Don't hold your breath – Page 2 – Tripping the world, slowly

Baroque Darmstadt

A huge stage was being constructed in front of our hotel when we reached Darmstadt. What was more concerning was the bank of speakers arrayed in front of it. I was assured at check in that the concert was to take place much after we left. When we came out again, we could look at the town with more pleasure. What we saw in the center was a post-war reconstruction of a baroque town, now clearly populated by students. That’s why the concert stage, and that’s why the political graffiti.

Darmstadt first became a prosperous town during the 17th century CE, so much of the center of town was then built in the baroque style. We walked around the university, originally the domain of the grand dukes of Hesse. Passing through impressive gates we could see courtyards full of quickly built huts into which huge bunches of cables and pipes flowed. Clearly the interiors would be filled with electronics and other sensitive instruments. We moved away in search of the two lovely gardens which stand side by side. Around the smaller one, Prince George garden, were a whole suite of structures: pavilion, gazebo, orangery, a summer palace, and even a sylvan theatre and a colonnade. As you can see from the couple of photos above, the more permanent structures are in the baroque style.

Art Nouveau vase in the Darmstadt museum

In the early 20th century the town was an important center for the development of the style called Jugenstil. I walked around a gallery of the town museum which was full of artifacts designed in the town: furniture, tableware, vases (like the one in the photo above). It was all very familiar: Art Nouveau was a worldwide development, and the India of my grandparents’ time was not a stranger to it. After this, I was surprised to learn that this was the first city from which Jews were rounded up for transportation. The city was bombed multiple times during World War II. Most of the baroque structures we saw were reconstructions.

Two oddities are worth a mention. A small turret with a statue of a Teutonic warrior stands in the middle of the Herrngarten. Called the Riwwelmaddes, it is a memorial to the Hessian troops who participated in the battles against France at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The other is the 39 meter tall tower in the center of Luisenplatz, the center of town, and the center of the holdings of the erstwhile grand dukes of Hesse. Called the Langer Ludwig, the monument to Ludwig I is topped by his equestrian statue. The tower is so tall that it is very hard to see it.

Darmstadt turned out to be a restful time. I was off to work the next day, but The Family explored the town quite thoroughly. She said it was full of squares and gardens where you could sit and relax. Although, she said, she found a nice cafe which was warm and inviting. The rains of the previous two days had stopped, but the weather was still unpleasantly cold for spring.

Daydreams

As if I don’t get time to sit and daydream! I snorted inwardly as I caught myself slipping off into a daydream while taking a boat full of chattering crowds through Hamburg’s harbour. The sight of a red balloon floating in the immensity of the sky had drawn my eye to that emptiness. Our eyes normally ignore the immensity of the space that we float in. Now the sight of that reducing the vast harbour to a tiny nothing filled me with a sense of lightness.

The remains of my salad days! I caught myself dreaming again as I stared at the plate of salad which I’d just finished. The light glancing off the plate, the slow mixing of the immiscible oil and the juice from tomatoes, had drawn me into a fascinated state of mind.

I’d been letting my coffee cool as I stared into a ghost of a town, manifesting itself in the cafe’s window. What was that? A very odd multiple reflection had created this architectural phantom. What a wonder, I thought.

Egyptian goose + Birds of the Week Invitation CLXXIII

Spotting a gaggle of Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca) in a park in Darmstadt surprised me. I was sure of the identification: the brown mask is a giveaway, and is supported by the colour of the beak, the pink legs, and a brown patch on the breast. I’d previously only seen them in Kenya, and I’d put them down as a species from sub-Saharan Africa. I found later that my memory was not wrong. It was introduced into UK in the 17th century, but in the Netherlands only in the 1980s, and expanded from there into the rest of Europe. The expansion had just begun when I lived in Germany, so I’d missed them earlier. Breeding populations are now also found in the US. The featured photo is evidence of it breeding in Germany. The two below show it in its native habitats in Africa.

The chicks made me curious about its breeding and mating behaviour. Like most birds, there is pair bonding. Since the young develop in eggs, nests have to be defended, and brooding adults have to be nourished. This is the evolutionary pressure behind pair bonding in birds, at least for a season. But pairs of Egyptian geese bond over several seasons, often for life. In the past behaviour such as this was taken to be a moral example. But behaviour is driven by biology and its imperatives. So it is interesting to try to figure out driver behind such long-term pair-bonding.

The question has exercised several generations of evolutionary biologists. Field studies with several species show that long-term pair bonding improves fertility in long-lived species of birds. The reasons are not yet totally clear. In some species birds begin to play mating games for a year or two before they are mature enough to breed, and it is believed that long-term pairs are formed in this process. If so, it would seem to require effort and time to form new pairs, so reducing the time in each spring during which successful breeding can occur. With our very detailed knowledge of the complexity of long-term pair-bonding in one species, we can imagine that there is much more to this story. There is also interesting speculation about how long-term pair-bonding may lead to the evolution of cooperation.

This is an invitation to share your post about birds, their photos, or their behaviour. If you post about birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to have a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. Do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post, and remember to visit other people’s posts. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week CLXXII

Street Art of the Rhineland: Monday Art

Street art was everywhere in Germany ten years ago. Now a modern kind of ceasefire has been declared, with most street art being confined to junction boxes. Only seldom does it break its boundaries and spill over on to walls. I saw interesting examples everywhere. The featured photo is of a wonderful piece which graced the old town of Koblenz.

This wonderful painting of a mallard was another piece of street art in the old town of Koblenz. The absolutely realistic picture of the duck, the beautifully rendered background, and the general colour scheme made it one of the pieces that I liked most. The scrawled sign over it is the kind of thing that gives street art its impermanence.

In the very center of Darmstadt I had a nice lunch, but I could not find a coffee. Instead there was this piece of street art. Germany’s love affair with coffee has evolved into a burning passion for espresso. As it turned out, there was a hidden sign in the painting, the arrow made by the space between the lid and body of the machine. This was the direction to a wonderful coffee shop. Street art may be useful even in ways the artist may not have realized.

The overgrown piece that you see here was standing somewhere in the center of Darmstadt. Street art is more ephemeral than most other art forms. But the way the invading weeds had begun to obscure it seemed to be a statement about all human effort and entropy. Such a wonderful ozymandian statement, I thought. Could it have been planned by an artist with a green thumb?

Eis

One thing The Family and I never agree on is ice cream. Last year in Sicily she sated herself on the local granitas. I tried them, and I had an intellectual appreciation of their worth. But the thing I really liked was the dense texture of their eggless gelato. All that is internationally famous. But German eis? Who outside of Germany thinks of that as a draw? A look at the ice cream shop (above) with an attached laboratory (below) convinced me that here was something worth trying.

But when I pointed it out, The Family was not convinced. “It’s 8 degrees here. Who wants ice cream in the cold?” she said. I pointed out that we have Rieslings at that temperature. That was not convincing enough. Later, after lunch, when we retraced our steps however, she stopped at this place. Each serving was three scoops, so we could share: a scoop of strawberry for her, a dark chocolate for me, and a malaga to top the others off. I liked the chocolate and malaga. The Family liked the strawberry. For our own divergent reasons we agreed that the place would have been worth going back to, if we’d stayed in Koblenz for another day.

A sundial is forever

Out for a walk with our hosts in Darmstadt, we stopped at a sundial. One looked at the watch and said “It’s not correct.” The other said, “It is summer time. If you allow for that, it is accurate.” Once you have calibrated a sundial it lasts as long as the earth does not tilt on its axis more than it has done in the last few hundred years. I don’t know exactly how long the earth’s axis will remain fixed, but certainly longer than recorded. While I’d been looking at a detail and thinking of the end of civilization, The Family had been admiring human-sized things.

Turning to me, she asked “Can you take a photo of the whole column?” I did. It was a beautiful baroque column in the middle of a garden laid out around it for the enjoyment of a prince who built his baroque palace nearby. Darmstadt is a prettier town than I’d discovered earlier. You see a town so much better with gracious hosts who walk with you around their hometown.

See Germany by rail

When the train halted at this little station for two people to get down and one to get on. I had time enough to take a photo of the charming ivy-covered building. “So lovely,” wrote friends who I shared the photo with. Another asked “How did you find such a place?” I didn’t answer, because the true answer is disheartening. The German railway system is a shambles. The fast intercity trains are often tremendously delayed or cancelled.

The reason, apparently, is that the tracks have not been renewed since the 1970s and can no longer really support the speeds that are required. As a result, missed connections and cancelled trains are an everyday affair. When an intercity train is cancelled, all the passengers rush into a small slow train, which is then stuffed as full of people as a suburban train in Mumbai. And, of course, it stops at every town and village.

I’m glad that people are still friendly, retain a sense of humour, and that there are beautiful places and railway stations covered with ivy.

A walk in Koblenz old town

What’s the subject today?

Maybe a simple macro of May’s flowers growing by the roadside in the charming Baltic town of Lübeck. Or maybe a little more about it. I have no idea why my eyes light on one thing rather than another, why I find one thing more attractive than something else. But if I want to show you what I find interesting, then I will try to make it singular, give it the focus of my, and your, attention. The simplest way to do that in a photo is to focus the lens on it and blur everything else. If it is small enough, then macro mode works best, and that’s what you see in the photo above. Of course, with today’s phone cameras and their resident AI/ML slaves, you can choose your focus after taking the photo.

Maybe you want to play games instead. Focus on something which is not really what you want to show. Here is an example. Show this, and most people will first look inside the frame. Ah ha, leisure time in the sun. And then they’ll look at the frame and ask, where is Travemünde? It’s a nice beach by the Baltic sea, but that’s not the story. The story is the empty frame. Why is it there, with nothing really to frame in it? (You can see that I had to stand off on one side to frame the loungers.) Something has been removed. You could follow up in a long blog post which solves the mystery. So here the composition of the photo is totally deceptive, like a classic mystery story by Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr.

And here is another sleight of the hand with focus. The fountain in the lovely village of Cochem, on the banks of the Mosel, is topped by a sculpture of St. Martin cutting his cloak in half to share with a poor man shivering in the cold. It was awfully cold and rainy when I took this photo, but that is not the story either. It was hard to get this photo to work. The square is too small to blur out the background, not that I wanted to. So I played with saturation and exposure, partly desaturating the background, and lightening the sculpture. There’s only so much you can do with a badly lit scene unless you use AI/ML tools. But the photo is misdirection again. I wanted to show the charming half-timbered renaissance houses which give the square its character. Taking their photo would have been pretty flat, so I tried out this method. I hope this postcard is more full of movement. I wish it had been full of sunshine too, but that’s May.

Eurasian Coot + Birds of the Week Invitation CLXXII

On my first ever trip specially for bird-watching I saw an enormous number of small water birds which were very distinctive. They were completely black (head and shoulders glossy but sooty body) and had a standout white bill and frontal shield. These were Eurasian coots (Fulica atra, also called common coots). They were unforgettable, especially since, for years, I would spot flocks every time I passed near water. They seem to be less common now, but I’ve not really kept count and cannot dispute the general agreement that it is of least concern for conservation efforts. But I’d never seen the chicks before: in India the breeding season is during the monsoon, and I do almost no bird-watching at that time.

In mid-May, when I was out for a walk with a friend, next to a fast-flowing stream in Germany, I saw the chicks that you can see in the featured photo. They were beginning to lose their down and the emerging plumage was very dark. They were not the young of ducks or geese. I don’t know most of the birds of Europe, but I had a feeling that these could be the chicks of Eurasian coots. Nothing else I knew was so dark. Soon enough, a parent came paddling by, and my guess was verified. Later I read that the young will retain the white on their neck and face for some time. The beak will change colour, and the frontal shield will develop at about the time the plumage turns darker.

Eurasian coot, Fulica atra, adult with nest

The chicks were too young to have wandered too far from their nest. I looked around, and on the riverbank nearby I saw another parent near a nest. A nest very close to water, emerging from vegetation, and resting on it, is said to be common. Sometimes, though, they have been seen floating on water. In no sense can this be called a lifer, but I was very excited to see the hatchlings of coots, and a nest, for the first time. For me, watching birds is not only about keeping a score of the species that I have seen. It is also about watching the behaviour of birds. Nesting and rearing of the young, hunting and feeding, mating rituals, are all interesting things to observe.

Birds of the Week CLXXI