Deep freeze

It was an absolutely gorgeous day - colder than the proverbial witch's mammary, but sunny with not a lot of wind.

I got out this morning for a power walk around downtown. Nobody much was about, sidewalks were mostly clear and the sun blazing. At that point, it was supposed to be -11C, with the wind chill, -17C. It didn't feel anything like that cold. It was forecast to get even colder as the day wore on.

I went out again this afternoon with my camera. It was even nicer. I never felt cold, except my face, and my hands when I pulled the top of my mittens back to have fingers free to operate the camera.

I went over to the river to check out the ice rink somebody has built on the flat below Blackfriars Bridge. As I guessed, people were out skating on it today, not many, but it's a small rink. 

Two of the guys who built it were there. They confirmed they'd pumped water up from the river to flood it. It's as small as it is, they said, because they weren't sure it was going to work. It looks to me like it worked pretty well.

Every picture tells a story  This is one of my favourite pictures of Karen - and I've snapped a lot of the woman. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it was taken in one of my favourite places. 

Karen and I had gone to England in October 2003 to see Caitlin who was doing her first year of university at the British campus of Queen's University at Herstmonceux, Sussex. The main building was a 15th century castle. She wasn't doing well, not eating, homesick - but thriving on the course work. 

After we'd spent some time settling Caitlin down, we flew to Venice and stayed at a vacation rental in the Santa Croce neighbourhood. It was a revelation, that trip. We had been to Venice once before when we were in our twenties, but it had rained the whole time and we were miserable. This time, we finally got Venice. 

We'd go back in a shot, but you would almost feel guilty about contributing to all the problems too many tourists have caused in the city. If you read Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti detective novels, you know how much tourists are resented by Venetians not directly involved in the tourist trade.

Amusing bird facts  The latest chapter I've read in Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way is about play. It focuses on ravens, which are among the smartest birds - up there with primates, according to some researchers - and also among the most playful, despite their reputation as harbingers of gloom.

Common Raven (© eBird)

I loved the description of one Swedish researcher's tame test animals playing in the snow: "They do all the classical things, sliding down a hill, going back up, sliding down again. Sometimes on their backs with a stick in their feet. You can throw snowballs at them, and they all line up and try to catch them, jumping as high as possible."

This is the best part: "Sometimes one raven will walk over to another and just grab a leg and yank it. Then the other will grab a leg, too, and they'll both lose balance and fall over in the snow, boom! holding each other's legs, and sometimes holding an object in the other foot as well. It looks absolutely crazy."

I couldn't find any videos of ravens doing all the things these Swedish ravens do in the snow, but I did find the above clip, which gives some flavour of it.

Why do birds play? It's a bit of a mystery. 

The traditional explanation is that it's an animal's way of learning skills they'll need in the future to survive. But that explanation is no longer accepted as the whole story. The Swedish zoologist with the ravens, Mathias Osvath, a cognitive zoologist, speculates it may be like sleep, a way for birds to regenerate and keep brain function healthy. Another intriguing theory is that it contributes to a bird's ability to adapt quickly to new situations in the wild. 

Last word to Osvath: "We scientists are not supposed to say that, but almost every one of us - between papers, so to speak - would agree that the animals we see playing are having fun, and fun can be its own powerful reward."