Our Area Group organisation changes and development. Heart of the Levels.

The Heart of the Levels local Area Group of the Somerset Wildlife Trust is currently following nature and evolving into a different form. Our Chair for the last year is stepping down for personal and business reasons and its not clear yet quite how we will continue.

The committee has agreed to continue as best we can whilst we consider our options.

We have asked the Trust to write to all our local members explaining the situation to them and asking for their help and comments.

We already have our next two public meetings organised and our Watch Club for children is continuing as usual.

Our Botany Study Group also continues as usual.

Our Group is hosting the next meeting of all Area Groups and that will also go ahead as planned.

One way or another we will continue to support the Wildlife Trust  in their efforts to look after the wildlife and natural environment of this lovely county of Somerset.

Reflections of a Curlew: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Here is a link to a very interesting Blog. I would be pleased to read  any comments you may feel able to share with me.


Reflections of a Curlew: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Common Blue butterfly

To say this butterfly is common is often only one step away from ignoring it. So this Blog is simply paying a tribute to the evolutionary process which has resulted in a most amazing small insect. The patterning on the under side of its wing is fabulous. This particular specimen happened to come to rest in the late afternoon today on a lavender bush. It wasn't feeding and it just sat there in the late sun whilst I got my camera together . A tripod to minimise hand shake and a 90 mm Macro lens and also a remote button for extra measure. I even had time to experiment with auto, AV and auto macro. The best results with the sharpest and clearest image was definitely using the tripod and macro lens. Click on the picture to see a larger image. Can you tell which one used a 50mm standard lens and which used a macro  90 mm lens and tripod and remote control? Both images are shown with a reduced file size for faster uploading.



Image A

Image B

Darwin

Before I start on my post, here is a photograph taken by John Bebbington and used in our poster for our next public meeting in Langport on 12th November. Anne Bebbington will be talking about the diversity of ways that flowers achieve pollination. This shows one of them.

I've got to chapter 6 in Richard Dawkins book , "Climbing Mount Improbable". This chapter spends a lot of time explaining his understanding of the evolution of the eye. Having explained in earlier chapters the meaning of Mount Improbable as a way of understanding the ways in which life may have developed and diversified he has gone on to discuss spiders webs and flight.
With an engineering background I find it fascinating and well explained. I can also see the problems which can arise in the minds of people for whom religious faith is important.
This post is prompted by a news item covering the British Councils international survey of opinions about how much people know about and understand about Darwins work.
You can contribute to their survey on line by going to their web site. Click here. It is quite a good idea I think to complete the survey and to have to think out your answers.

Evolution

A visitor to this blog has asked a straight forward question and I have tried to find an answer of sorts. I'm not a zoologist or biologist so I looked on the Internet for some ideas. I typed into Google the simple statement , evolution of wings.The first reference which appeared instantly was to a National Geographic magazine article which I think is a good starting point giving food for thought and which could lead on to a wider investigation on the question posed. So here are the first few paragraphs which develop into seven pages. I found it interesting enough to read it all and so I recommend it to anyone who is curious about how a fin can become a limb and can become a wing.

Here is a link to the full article:


A Fin is a Limb is a Wing
How Evolution Fashioned its Masterworks
By Carl Zimmer
Photograph by Rosamond Purcell

The father of evolution was a nervous parent. Few things worried Charles Darwin more than the challenge of explaining how nature's most complex structures, such as the eye, came to be. "The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder," he wrote to a friend in 1860.

Today biologists are beginning to understand the origins of life's complexity—the exquisite optical mechanism of the eye, the masterly engineering of the arm, the architecture of a flower or a feather, the choreography that allows trillions of cells to cooperate in a single organism.

The fundamental answer is clear: In one way or another, all these wonders evolved. "The basic idea of evolution is so elegant, so beautiful, so simple," says Howard Berg, a Harvard researcher who has spent much of the past 40 years studying one of the humbler examples of nature's complexity, the spinning tail of common bacteria. "The idea is simply that you fiddle around and you change something and then you ask, Does it improve my survival or not? And if it doesn't, then those individuals die and that idea goes away. And if it does, then those individuals succeed, and you keep fiddling around, improving. It's an enormously powerful technique."