Note: In order to save on costs I’ve had to start uploading all relevant images outside of WordPress. For reasons that have me completely stumped, and when I say that I mean I’ve spent hours trying to fix the problem, the images, which I feel are an integral part of this post, simply refuse to display within this post, and unfortunately, it will be necessary to click on the necessary links that will take you to where the images are hosted. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to fix this issue, but, not knowing whether the issue will be fixable tomorrow, several weeks from now, or can it be fixed at all, I’ve decided to simply release this blogpost that I’m really excited about. So here it is, and I hope people still enjoy it despite these obnoxious technical difficulties!
On the first day of Summer this year, a cucumber spider sits in a flower
Starting this year (2024), getting out with the camera to photograph birds and bugs has become an absolute obsession to me. If the weather’s sunny, you can’t stop me. If the weather’s bad, I might still venture out, the insects are usually nowhere to be seen in such weather, but you might still see a few birds. So what started this passion for both our flying friends and our tiny friends? (Some of which also fly.)
Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that I’m using the word “bug” to mean both insects and arachnids. Arachnids are spiders, not insects. The reason this distinction is important is because spiders have less in common with an insect than a human has with a dog! And we wouldn’t lump them into the same category!
So, the somewhat unusual reason that started it all is that, well, I’m a big sci-fi fan, and a big fan of astronomy. I was in an absolute ball of excitement when the James Webb Telescope was launched. I look forward to the Europa Clipper reaching Jupiter’s moon and teaching us more about this frozen world. And for me, in terms of learning new things about space, the absolute jackpot would be learning, is there life out there? Not just is there, yes or no, but what kind of minds do aliens have? Do they have societies? What kind of societies do they have? What can they teach us about ourselves? In short, what vast wealth of knowledge would we gain if we learned there was another type of mind, and a different type of society, out there somewhere in the universe?
But, and of course there’s a but.
If we’re lucky with the James Webb Telescope, or with future telescopes, we might for example find out that there is industrial pollutants in the atmospheres in one of the planets near to our solar system. And then what? Well, that’s pretty much it. We will know there is a society on a nearby planet, and that’s all. What kind of society do they have? We don’t know. Are they warlike or peaceful? We don’t know. Have they solved problems that humanity has struggled with for centuries? We don’t know. Going to ask them won’t be possible for centuries, if ever. The furthest a spacecraft has ever been sent is a distance of just under one light day, that’s the Voyager 1 spacecraft, and it took just under fifty years to travel that distance. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away. It would take Voyager 1 seventy thousand years to travel this distance!
Often a big part of having a neurodivergent brain is that you can’t simply “switch off” your interests. There was no telling my brain to just do something else instead. I wanted to encounter an alien brain, or an alien society, and well, my brain just couldn’t get away from it. But the reality was, the universe was saying no dice. If we were to build something a hundred times bigger than the James Webb telescope, there was still a huge chance that humanity wouldn’t be able to detect alien life. I’m not saying humanity won’t achieve it someday, but, it would have to happen in the next fifty, if I’m lucky sixty years for it to happen in my lifetime. So, the interest was there, nothing was going to change that, so something on this Earth would have to satisfy that interest. And, the more I thought about it, there was.
I had been aware for a while that octopuses….
Okay I suppose we’ll have to get into that whole thing. I can already hear someone at the back shouting “Actually it’s octopi” even though this is a blogpost not a lecture. Frankly, I don’t care whether someone says octopi, octopuses, or octopodes, as long as I understand what you said I don’t care if you’re using so called “bad English” or “bad grammar”. But the word octopus is Greek, and the suffix “i” is Latin:
https://qz.com/1446229/let-us-finally-resolve-the-octopuses-v-octopi-debate
So there you go, if you say, “Actually it’s octopi”, you are not only a pedant, but you are completely wrong in your pedantry! So there!
So anyway, I had been aware for a while that octopuses were really smart, and not only that, but that they diverged from humans about a half a billion years ago. As I learned more, I realized that humanity’s last common ancestor with an octopus, was a flatworm. It seemed, yes, octopuses are not aliens, we have ancestors in common with them, and they’re from Earth, but, given a half a billion years’ separation in time, could they be an intelligent species that is somewhat similar to aliens? Shortly after this I devoured “Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey-Smith. It gave me great joy to know that in the deep sea lived the octopus, a creature that is the closest thing we might ever encounter to an intelligent alien. One of the most alien things about them is that they have a brain in their head, and a brain in each arm. Each of these nine brains can act independently from each other or can act in unison. A lot of fictional aliens on our tv screens or in our cinemas or on our whatever the latest Netflix equivalent is tend to look very similar to us, maybe the forehead looks a little different, that’s all. Perhaps our deep seas in the form of the octopus have better sci-fi than a lot of actual sci-fi!
This was the start of multiple books I read on the subject of various animals. Shortly after this I read “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a sci-fi novel about a planet of jumping spiders that are accidentally given a human made virus that gives them human levels of intelligence, and yet they still think and act like a spider. This was a big part of why I now absolutely love jumping spiders. And when I thought I had found one, I was overjoyed. This is the spider I found:
Metellina Spiderling (28th April 2024)
But it’s not a jumping spider. Still I came to love these little spiderlings, and knowing where they are, I often take a trip to the part of the Glen River Park where they live to see how they’re getting on. One seems quite happy to live on a bit of barb wire, a rebellious spider perhaps? A third one seems to be missing, don’t know where they’ve gone, I hope they’re still alive. This one, on the leaf, now lives inside a hole in the wall. (Unless that’s the third spider, and it’s the leaf spider that’s missing.) It can be great fun to take a walk down to the wooded part of the park where they live and see what they’re getting up to.
And soon enough I was reading “An Immense World” by Ed Yong. My goodness, this changed the way I thought about animals. I already had some idea about animals having different senses, bees sensing different colours from us, bats echolocacting (bats aren’t blind by the way), but Ed Yong explains to you that, it’s not just that they have different senses, they are, pretty much, living in a different world, their senses are so different that if we could all of a sudden sense the world like they do, we would think we had been transported to another planet. The most easy to understand example he gives is the vision of a mallard duck, and even though it’s probably the easiest to understand comparatively speaking, I still can’t get my head around it! A mallard duck sees in 360 degrees. So, with my vision, there is a furthest left I can see, and a furthest right I can see, to a mallard, those two extremes would just be next to each other. There would be no “edge”, it would just continue. When a mallard is flying, they simultaneously see the world moving towards them and moving away from them. And as I say, all this requires me to visualize is if my own eyes were somehow placed on the side of my head, and I still get dizzy just thinking about it!
Speaking of mallards. Are you ready to have your heart melted? It matters not, you are about to have your heart melted regardless.
AWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!! (14th April 2024)
Look, it’ll be okay, just put your heart in the freezer for a few hours and it’ll be alright again. A few weeks ago in the Glen River Park, the baby ducks were born and I watch them following their mother around the river. There’s still a few of them left, sadly not all of them made it, nature is often cruel, but there’s something delightful about watching them playfully swim through the water.
Incidentally, never approach a bird nest or a bird who is incubating her eggs, and likewise never photograph a bird nest or a bird who is incubating her eggs. Birdwatch Ireland has a great article on why you should avoid this activity, you may be risking danger to both the mother bird and her babies, and you definitely don’t want that!:
https://birdwatchireland.ie/too-close-for-comfort-bird-nests
One of the other birds Ed Yong talks about in his book are robins. These birds are amazing. Scientists are still not entirely sure how it works, but, they can see the Earth’s magnetic field, somehow. That’s part of how they migrate. Does it get any more alien than that?
AWW YOU’RE ADORABLE WITH YOUR WEIRD MAGNETIC POWERS AREN’T YA AREN’T YA!!!!! (9th April 2024)
So it was shortly after I finished an Immense World by Ed Yong that I thought to myself, I really want to get out there and view these amazing creatures that I share the world with. I wasn’t completely new to this. When I’m in Courtmacsherry there is information in one of the small parks about the local birds, and in 2020 I made it my mission to photograph all of them, and I did, the only one I didn’t manage to photograph was a golden plover. And I had photographed butterflies and ladybirds before. But this year (2024) something changed, and I wanted birds and bugs to become a much bigger part of my life. So I started regularly going out with the camera to meet my non human neighbours.
A Starling (4th April 2024)
A Goldfinch (4th April 2024)
A Pied Wagtail, they wag their tails it’s adorable! (6th April, 2024)
7th April, A Blackbird Singing their heart out
And I soon became interested in the work of Seán Ronayne, fellow Cork man, and fellow autist. He is documenting the birdsong of every bird in Ireland.
I love to hear the songs of birds, so far I’m quite bad at it, I can identify a pigeon and a crow, and I’m getting better at identifying blackbirds but I still get them mixed up with robins. Seán Ronayne’s absolute drive to document every single bird song in Ireland absolutely fascinates me, and he’s also doing great work in bringing attention to one of the things about Ireland that I’m not happy with, which is that not enough, not nearly enough, is being done to protect our beautiful nature and our amazing wildlife. One of the examples he talks about that really makes me more aware of it is that, I absolutely love mountains. But when you see a mountain that is devoid of trees, it might look majestic and epic to me, but this is a mountain where all of the trees were cut down. We’re losing the beauty of our natural environment, and often times we can’t even see it. If I can’t see mountains as horribly deforested, will future generations live in a world where the natural world has been further plundered, and even more of our wonderful wildlife has gone extinct, and it won’t even be noticeable to them?
The bird photography I took to more quickly, because it’s easier, at least at the start. But once you get a bit more used to photographing really tiny bugs, it can actually be easier than photographing birds often times. This is because birds have a tendency to fly off if you make the slightest sounds, but non flying bugs, they’re often not even aware that you’re there, so you can photograph them to your heart’s content. One of my absolute favourite bugs is the shield bug, they’re often derisively called stink bugs, because their defense mechanism is to release an odor that is quite bad (I haven’t smelt it yet, maybe the shieldbugs like me!) It can be quite annoying that many of these wonderful creatures get defined purely in terms of in what ways they inconvenience humans. A few weeks ago, I saw a dock bug for the first time, the way the creature moved among the grass was so incredibly alien, quite a memorable experience.
A dock bug in the grass, one of my favourite insects. (19th April, 2024)
And sometimes you can watch as a dispute or drama occurs between tiny little bugs. A few weeks ago, I watched as to my understanding, a fight almost broke out between two little dock bugs. It’s entirely possible that I simply don’t know what was happening, but this is my best guess. The two dock bugs encountered each other on a plant, and started shoving each other, and then, just went about their way, as if to say, “We’ll leave it off, it’s not worth it.” Amazing to think that I’m the only person on Earth who witnessed this little incident between two tiny creatures!
First day of Summer and the dock bugs are out! (May 1st, 2024)
Among the green vegetation (May 1st 2024)
The dock bugs remind me of ourselves, they don’t like the cold weather, they like the sun! I hadn’t seen them for quite a few days, but on May 1st, which appropriately enough was a sunny day, the dock bugs were out again! I hope to see many other types of shield bugs, but so far the only other one I saw was this this delightful gorse bug, and I’m delighted that I managed to capture one of the creature’s eyes in the photo.
A gorse shield bug, and you can see one of their eyes. (22nd April, 2024)
So why do I like capturing the eyes of little bugs on camera? (It should be noted that some bugs don’t have eyes.) It’s because I think this helps illustrate that they are thinking, feeling creatures, that deserve our care. Don’t get me wrong, I’d save a human being before I saved any one of those creatures, but I see such callousness towards these little animals, that are just trying to stay alive, or trying to take care of their young. I’ve seen horrible videos on you tube where people see a wolf spider with her babies on her back, and their response is to kill her. All of the babies then scatter across the floor, their mother cruelly killed. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want flies anywhere near my food, but when they are, I simply scare them away, I don’t see the need to kill them. The other day right before bed, I encountered a cellar spider in my room. Had it been earlier in the day, I would have gotten out the camera, but I wanted to go to bed, and I have a fear that if a spider lands on me when I’m asleep I’ll get an anxiety attack, so I put the spider into a glass, and transferred them to another room. Even when bugs are a source of inconvenience to us in our own houses, there is no need to kill them, we can simply gently move them to another part of the house. They’re not monsters, they’re just trying to live their lives. Here are some photos that I hope illustrate this.
Bumble Bee, 23rd April 2024
A fly lands on the earth, 22nd April 2024
This bee looks like a superhero! (19th April, 2024)
I love bees! (28th April, 2024)
Cucumber Spider, (May 1st, 2024)
My hope is that we treat even the most “weird” animals with compassion. Maybe to see them as beautiful, as wonderful, but even if we can’t see them this way, at least treat them as deserving of care. I think lampreys ( a type if fish), are hideous, and with their rows of horrific teeth, I don’t know will this ever change. So I was worried this feeling of revulsion towards them would mean I would lack compassion towards them, but, when I learnt that they are eaten in the form of lamprey pies, I still felt really bad for the poor creatures.
So I hope this story has been somewhat informative and not too long winded, my hope that humanity would some day find aliens among the stars led me to find alienish creatures right here on Earth, often less than a half mile from my house. To the best of my knowledge, all of the animals I have shown you today diverged from our human ancestors 300 million years ago or more, they’re not aliens, but they’re the closest thing to it. I’ll leave you with what in my opinion are some of the best photos I have taken, and if you’ve ever considered taking an interest in this kind of photography, there’s never been a better time of year, the baby mallards are out and about, and the little bugs are soaking up the sun!
Peacock Butterfly (13th April 2024)
Heron (16th April 2024)
Blue Tit, 14th April, 2024
An Alien Duck! This is actually a tufted duck. (18th April, 2024)
Crane Fly. This one has only five legs, which means it only just barely escaped a dangerous situation. 30th April, 2024
A Song Thrush. Really Beautiful Singers. (29th April, 2024)
Missing Sector Orb Weaver Dancing In The Sky (13th April, 2024)
Linnet (23rd April, 2024)
A dunnock. To my amazing luck they were singing their heart out, and didn’t see me at all so I was able to get really close! (24th April 2024)
That’s it. Now go outside and look at some birds and bugs!
Ponderings Of An Autist 
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