mobile madness

                                                Mobile madness

It is about twenty years since mobile telephones first entered our lives. Mostly in communications terms they are an absolute boon making possible communication across vast distances by means of texting and also pure and simple phoning. In fact to remember the days before mobiles were invented it is easy to wonder how we ever lived without them.

Almost everybody has one these days apart from a few technophobic individuals.  The technology is ubiquitous. Now of course the question is how did we ever live without them. Smart phones have married technology with new developments such as global positioning and use of the internet.

However human development has not always kept up with their use.

It is a common sight to see people walking along the pavements and across roads so thoroughly engrossed in what is going on that they are oblivious to what is going on around them. It would be interesting to see how many accidents are cased by this. 

The other development is of course people speaking loudly on their phones in places such as buses. This is quite amusing to me as I always wonder what these people would feel if they could hear themselves speak.

The scene is clear . You are sitting on the bus and somebody gets on speaking loudly about their lives and their relationships with people.

I sit with the thought “I don't know you from Adam but I know all your business” You hear people describe such intimate details of their lives in such loud and penetrating voices that you begin to wonder if this is a display of public exhibitionism or whether these people are intentionally unaware. Of course at the end of the conversation you feel that you know them as it is impossible not to listen

People describe such intimate details of their lives on these devices it actually boggles the mind. I have heard details of their business relationships, the deals they are doing, Who they are going to sort out, who they live with and such like.

In an age where there is a lot of worry about the spying of government agencies and such like and the question of the privacy of the individual it certainly means with some of these people monitoring would be so easy. You could just imagine recording a conversation and anybody could know everything about them. Surveillance would be so easy!

Stress of city wildlife

                                                Stress in city wildlife

A new study has just shown that animals are also susceptible to the at pace of city life. Birds have been shown to rise earlier and to encounter higher levels of stress. Several times when I have travelled during the night I have encountered pigeons hanging around all the fast food places. It appears the birds are awake longer than they would be in a rural setting. Birds in the city wake on average half an hour earlier than their forest cousins.

The implications of this are profound! Do we expect that they will get the same diseases as city dwellers get?

The evidence for this is now somewhat patchy. The dawn chorus starts earlier as birds wake up from the night and proceed to defend their territories. The day starts a lot earlier and they are reputed to have greater success in finding mates. In many ways we see the birds as a mirror image of ourselves. They keep the same times and in some ways like the pigeons I saw they stay up later and rise earlier.

This begs of course a massive question as when looking at wildlife in the city somewhat reduced in number of species it runs to how they deal with the stress. What would definitely e interesting would be to know if this causes the same sort of problems as we see in humans with negative medical effects.

As they share our city world with its bright lights and fast pace does it follow that they are affected by the same sort of problems. The original survey was done on blackbirds. They are quite a common species in the towns but there were calls for studies to be made on urban foxes as well. London has its fair share of scavengers with the main urban wildlife being foxes, a fairly ubiquitous part of our wildlife, crows and magpies, starlings and of course the pigeon.

How they are affected extends to what they are eating as well.  Many of the species that successfully make their homes in the city are scavengers. They scavenge all that humans eat and in this case it means dealing with takeaways. Most London areas are filled with takeaway shops bearing things like “Chicken and chips” and kebabs. In many cases the people who eat these are either drunk or spoiled and the remains are fast thrown on the ground to be picked up by the scavengers that lurk. Many times an old carton of chicken and chips is pecked on by the starlings, crows, pigeons or foxes who suddenly materialize on any morsel that has been dropped.

These birds materialize and peck at the discarded food. Most of the time they only search for that as do the flocks of crows that appear in the neighbouring areas looking for the trash left by humans. Scavenging makes food finding easy

Rubbish bins suffer the same fate as crows and foxes try in their turn to tale what is left. The question of course is if they eat such bad food, don they suffer the consequences as humans do and end up suffering various conditions such as clogging of the arteries and various circulatory disorders or does the fact that they lead active lives protect then from this?

This is a question we will find hard to k now as there is no knowledge of how much calcification and hardening of the arteries there is. Many urban birds partake in some way in the feast ! Yet nobody can say quite how it will affect them.