Almost faster than the speed of light
I have made an important discovery with major implications for the natural world around us. Looking for owls in Leusden (not found) I saw a bird at the end that I hadn't seen before, but good heavens it was fast. As soon as I let my eye fall on him/her, he flitted away again into the bushes, behind a branch or to another tree, and my camera hardly could follow it, the autofocus always too late. Did I mention earlier this year that bearded males suffer from a severe form of hyperactivity, this little bird that is twice as small is probably 100 times more mobile.
So there must be a relationship between size and inability to sit still, and I suspect it is logarithmic. So a bird half of a firecrest (that's the bird in this photo) moves 10 000 times as fast as a bearded male, and with that you can forget that you can see them.
At most you can still hear them, and if you hear something buzzing, squeaking or another strange sound, then it is definitely a bird not to be spotted. How many new species does that yield?
Almost faster than the speed of light
I have made an important discovery with major implications for the natural world around us. Looking for owls in Leusden (not found) I saw a bird at the end that I hadn't seen before, but good heavens it was fast. As soon as I let my eye fall on him/her, he flitted away again into the bushes, behind a branch or to another tree, and my camera hardly could follow it, the autofocus always too late. Did I mention earlier this year that bearded males suffer from a severe form of hyperactivity, this little bird that is twice as small is probably 100 times more mobile.
So there must be a relationship between size and inability to sit still, and I suspect it is logarithmic. So a bird half of a firecrest (that's the bird in this photo) moves 10 000 times as fast as a bearded male, and with that you can forget that you can see them.
At most you can still hear them, and if you hear something buzzing, squeaking or another strange sound, then it is definitely a bird not to be spotted. How many new species does that yield?