrong about the climate emergency is unlikely.

What we know:

Carbon release into the atmosphere is increasing and human activity is the cause. Agriculture, forestry and industry are factors and the burning of fossil fuels is especially consequential and causing the Planet to warm.

2. The process is being monitored by scientists, and efforts are being made to convince politicians to act responsibly, limiting Carbon release to moderate the warming effect.

3. This must happen soon, because there are potential turning points beyond which it will be impossible to recover.

4. What needs to be done is clearly understood, but progress in combating climate change has been slow and there is cause for concern.

5. Some of us seem complacently smug about making small personal changes without fully appreciating the magnitude of the situation – small changes in lifestyle will not be enough.

If governments are to combat climate change, they must take action soon:

many world leaders and their governments have so far avoided coming into line with the Paris Climate Change Agreement – the first worldwide legally binding accord on climate; adopted at ‘The Paris Climate Conference’ (COP21) in December 2015 it set a framework to reduce Carbon emissions by limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with a target increase of not more than 1.5°C by the end of the Century.

The most recent Conference of Parties (COP25) recently took place in Madrid, and there was a pervasive sense of frustration amongst delegates because many governments fell short of prescribed temperature rise targets, and in some cases delayed meeting them altogether.

In the early 1970s when I made this simple cartoon I was unaware of what the future would bring. it isn’ just water vapour that planes put into the air: Carbon emissions from air travel has become a serious problem and continues to rise. If nothing changes, air travel alone will use around half of our emissions budget by 2050. Ironically I’ve contributed to the problem by flying around the world to work on environmental stories, but when it comes to climate change, few of us are squeaky clean.

Unfortunately, there has been a mismatch between what scientists know and how politicians behave in light of the facts. Climate scientists tend to be pessimistic about the current trend in rising global temperatures whilst politicians are more optimistic – in part because, when they take time to consult scientific research (which is by no means a given), they reach conclusions in a way that scientists don’t, cherrypicking the evidence that best suits their policies. The reality is, their goals are very different.

A Cross Section of Scientists and Politicians Stand Together.

It’s easy to tell the optimists from the pessimists, but the situation is complicated. Baz seems cheery, he’s a politician but has always identified as a scientist – he’s mistaken, although he does have a GCE O-Level in Biology, but has worked as an economists for most of his life – he thinks natural resources are free, to be taken without penalty, and world economies must keep expanding to survive, even though our world has finite resources. Then there’s Phil, who thinks he knows a lot about science because he has a school certificate in sociology. Recently, he’s been appearing on T.V., describing himself as a crypto-zoologist, claiming the existence of animals for which there is no scientific evidence, in some cases describing them as spiritual entities. Phil has a gift – he can sound convincing about almost anything, and the less he knows the more convincing he sounds, especially to those with limited scientific knowledge. A cursory glance at Phil’s face suggests pessimism, but really he’s just gormless – Phil is a likeable idiot.

Crypto Phil came for a visit the other day and noticed tracks across my lawn: he told me that their size and the presence of toes were a sure sign that a bigfoot had visited my garden. This he said was unusual. I mentioned that before the thaw had set in I’d been walking along the same snow track to put food out on the bird table. ‘And are you seeing fewer birds since the footprints showed up?’ he asked. The weather had become milder, the snow was melting and I admitted that fewer birds were coming in. ‘There you are then.’ he said. Phil likes coming to conclusions – it’s all the stuff before that he has trouble with.

Science is a rigorous process with the fine details being continuously refined; it never stands still and those working in different disciplines may not have enough expertise to make value judgements outside of their field. So, what chance do the rest of us have? Well, not a lot, but if the science under consideration derives from a prestigious scientific journal such as ‘Science’ or ‘Nature’, we can be fairly confident of the veracity of the published work, everything will have been vigorously peer reviewed, and we should pay attention to the conclusions because science is not a matter of opinion to be countered by ‘alternative facts’. There is in any case usually no need to get sniffy about less prestigious publications, as most are peer reviewed journals and in consequence reliable, although it is wise to be discerning. ‘The Journal of Little Green Men’, probably doesn’t need to be on your reading list unless all your research is being done on social media.

**There’s no need to make things up about science and nature – the real world is interesting enough already.**

The result of Britain’s December 2019 general election was interesting because Parties with strong environmental policies (such as the Green Party) did not make inroads into votes going to more traditional parties. This raises the question as to how the electorate can be persuaded to vote for politicians prioritizing environmental issues over other concerns, because If this can’t be done, the traditional parties will have to be pushed into do doing far more to combat climate change.

Motivating individuals to react proactively to the climate crisis has been difficult; a great many people will happily admit to the problem, but so far, few have been inclined to vote for change. Tell people that it is necessary to keep global temperature increase down to 1.5°C over a century and they show very little interest – probably because the information is presented with no sense of urgency and it doesn’t spur individuals on to demand action from their leaders. Recently, Brexit split Britain with clear opinions for and against and there was a clear understanding that this was an important issue; but compared to rapid species loss, declining natural environments and climate change, it might prove in the longterm to be far less consequential.

Britain has experienced some really warm summers during the last century. The summer of 1976 stands out in my mind in particular because I spent a good many days filming heathland and woodland fires. Going back through meteorological records there have been many hot summers, but nothing compares to the present. The last 9 years have, globally, been the hottest on record.

**A hot summer’s day in Britain during the early 1980s. Memorable to me perhaps, but over a short period of time more recent weather conditions have become more extreme.**

Ian Bateman of Exeter University has authored a new study published in Nature – Food, and spoken about the effect of the warming climate on agriculture in Britain. He says that a standard rise of 2°C of global temperature over an average lifetime might initially benefit agriculture, as past warmer years have usually benefited food production; but if conditions should become too dry, it would be necessary to pipe water to the eastern side of the country from the north and west – these regions of higher rainfall; the cost of doing this would most likely eliminate any profit from the increased production; and if temperatures kept rising the benefits would be short term.

The scenario could be even more worrying if global warming proved to be more extreme, say a 3°C rise in temperature resulting in a more rapid melting of the Arctic ice and Greenland ice sheets which might turn off the Gulf Stream bringing warm water up from the Caribbean to flow around Britain. The Gulf Stream presently provides a warmer temperate climate than Britain could reasonably expect from its northern geographical position. If the stream just flowed (as it might) from west to east across the Atlantic and never reached Britain the results would be catastrophic.

When compared to most of Europe, the Gulf Stream makes Britain and Ireland a special case in the climate stakes. If these Islands could think, they might imagine themselves much further south because of the warm water presently flowing around them. If the gulf Stream switched off the climate would become significantly less warm and the British would at last be justified in moaning about their weather.

With the Gulf Stream off, Britain’s food production would be reduced by a third or worse. The Islands rely on food imports from other countries and if a reduction in food production is widespread, feeding Britain’s ever increasing population would in retrospect make Brexit seem trivial: unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to visualise ahead of time which are ‘the most important’ of ‘the most important things’ to worry about.

A BBC news reader recently expressed surprise when she read out, ‘almost 3% of the World’s Carbon emissions come from shipping goods around the world’. Like many other heavy transport systems, cargo ships run almost exclusively on ‘dirty’ Carbon based fossil fuels. Imagine then if we weren’t able to eat oranges or bananas because we lived outside of the regions where they grow; we might consider things were going backwards; but there is no doubt it would moderate climate problems if we all ate food grown closer to home.

There is however some good news: a change of emphasis has occurred in the way science and the media deal with environmental issues and climate change. In the past scientists never expected their many years of research to lead to the public interpreting the findings and acting appropriately, or expect politicians to act quickly on issues related by their work. The interpretation of science has always been the job of the media – with varying degrees of success – but with the present immediacy of environmental issues scientists have become more inclined to speak out, and the current mood of the media is to provide them a platform to do so.

Twenty years ago it was difficult to find scientists capable of engaging public interest; those that could, would often transition to the media where they were more likely to be listened to and the money was better; but things are changing – why would scientists allow their ideas to be re-jigged by media personalities if they are able to speak effectively for themselves?

Professor Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds recently spoke to great effect on the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets and potential changes in sea level; he explained the current scientific work concisely and without melodrama – in part because the current scientific work is so dramatically clear there is no need to overstate the case. The Planet has been heating for the last 30 or 40 years, and we have shown little concern for the consequences – and in the last ten years the Greenland ice sheets have begun to melt at a much faster rate than predicted.

**Close to the Arctic Circle there is not only visible ice, but a lot of water held in the land as permafrost.**

I fly from Vancouver to London Heathrow in early spring to visit my father in Southern England. Airlines usually take the most direct route flying north east over the white wilderness of Canada; then over the Labrador Sea before reaching the extensive permafrost and ice sheets of Greenland – these northern landmasses keep you thinking the great white north will never end. But in the most literal sense, it seems they will, with things now changing more rapidly than expected.

The Arctic is melting faster than was the case 25 years ago when snowfall was countering ice sheet and glacier melts into the ocean. Since 1992 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice has disappeared from Greenland, with water flowing into the Ocean causing a rise in sea levels of 10.6 millimetres – this might not seem a lot, but for every centimetre rise, around 6 million people are put at risk and likely to experience at least one flooding event each year. Inevitably, without action, this can only get worse.

**In recent time glaciers have been melting more quickly into the oceans.**

Greenland is losing ice 7 times faster than was the case in the 1990s and if the warming continues many millions of people will be exposed to coastal flooding by the end of the century. A current IPCC projection demonstrates that if the situation continues at the present rate the melt from Greenland could push sea levels to rise by 8 or 9 centimetres by the end of the century. If it were just 7 centimetres which is a conservative estimate, the results would still be devastating for coastal areas and low lying communities around the world.

The Annual Arctic Report Card 2019 shows the Arctic is melting at an alarming rate, and much faster than scientists had previously anticipated. Without immediate action melting permafrost could soon release 600 million tonnes of Carbon (C) and Methane (CH4) into the atmosphere.

None of this is speculation – monitoring ice sheets by comparing satellite images over time provides compelling evidence of the problem. Perhaps we should think about this in the same way we consider a close relative dying – there is never a convenient moment, but it has to be dealt with appropriately.

In the Antarctic scientists are now working on ‘The Doomsday Glacier’ which is falling into the sea at a rate of two miles a year. Thwaites Glacier sits on a vast basin of ice with a front that measures almost 100 miles across. At the point where the glacier approaches the sea the landmass forms a ridge that dips back under the base of the glacier and favours water flowing back landward; and this contact with water is hastening ice melt. It is startling to think that around 90% of the worlds fresh water is locked up in Antarctic ice with Thwaites Glacier presently containing half a meter of potential sea level rise. If the Western Arctic ice sheet should also melt which is possible, the loss will be equivalent to an astonishing 3 metres sea level rise .

If emissions of global warming gases were cut significantly the impact on reducing rising sea levels would be significant, but if temperatures continue to go up things will only get worse. There is still time to react, but as yet not enough is being done to hit global Carbon emission targets. In the end, the necessary changes might be driven by concerns over the dire economic consequences of doing nothing, rather than any loss of life or unfavourable changes to natural environments. As odd as it might seem it might be business interests that push politicians towards better outcomes.

We are now close to reaching critical turning points which would lead to irreversible changes to the way global systems operate. Scientist might disagree on exactly when these changes will occur, and some changes might not occur all at once, they could perhaps move by degrees; and if we adapt our behaviours to changing conditions we might stave off imminent disaster; but abrupt switching points beyond which there are no returns remain frightening possibilities.

There have already been climate changes directly related to human behaviour and such events can no longer be ignored. Making predictions about almost anything has a degree of variability, and not knowing exactly when irreversible changes will occur, plays into the hands of those wishing to demonstrate that climate change isn’t really happening. Ironically, there is nothing worse than reaching a turning point, only to discover that ‘you’re not quite there yet’, although anything that buys time for leaders to react proactively must be a good thing, but with climate change happening more quickly that anticipated, there isn’ the luxury of too much time.

It is difficult to convince people that things will go wrong before they happen, and often a disaster must occur to precipitate a reaction. On occasions, big companies behave cynical: recognising a potential problem that might prove hazardous, they plough on without making changes, in the hope that profitability will exceed future insurance claims. However, when it comes to the climate emergency, refusing to act proactively is not a realistic option: if there are turning points beyond which we can no longer achieve stability we must act quickly; many children seem aware of the urgency – politicians… not so much.

**If the climate continues to warm, it won’t be a simple matter of fisherman moving further up the beach, lifestyles and even lifetimes will be changed.**

With such huge profits being made from fossil fuels it is easy to understand why producers are reticent to give them up.

There has always been an unwillingness to factor in the millions of years of chemical and physical reactions that go into forming high energy fossil fuels, and the problems associated with the release of huge amounts of stored natural energy in such a short space of time has been largely ignored.

It seems we are best at solving immediate short term problems – our brain’s evolutionary course has left it inadequately wired to deal with uncomfortable situations that unfold over longer periods, and it might be necessary to start compensating for our ‘fallibility of thinking’. However, now that climate change is unfolding so rapidly, we might begin to see things more clearly. Run away ice melts in polar regions are just one of many signs of serious change and reinforce the view that 11,000 scientists are unlikely to be wrong about climate change. We must accept the evidence and push our politicians to act appropriately… and most important of all, they must do it soon.