Don't hold your breath – Page 3 – Tripping the world, slowly

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.

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 CLXXI

Fountains of Koblenz: Monday Art

Fountains are idiosyncratic pieces of post-war German public art that I love. The one you see above is typical. I saw it in the courtyard of a shopping area at the edge of the old town. The Family and I walked around it, and took a couple of photos. We couldn’t see a date or a designer named on it. I could not find any information about it elsewhere. The difference between public art and street art is often only in that someone pays for the former. You would therefore expect that it would be mentioned somewhere who made a piece of public art. Sadly, fountains are not so well regarded any more, it seems.

More famous is the Schängel fountain in the courtyard of the town hall. Surrounded by baroque and renaissance buildings, the fountain was designed in 1940 CE by Carl Burger. I stood away from it and watched as it squirted water over a hapless tourist. She scurried away, laughing. It was a cold day, and I had no desire to get wet. I watched it squirt water at intervals, and then took a photo. I’d quite forgotten about it, and was reminded of it only by a manhole cover that I saw earlier that day. Schäng is the local pronunciation of the name Jean. The French invasion of this region had popularized the name. Even now, if you see a German called Jean, you can be pretty certain that he comes from this part of Rhineland.

A typical piece of public art is the Historiensäule, an 11 meter high column above a fountain in the old town. This column from 1992, the second millennial anniversary of the founding of the town, is well documented with leaflets in various languages; tourists come off Rhine cruises with guides to look at it. The rowboat with barrels of wine at the base commemorates the Romans founding the city. Above this the ten segments take you through the history of the city, although the top three sections refer to the 20th century. The level below this shows the Napoleonic wars, just above one that depicts the trial of witches. All this is in the middle photo above. The one on the extreme right shows the riders of the crusades and the slave trade at the top, above the churches on fire. That is the representation of the transfer of the city to the Archbishop of Trier from the Franconian court, which is depicted on the next level below it. “That was educative,” The Family said, as we went to find a warm cafe for our elevenses.

Overcome by choice

Rain and a thunderstorm drove us into a bakery in the charming village of Cochem. Coffee or tea are a given in a bakery, but then comes the hard part: the choice of pastries. A flaky croissant? Maybe not totally out of place so close to France. Or one full of quark and strawberries?

The Family chose something which looked less extravagant, and I chose something which looked very indulgent. The rain lasted for a while, giving us enough time to taste each other’s choices and discuss what we would choose if we had to choose again. It is because of such indulgence that we always put on a couple of kilos on every trip, and spend a month or so getting rid of it when we get home.

Complexity

Germany is not just cakes and old buildings or music and forests. There are also universities and modern industry. I was lucky to be given a tour of the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) near Darmstadt in Germany. The photo shows a small part of a particle detector at the facility.

May in Germany

Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tandaradei,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
Walther from the Vogelweide (Under den Linden)

The buds burst forth
From each green frond!
A thousand bushes
Resound with song!
And joy and wonder
Streams from each breast.
Oh Earth! Oh Sun!
Oh joy without rest!
Johann Wolfgang from Goethe (Mailied)

Spread once more your arch
Over me, You green canopy! …
Soon will I leave thee,
A stranger be in foreign lands,
On divers busy roads
See life as on a stage;
But in the midst of life
Thy earnest words’ force
Will buoy me up, the solitary, and
So will my heart ne’er age.
Joseph from Eicendorff (Abschied)

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don’t know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Vor dem Sommerregen)

The (old) Lady of Koblenz

Liebfrauenkirche in Koblenz is built on the site where a small church was erected in the 5th century over the foundations of a late Roman hall from the previous century. It was expanded, and then rebuilt completely in the 12th century, undergoing successive expansions and additions over the next centuries. It was damaged heavily during Louis XIV’s excursion into the area, and rebuilt a few years after. It continued to receive additions and patch ups over the next few centuries. The arched door in the photo above was built in 1765. The window above it had been shortened in 1702 in order to place the statue of Mary above the door. An Allied bombing at the end of 1944 collapsed the towers and the roof. The rebuilding was completed only in 2007. So this was the first time I’d seen it since the restoration was completed.

The towers loom over the old town of Koblenz, and loom higher the closer you get. The narrow perspectives of the old town do not make it easy to get external views of the church. Inside, the church looms again, dwarfing everyone inside. In this expanse it looks bare, like many of the churches in this area: where centuries of art burnt in one or two incendiary raids. The eye is drawn to the little details that remain: carved and gilded wood panels along the sides, the painted wood in the vaults. The destruction of those bombings of the 20th century now seem mere test-beds for what happens now.

There’s some wonderful stained glass to be seen here. Rhineland churches were full of these, and by a stroke of luck, some survived. I often play this game with myself: spot the older ones, and try to tell them from the post-war pieces. Sometimes the thickness of the glass lets me guess accurately. At other times I’m not sure. Try your hand at it, the next time you travel in this region, where the Romans brought wine and left it to be cultivated by the Germans.

In earlier years I’d found something else which was interesting in these churches: tiny or large. Works by local artists who are not well-known has often remained; the church seldom throws anything away. in Liebfrauenkircke I saw the lovely painted wooden sculpture that you see in a gallery above. There was a series of paintings of the stages of the cross, oil on wood, hidden away in a dark corner. The figures were amateurish, but the layout and colours showed a nice sense of design. Then there are glazed ceramics, usually unremarkable, but sometimes worth pausing to look at. This had taken most of the morning, and it was time for our elevenses.

There are two or three things I must tell you

It is an old axiom, and well said, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (in Molly Bawn, 1878)

Many people believe that the rules of aesthetics were first formulated by the Greek philosopher Plato. Not too wrong. Other theories of aesthetics, the Natyashastra of India and Confucian aesthetics in China, developed around the same time. But there must have been rules of aesthetics in more ancient cultures as well. Whatever. Let’s get back to Plato. As everyone knows, he was a wonderful artist. No? He must have had great taste. No? At least he was quite definite about what he liked. In his book, The Republic, he urged rulers to ban art which “stirred up the wrong emotions.” In modern times Umberto Eco wrote a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, connecting it to the theories of James Joyce. But on second thought, he added a long introduction to the book in which he pointed out that any rigid theory of beauty is clearly contradictory to the subjectivity of liking.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts could.
Anonymous

This week we believe that three is more beautiful than two or five. But how do we count threes? In the featured photo there are clearly three things: the colours green, yellow and purple. I don’t know whether you like it or not, but when I went for a walk with friends through a small village in Germany, flowering meadows like this looked beautiful. In the photo of the Romanesque Herz-Jesu Kirche that you see above, you can see many groups of three: three towers (like Tolkein’s middle book), three windows, and so on. In the photo below, you see three kinds of things: a railing, a gull, and the girders of a bridge. Our sense of whether we like these photos or not is clearly influenced by whether we see these trios.

There are three kinds of people: those who believe this, and those who don’t.
Terry Pratchett

Oh yes, there are three photos in this post, and three quotes. As they say at the end of the famous cartoon shorts, Tom and Jerry and Harry, “That’s all folks!”

Tufted Duck + Birds of the Week Invitation CLXXI

Boldly patterned, small, golden eyed, and commonly found. That’s a tufted duck (Aythya fuligula) for you. I’ve found it swimming in the waters of a small pond in Rajasthan, a reservoir in the plains of Uttarakhand, in the freezing water around Gamla Stan in Stockholm, and, most recently, on the murky waters of the Elbe near Hamburg’s harbour. I’ve generally seen large flocks, but this time, in spring, I saw only a pair. The tuft of the male is pretty noticeable, as you can see in the featured photo. The black back persists in the tuftless brown female. As always, the sexual dimorphism indicates different roles in nesting. The females do the incubation and rear the chicks alone for four to six weeks by the female alone. The unfledged chicks are then left to fend for themselves.

Tufted duck, Aythya fuligula, Hamburg Elbe

The strangely lopsided and careless pattern of breeding also leaves space for brood parasitism, by other females of the same species, or of another. Typically a clutch has six to eight eggs, but it is not unusual to find nests with a dozen or more eggs. I would guess that the frequency with which these large clutches are found indicate significant chances of brood parasitism. It is a wonder that with this style of nesting the species is far from endangered today. It is not only widespread across most of Eurasia, but also common, with a world population of more than a million. This should have something to do with its adaptability in choosing habitats. It has been found at heights of 2400 meters in the Alps, brackish as well as fresh water, streams, lakes, and even the sea.

Birds of the Week CLXX

Portrait photography by Bryan Adams: Monday Art

Bryan Adams? Not the same one? Yes, the same. And in a less known role as a photographer. The banners outside Darmstadt’s museum promised photos of celebrities. A big part of the crowd inside admired the photos of people they already knew from movies and music, media social and media legacy. Corporate imagery blinds you until you see nothing else. I saw many people taking photos of the portraits. They are well done, but what can you see in another photo, no matter how well done, of the queen, Pink, or Ben Kingsley?

Interesting as these celebrity portraits are, I would have sleepwalked through the show if it was not for sections of photos of people who are not famous. This is what rescues the show from being by a celebrity about celebrities. There was a wall of faces of homeless people (the featured photo in this post) and several large portraits of people who were wounded in recent wars. These sections held less viewers. So I understand why a museum would advertise and lay it out the exhibition as this one did. The exhibition is touring, and you could consider catching it if you haven’t.

A chai shop in Hamburg

Over the years I’ve lost my memory of certain important German cultural institutions. One of these is that coffee time is in the afternoon between 3:30 and 5:30. You might get it half an hour earlier or later, but certainly not after 6 PM. Over the last four decades, instead I find that a need for a tea and a cake comes over me at about 6 PM. Too late for a German institution.

Fortunately Turkish çay (pronounced exactly like chai) shops have stepped in to fill this gap. I looked at the reviews of coffee shops near our hotel when we checked in, and found several open. The nearest one was rated high by both locals and tourists from many countries. We stepped out of the hotel, crossed a couple of roads, and found this welcoming gent behind his counter, ready to serve a rather nice çay and baklava.