Words About Things

A baby seal has been discovered in a garden in kent, 18 miles from the sea. It was found rolling around in the snow by Harriet Dwyer after swimming up the river Rother, which meets the English Channel at Rye. Harriet told her father who thought that perhaps she had been at the mulled wine.

“My daughter was out with our dog Jack in the snow when she came in and said ‘There’s a seal in the garden’. I said ‘No, it must be an otter’. We all went out and under the hedge was a seal looking quite chirpy and slithering around in the snow.”

”I went back indoors and rang the RSPCA and police. The seal made its way across the garden into the pond, where it sat happily staring out of the pond in an enchanting way with its eyes just above the water.”

The RSPCA took the young pup to the Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre in Hastings and named him Gulliver. The seal had a tag indicating that he was from a rehabilitation centre at Ostend, Belgium.

Back, due to not demand whatsoever, it’s the return of the critically uncelebrated Wednesday Links post!

1. Like Pop, snakes will occasional try to eat themselves. Unlike Pop they normally end up having to have their jaws dislocated.

2. Up to 10,000 mobile phones are left in Taxi cabs in London every month. At least 4 of them are returned to their owners (on a good month).

3.  Make do and Mend: Sugru can be used to fix, hack and bodge your stuff back to full working order. It is a flexible silicone material that ‘cures’ in 24 hours.

4. The 8th most popular search term in Google.co.uk this year? Google. (What is the world coming to?)

5.  Daisy Lowe, Lily Cole and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley feature in the 2010 Pirelli Calendar which was shot by controversial snapper Terry Richardson.

Ever wondered what half a million bats flying around in the dark would look like? Hard to see obviously but if you had an infra red camera it would look like this:

The amazing footage was filmed by Ecologists studying the bats at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. It shows an estimated half a million free-tailed bats leaving the caves at night to look for food.

A recent study of  avian specimens in Australia has found that various species are becoming smaller over time. The research, which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, shows that successive generations of birds have smaller wingspans.

Birds which live in warmer regions around the equator tend to be smaller than their counterparts in cooler regions. This helps the birds to conserve heat but now it appears that climate change has begun to have an effect on wingspans. As temperatures rise the average size of birds, such as the fairy-wren, is reducing.

“We show for the first time that the size of birds have changed geographically with rising temperatures. Birds of a size once found near Brisbane now occur near Sydney – seven degrees further south… Our study is important because it shows a generalized response to some major environmental change over the last 100 years, probably global warming.”

Dr Janet Gardner, of the Australian National University in Canberra

More details here.