Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 4

96. Fly Revives

These photos, from just on seven weeks ago, represent a little bit of good news – it seems the right time for such a thing.

Two posts ago I wrote about the devastation that the March 2021 floods had brought to the “Pipeline” dive site, at Nelson Bay on the east coast of Australia. A mass of muddy water poured down the Karuah River to this delicately positioned site, and killed a huge amount of life. Late the following month, with some trepidation, I went back not to the Pipeline but to Fly Poin...

95. Aviary Day

This is a continuation of my thread about the galahs.

They are still coming round, though not as often. I’m seeing them about once a week or so (though under our new lockdown I’ll be keeping a closer eye). During those first weeks, when they were around much of the time, battles with other birds were common. Conflict still erupts – they chased off a cockatoo this morning – but this period has seen more diverse interactions with other birds.

The point of this post is largely the photo at the top...

94. The Pipe Before the Storm

The photos in this post are from a dive back in December, on the “Pipeline” site in Nelson Bay. This has probably been the most important dive site for me, even more than Octopolis, over the past several years. It appears on page 1 of Metazoa and features in many other parts of the book.

The weather that day in December was ominous, as a storm was making its way down the coast. Much of Byron Bay, further north, had been washed away and the storm was soon due down where I was. Conditions were gl...

93. The Nest, 2

Continuing straight on from last time:

The next morning (day 5), the galahs were there. They had weathered the cockatoo storm.

A new question was posed by magpies. About four of them had gathered, and some of them came in to buzz a galah. But these seemed to have little effect; the galahs were unperturbed. In the afternoon a squadron of cockatoos came in, and the galahs appeared to come straight out their nest in response to the calls, but no fights were necessary. My notes for day 6 are scramb...

92. The Nest

This is a nest that has just been established by a pair of galahs – a kind of parrot – down behind our garden. I think the nest is new because this is the first time I’ve seen galahs at all in this immediate area. Five different parrot species come through here regularly, and although galahs are local to the region, I’d never seen them right here, until one morning this week when a novel birdy disturbance rippled through the eucapypts, and later that day it seemed pretty clear that two galahs w...

91. Ephemera

The Australian bushfires of last summer had very few positive effects, but above you can see one. These are pink flannel flowers, Actinotus forsythii, which have been blooming over the past month in countless numbers on high ridges in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The last time they were seen up here, the rangers say, was around 1957. The seeds from back then (Sputnik 1, Khrushchev, Eisenhower…) have waited till now to produce these flowers.

Pink flannel flowers are “fire ephemerals”;...

90. Melville, Cranmer, Wycliffe

The epigraph to Metazoa is a passage from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The narrator, Ishmael, is describing the task of watching for whales from high on a mast. “Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard.” His poor performance, he says, was due to by being distracted by “the problem of the universe.” He then gives some advice to shipowners: “Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable medit...

89. Tritonia

Many of the animals who figure in the text of Metazoa have a photo or drawing in the book as well. An exception is Tritonia, a tiny nudibranch who anchors a historically loaded mimicry-nexus at the end of chapter 3. I had hoped to include a Tritonia picture, but was never able to get one that was suitable.

I see them at Fly Point (Nelson Bay, NSW). They are not especially rare, though they do seem to be seasonal, and now is the time for them. But they are small often about 4-5 mm, I think ...

88. METAZOA

Metazoa has been released, in the US, UK, and Australia. This book is a follow-up to Other Minds, and closely connected, as the name indicates, to this website – a child of the site, in some ways. The US release is from Farrar, Straus and Giroux while the UK is from William Collins, and the two covers are combined above.

“Metazoa” is an old-fashioned word for the animal kingdom. The term was coined by Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, philosopher, and illustrator who figures several times in th...

87. Ants

It feels like an age since the Australian fires of last summer. Since then, the US has faced its own infernos. Those are now subsiding as another Australian summer gears up. Over this year, I’ve regularly visited a particular burned area in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, watching life return. Especially during the first months, when so much had been stripped bare, it was possible to notice and track various small kinds of life that would normally be hidden, or more elusive. The animals I b...