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How to attract more birds to your garden
TL:DR – Advice on attracting birds to your garden I was asked to offer some advice on how to attract more birds to the garden. I wrote a rather long article with lots of detail and added some bird photos of species we’ve seen in ours. I then asked ChatGPT to summarise the article and give me ten bullet points. This is my heavily edited version of the algorithm’s output: Attracting Birds to Your Garden: Provide water: Place shallow bowls or birdbaths with clean water at ground level and/or on a stand. Create a wildlife pond and extend it to create spillover area that becomes permanently muddy and diversif...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 22, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

Converging eyes and Lepidoptera evolution
The European Peacock (Aglais io) has four “eyes” on its wings just like the Emperor (Saturnia pavonia), it’s a nice example pareidolia and of convergent evolution. Peacock Butterfly Butterflies, of course, are just one branch on the moth family tree, we make a distinction in English because of our language and not much else. All the characteristics that are meant to set moths and butterflies apart are found in each, lots of day-flying moths, several with clubbed antennae, loads that are brightly coloured and patterned, some with thin bodies, some with thick, many that close their wings together above their bo...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 21, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Return to the reserves
TL:DR – Tick list of wildlife from my return to the reserves. Finally, managed a half-decent walk (4km) around a local nature reserve with Mrs Sciencebase this morning after weeks of sporadically atrocious weather, work commitments, and a crippling rip in my Achilles tendon. Nice to be back among the reeds and water espying and hearing all kinds of wildlife: Birds Fenland Flyby – Bittern over reed beds at RSPB Ouse Fen Bittern (flypast), Black-headed Gull, Buzzard, Canada Goose, Cetti’s Warbler (calls from three), Coot, Cormorant, Crane (very distant), Great Crested Grebe, Greylag Goose, Heron, Kestrel, ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 20, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

Webtoons about STEM university
TL:DR – STEM webcomic search term ideas. Several of you have recently been searching for the following phrase and reaching sciencebase.com: “webtoons about stem university”. I couldn’t work out what that  might be about specifically, but had some thoughts. First, if you’re searching for “webtoons about stem university,” perhaps you were looking for web comics or digital comics that are related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and set in a university or college setting. Perhaps not… Maybe you were interested in finding engaging and entertai...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 19, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Other Science Source Type: blogs

Sticking the Tusk to Musk
TL:DR – Focusing my social media attention on Mastodon and Sciencebase. I’ve had an account on a Mastodon instance almost as long as Mastodon has existed. Nominally, my start date was November 2019, but my account told me I’d logged on in 2016 just after the first instance was launched. Anyway, I may have been an early adopter, but I really didn’t recognise the relevance of this distributed, federated system until April 2022, when it started to come up on the radar as a good alternative to Twitter, when talk of Musk buying it was headline news. In November 2022, just after Musk took over Twitter, ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Social Media Source Type: blogs

The Moth Trap: How I came to see the lepidopteral light and how you can too
TL:DR – How to fall in love with moths and mothing. Regular Sciencebase readers will know only too well that back in July 2018 I got hooked on moths. An enthusiastic friend lent me a moth trap he had built himself for his children many years ago. The trap is basically a wooden box with a plastic funnel and an ultraviolet light supported by stiff plastic vanes). Moth trap The UV light attracts the night-flying creatures, some of them bump into the vanes, drop into the funnel and then find a cozy corner in one of the empty egg cartons put inside the box before “lighting up”. The amateur, or indeed professi...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

The Moth Trap: How I came to see the lepidopteral light
Regular Sciencebase readers will know only too well that back in July 2018 I got hooked on moths. An enthusiastic friend lent me a moth trap he had built himself for his children many years ago. The trap is basically a wooden box with a plastic funnel and an ultraviolet light supported by stiff plastic vanes). Moth trap The UV light attracts the night-flying creatures, some of them bump into the vanes, drop into the funnel and then find a cozy corner in one of the empty egg cartons put inside the box before “lighting up”. The amateur, or indeed professional, lepidopterist examines the catch at dawn, recording s...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

ChatGPT: Your personal brand manager
TL:DR – I prompted ChatGPT to write me a personal brand pitch. — I haven’t mentioned ChatGPT for a while. There has been something of a backlash against the hype and the scaremongering. But, I have still been using it for various small jobs, such as quick website tweaks and summarising documents that are TL:DR (too long, didn’t read). Latest prompt I gave it was to act as my personal brand manager and write me a pitch based on the Sciencebase homepage. This is an edited version of what it came up with: David Bradley Science Writer As a multi-award-winning freelance science writer with over...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Music Other Photography Science Sciencebase Social Media Source Type: blogs

What ’ s in a name when it comes to moths?
TL:DR – It was learning some of the common names for the macro moths that helped piqued my interest in being an amateur lepidopterist and citizen science moth-er. There are around 1800 moth species seen in the UK. A large proportion of these are the so-called micro moths (which isn’t about size, but rather their position in evolutionary history) and they are usually referred to by their scientific name rather than a common name although some do have colloquial names too. But, almost all of the macro moths have an intriguing common name. Here are some of my favourites The Clifden Nonpareil (Catocala fraxini) &#...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Navigating the Blackcap ’ s changing migratory patterns
TL:DR – There is no evidence that Blackcaps that overwinter in the UK are “demigrating”, they all tend to leave by mid-April. That said, much of their migratory behaviour remains a mystery. I’ve written about a warbler species we see here in the summer known as the Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla, several times on Sciencebase. Commonly, for many, many years, thousands in fact, Blackcaps that migrate to the UK in the summer have spent the northern winter in Iberia or North Africa. They migrate north to south and back again, year in, year out. There is, however, a number of Blackcaps that tend to spend ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

How to sell your popular science book in the age of influencers and podcasts
A friend of mine, Greg Gbur, has a new book out. It looks fascinating, its title is Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen. I needn’t tell you much more about it, it does what it says on the tin, as they say. Gbur is a physics prof who specialises in optics and has a way with words. It’s a guaranteed great read. Anyway, Greg was lamenting on social media how hard it is for a popular science author with a book out to get that very message across. There are so many books published every week, so many people chattering and chuntering on about those books. Any attempt to promote it and get the ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Other Science Source Type: blogs

Attracting birds to your garden
Sciencebase reader Michelle messaged to ask how she might attract more birds to her garden. There are plenty of things she can try to see more of our feathered friends on her patch. Some things will have an almost immediate effect others might take a little longer. The rewards are always worth the effort to see the variety and numbers of birds that can appear. I have an article about the birds you might see in an English country garden. Blue Tit What to do The most obvious thing to do is to ask what the birds need and then try to fulfill those needs: water, food, shelter/cover, somewhere to nest. So, you could put out a co...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

A smelly boost for your mothing life
TL:DR – Recent research has demonstrated that adding the volatile organic compound amyl acetate to a scientific moth-trap can boost the number of moths attracted to the UV light by almost a third. A social media discussion about UV light sources for scientific moth-trapping, the type of vanes on the trap, and the environment in which one traps brought up some interesting thoughts. Several moth-ers use double sources to give them a better chance of enticing numbers and diversity to their traps. Although moths have been shown almost always to simply opt for the most energetic (higher frequency, shorter wavelength) whe...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 13, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Chemistry Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Overwintering
I have a post coming up in which I discuss the intriguing and changing migratory behaviour of the Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla. For several years, we have seen this species spend the winter in our garden. One year we had a male and a female. The likelihood is that these birds flew from their summer breeding grounds in southern Germany and instead of reaching Iberia or North West Africa they got slightly lost and ended up in Old Blighty…England. It’s been happening like this for a couple of decades at least. The male that overwintered with us 22/23 has departed and soon the Blackcaps that migrate from sub-Sahara...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 12, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Other Source Type: blogs

Are crypto currencies destroying the planet?
TL:DR – Bitcoin mining uses vast arrays of energy-hungry computers many of which are powered with an unsustainable, non-renewable energy supply, generating enormous carbon emissions. It is estimated that Bitcoin is currently wasting 140 terawatt-hours of electricity annually and producing 70 megatonnes of carbon emissions each year. Bitcoin is a form of digital currency. Each Bitcoin has a digital ledger, a blockchain, that records all transactions and is at the heart of the value in the currency. Bitcoin transactions are typically irreversible and can be made anonymously, providing a level of privacy. It operates o...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - April 11, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Environment Source Type: blogs