Dear Readers, I have been thoroughly enjoying this series of virtual meetings organised by the London Natural History Society – they have been varied, interesting and have introduced me to lots of new facts and ways of looking at the natural world. This talk was no exception – Professor Duckett’s main interests are bryophytes (liverworts and mosses) and he has been studying them for decades. In this talk, he was particularly interested in the effects of air pollution and climate change on London’s plants, especially those that grow on Hampstead Heath, which has been one of his main study areas.

Professor Duckett saw the seminal events of the last 50 years as being:

• the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968, which led to a dramatic fall in Sulphur Dioxide and soot pollution
• The rising levels of Nitrous Oxide pollution from car exhausts
• Climate change

The effects of these three changes were woven through his talk, but first he set the scene. The forest on Hampstead Heath is, like my local Coldfall Wood, ancient woodland with hornbeam coppice and oak standards. This meant that the hornbeams (incidentally the very last of our native trees to arrive before rising sea levels cut the UK off from the rest of Europe about 12,000 years ago) were cut for firewood every few years, while the oaks were left to grow for up to a hundred years before being cut. He estimated that the oldest oaks in the wood were probably about 400 years old, but interestingly the coppiced hornbeams could be older. Some of them were last coppiced as recently as ninety years ago.

The wood itself is probably 6000 to 7000 years old, part of a much larger wood that covered most of this part of the world. Professor Duckett makes the point that a mature tree captures up to 50lbs of carbon every year, while a sapling captures only .1lb. When you hear developers talking about replacing the mature woods that they plan to cut down with saplings, it’s worth noting that this is not a like-for-like replacement, as if we didn’t already guess that this was the case.

The oaks on Hampstead Heath are both Sessile Oaks (Quercus petraea) and English Oaks (Quercus robur) and Professor Duckett points out that there are also many hybrids between the two in the wood. There are also an increasing number of Turkey Oaks (Quercus cerris) which was introduced as an ornamental tree in the Eighteenth Century, and some evergreen Holm Oaks (Quercus ilex) – long-time readers might remember a pair of these trees growing outside Mum and Dad’s care home in Dorset.

Holm Oaks outside the nursing home

Incidentally, you can tell the acorns of the turkey oak because they have hairy caps! Who knew…

Turkey Oak acorns (Photo One)

Another common plant on the Heath is Alder Buckthorn (Frangula alnus). Professor Duckett told us that this was the foodplant of the Brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni), and he described it as ‘unfortunately not endangered’, for reasons that will become apparent. The butterfly is in fact doing very well as the climate warms, and is moving north at a rate of knots.

Alder buckthorn (Frangula alnus) (Photo Two)

Common Brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni) (Photo Three)

English Heritage have the responsibility to ‘restore and maintain the original landscape’ of the Kenwood Estate (which constitutes an important part of the Heath) whilst maintaining biodiversity. Alas, Professor Duckett points out that a large stand of Alder Buckthorn which wasn’t in Repton’s original design is going to be destroyed, because the brimstone is doing very well. It must sometimes feel as if a species is damned if it’s doing badly, but also damned if it’s increasing in numbers.

Interestingly, although Professor Duckett sees a number of dangers to the wood itself (from ash dieback, from competition from non-native trees such as the Turkey Oak and Norway Maple, and from climate change), he sees the biggest conservation priority in the wood as being….the bog.

At this point, my head swivelled. Bogs are vanishingly rare in London, and I had no idea that Hampstead had one At All. However, sphagnum moss was first recorded in 1877, and there used to be not one but three bogs. The other two are gone, and one remains. This one is a valley bog, where nutrient-poor water drains into a decline, and it used to be much more species-rich – sundew used to grow here, for example. This insectivorous plant exudes drops of a sticky liquid that catch little flies to provide the plant with the nutrients that are missing from the soil.

Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) (Photo Four)

The bog had been getting rather overgrown with brambles and shrub, but this year a socially-distanced team of volunteers have been clearing the area, and the sphagnum is already regenerating, along with the largest moss in the UK, Polytrichum commune.

Polytrichum commune plus sphagnum moss (Photo Five)

Finally, Professor Duckett returned to his theme of air pollution. The sulphur dioxide in the air from coal-burning during the early twentieth century rendered London a virtual lichen desert – by the time of the Clean Air Acts in 1956 and 1968, there was only one species of lichen left in the whole capital. After this, however, species gradually came back – today, you can see almost 150 species of lichen on Hampstead Heath.

Furthermore, although the Nitrous Oxide pollution along our main roads is bad for most living things, it provides nutrients for nitrogen-loving bryophytes, who can be seen growing on the trees along our main roads. One of these is Syntrichia papillosa or Marble Screw-moss, an urban species which is thriving in the low-sulphur, high nitrogen air.

Syntrichia papillosa (Photo Six)

Finally, climate change is improving the conditions for some plants, such as the Mediterranean Liverwort, which used to only live in Cornwall in 1966, and now lives as far afield as the Western Isles of Scotland.

Mediterranean Liverwort (Cololejeunea minutissima) (Photo Seven)

Professor Duckett’s final worry, though, was the lack of botanists being trained up in the UK. He has spent the past five decades studying mosses and liverworts, and has been able to follow the rise and fall of various species. During this time, fewer and fewer universities have been offering courses on botany (or on zoology either). How are we going to monitor what’s going on in our ecosystems if no one is trained? Let’s hope that the generation of citizen scientists who have become involved over the past few years can fill some of the gap.

If you would like to watch the whole talk (and the very interesting discussion that came afterwards) have a look here.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Franz Xaver, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two by Sten Porse, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three by By Charles J Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38298003

Photo Four By No machine-readable author provided. Migas assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=419620

Photo Five by ceridwen / Common haircap moss (Polytrichum commune)

Photo Six by HermannSchachner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Seven from http://www.dorsetnature.co.uk/pages-liv/lv-02.html

Dear Readers, you are all getting far, far too good at this quiz business, so here’s a new twist. Below are pictures of leaves in all their autumnal glory, and pictures of twigs. Can you a) match the twig to the leaf, and b) tell me the name of the shrub/tree? 1 mark for a correct match, and an extra mark for the name of the plant. And this time I’m not going to give you a list to pick from, so this makes it especially important to write your answers down before you go to the comments to respond, in case any speedy people have got there first 🙂

So, if you think that the leaves in Photo 1 belong with the twig in Photo A, and that together they are an English Oak (Quercus robur), your answer is 1)A) (English Oak).

I think this is really tricky this week. We don’t normally pay a lot of attention to twigs, but there are clues in some of the photos, so don’t give up hope! All of the plants are commonly seen in the UK countryside (and many other places in the Northern Hemisphere too).

You have until next Thursday at 5 p.m. UK time to put your answers into the comments.

Onwards, and good luck!

Leaves

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

9)

10)

A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

F)

G)

H)

I)

J)

Field Maple leaves (Photo One)

Dear Readers, the Wednesday Weed has moved temporarily to Thursday this week – work got a little bit out of hand yesterday, and these posts take rather more time than some of the others. However, having waxed lyrical about the Japanese Maple last week, I thought it was only fair to spend some time with our native maple, the Field Maple, this week. Although this is not as showy a plant as its Asiatic relative, it has a certain charm, with its yellow leaves in winter which, unlike those of its close relative the Sycamore, are not besmirched with tar spot fungus. This is a tree that pops up once a woodland is beginning to grow on disturbed ground – in its early years it is very shade-tolerant, and so can grow underneath the foliage of the pioneer species such as birch. It is always a small-ish tree (though in good conditions it can reach 20m), but it can make a lot of growth early in its life as it reaches for its ‘place in the sun’. It can live for 350 years, and although it loves chalky soil, it seems happy enough in London clay to be a popular street tree. In his book ‘London’s Street Trees‘, Paul Wood mentions a favourite Field Maple on Hornsey Road in North London:

‘Drunks lean against it, powerfully-jawed dogs are tethered to it, buses brush past it, a cocktail of Thunderbird, 7 Up and worse is frequently fed to it. Despite all this tender, loving care the tree is doing just fine‘.

How can you identify a Field Maple, and, just as importantly, how can you tell the difference between this tree and the ubiquitous Sycamore? Firstly, the leaves of the Field Maple are smaller than those of the Sycamore, and are not serrated. Plus there’s the aforementioned tar spot. The bark of a mature Field Maple has a corky quality.

Bark of the Field Maple (Photo Two)

The flowers are held in what my Collins Tree Guide describes as ‘little erect yellow-green posies’.

Field Maple flowers (Photo Three)

And the ‘helicopters’ are similar to those of the Sycamore, but are held horizontally rather than dangling.

Field Maple ‘keys’ (Photo Four)

Sycamore keys

As you might expect from a native tree, there is a variety of folklore around the Field Maple. It used to be believed that it would deter bats from entering the house, if a bough was hung in the doorway. Carrying a child around a Field Maple, or passing them through the branches, was thought to guarantee the infant long life, though presumably not if you dropped them. There is a variant that says that waving a branch of Field Maple over a newborn will give them lifelong protection from the evil eye, so this might be a safer course of action.

Field Maple leaves are the food for many caterpillars. Some species are pretty much totally reliant on this species, including the Mocha moth (Cyclophora annula)..

The Mocha (Cyclophora annularia) (Photo Five)

…the Maple Prominent (Ptilodon cucullina)

Maple Prominent (Ptilodon cucullina) (Photo Six)

and the Plumed Prominent (Ptilophora plumigera)

Plumed Prominent (Ptilophora plumigera) (Photo Seven)

Although Field Maple hasn’t been used extensively for timber, owing to its slow growth and small size, it was the wood used by Stradivari for his violins. The sound of these instruments have proved difficult for modern-day luthiers (what a great word!) to reproduce, and  chemical analysis has shown why. For one thing, the wood in the 18th Century violins appears to have been treated with a substance containing aluminium, calcium, copper and a variety of other elements, though whether this was done deliberately in order to change the tone of the instrument, or was simply a way for the woodsmen to prevent fungal infection in the wood, is unknown. But other qualities are simply the result of age – the wood appears to have gradually dehydrated, and constant playing has shaken some of the fibres until they have detached from one another. The authors of the study believe that this might contribute to the expressiveness and tone of the instrument, but if you haven’t yet purchased a Stradivari violin you might want to get a move on (if you have several million pound to spare) – the wood is gradually decaying, and the violins will not last forever.

A 1703 Stradivari violin from the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum (Photo Eight)

And if you want to hear what one sounds like, have a listen here. This music, and this instrument, and this violinist, are what human beings are capable of. I think that’s worth remembering when so much of what’s going on at the moment tends one towards despair.

And here, of course, is John Clare, catching the beauty of the Field Maple with his usual precision.

The Maple by John Clare

The Maple with its tassell flowers of green
That turns to red, a stag horn shapèd seed
Just spreading out its scallopped leaves is seen,
Of yellowish hue yet beautifully green.
Bark ribb’d like corderoy in seamy screed
That farther up the stem is smoother seen,
Where the white hemlock with white umbel flowers
Up each spread stoven to the branches towers
And mossy round the stoven spread dark green
And blotched leaved orchis and the blue-bell flowers –
Thickly they grow and neath the leaves are seen.
I love to see them gemm’d with morning hours.
I love the lone green places where they be
And the sweet clothing of the Maple tree.

Photo Nine

Photo Credits

Photo One By AnemoneProjectors (talk) – Field Maple (Acer campestre) autumn leaves, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75305174

Photo Two by By Marija Gajić – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45034594

Photo Three By Willow – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2041490

Photo Four by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=737185

Photo Five by Patrick Clement from West Midlands, England, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Six by Ben Sale from UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Seven By Patrick Clement from West Midlands, England – 71.024 BF2013 Plumed Prominent, Ptilophora plumigera, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63728673

Photo Eight by By User:Husky – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1052941

Great Fox Spider (Alocpecosa fabrilis) (By Mike Waite of Surrey Wildlife Trust)

Dear Readers, in these troubled times it’s good to have a bit of good news, so here’s something that will please all but the most troubled of arachnophobes. This magnificent spider, known as the great fox-spider, was listed as Extremely Rare in my wonderful ‘Britain’s Spiders – A Field Guide’, and has not been seen since the 1990s. And what a fine beast it is! The female has a body length of 16mm which might not sound like much, but you only need to look at those fine hairy legs to see that this is a substantial creature, more than two inches wide.

The great fox spider is actually a wolf spider – these are creatures with excellent sight, as those big front-facing eyes would suggest. Wolf spiders are runners – they don’t make webs, but instead gallop like cheetahs across the sunny open spaces where you can often find them basking in the heat. Because they don’t spin webs, you will sometimes see them carrying them their egg cases on their backs, and when the young hatch they hitch a ride too.

The spider was discovered by Mike Waite of the Surrey Wildlife Trust,  on a Ministry of Defence training ground in Surrey. He surveyed aerial photos of the site, and found some open dusty spaces, just the kind of places that the spiders like to hunt.He found some unidentified spiderlings, and I suspect he had a hunch that he’d found something exciting. At night, he visited the site with a torch  (and hopefully with.a white flag in case of any random firing), and was ‘over the moon’ to find some adults. 

Photo by Mike Waite of Surrey Wildlife Trust

Mike turned sixty this year, and describes his find as ‘the most important thing that I’ve done in a long career’. He also thinks that the spider might be much more widespread than people think – they live in coastal areas in the Netherlands, skittering across the dunes in pursuit of sandflies. ‘Have we been looking hard enough?’ Mike asks. Good question. But with lockdown fast approaching, it might be worth a good look if you live near enough to the beach to have a good look. There are more wonders around than you might think.

The roof of the Core Education Centre at the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK (Photo One)

Dear Readers, as I draw to the end of the first module in my OU science course, there is some discussion about sustainable building, and the decisions and challenges that have to be made when trying to come up with something that ticks all the boxes. The Eden Centre in Cornwall is known for its innovative buildings, particularly the biomes that hold thousands of species of plants, so it was not surprising that it wanted its new education centre (The Core) to be equally special. The brief was to

‘create a building the shape of a sunflower and the size of a spaceship to pay respect to the plant engine that powers the earth‘.

It was also extremely important that the building was not only inspirational (the intention was that people walking into the space would look up and be provoked into thinking about the place of human beings in the natural world) but sustainable, in the broadest sense of the word.

Inside The Core

The internal structure of the building was made from ‘glulam’ – as anyone who has watched ‘Grand Designs’ lately will know, this is a composite material made from layers of wood glued together that can be shaped and are as strong as steel. The sustainability component comes from the forestry practices of the companies involved – properly managed woodland can be a renewable resource, whereas steel is very energy-intensive to produce. 

The controversy, however, came from the choice of material used to make the thin, waterproof skin on the roof. The roof wasn’t just going to be a roof: it had to make a strong architectural statement, be durable and light, and be easy to work with, bearing in mind the complexity of the roof design. Furthermore, the Eden Project team wanted to be able to trace the environmental and social impacts of whatever they chose.

In the end, they chose copper. This was immediately contentious: copper takes a lot of energy to smelt and refine and the copper industry, like many other mining operations, has a long history of pollution and habitat destruction. Rio Tinto Zinc was used to help source the metal from a single mine (the Bingham Canyon mine in Utah) which had ISO 4001 certification for environmental management. The team worked with the owners of the mine to track the copper right through the supply chain, believed to be the first time that this has been done. In their statement on the use of the material, the Eden Project team state that:

‘The copper roof provided Eden with the opportunity to investigate how we can supply the 60% of
global demand for copper that isn’t recycled, by exploring the feasibility of sourcing copper from a
single, responsibly-managed mine, and ultimately, generate debate on the potential for certification
schemes in metals and minerals.’

Even within the OU team who devised the module there were differing opinions about the choice of copper as the roofing material. There were those who agreed with the Eden Project team, who concluded that working with the copper mining company had encouraged reflection on sustainability concerns and life-cycle analysis with the mining industry, and might even lead to a certification scheme.

Then there were those who argued that there were several more locally sourced renewable or recycled materials available for the roof, and choosing them would have been a better way to inspire solutions to environmental problems.

The Bingham Canyon mine in 2003(Public Domain)

What all this highlights is how complex the decision making process can be, both for massive projects like this one or for much more domestic-scale renovations. Do we think about external cladding for our chilly Victorian house, or are we more worried about the possibility of condensation and the fire risk? Do we replace our draughty windows and lose the original glass? The trouble is that quite often we don’t have the information in the detail that we need, and there are few ways of measuring one alternative against another.

However, this is not to say that decisions should not be made based on what we currently know. For what it’s worth, I think that the Eden Centre Roof decision was the wrong one: it would have been better to use something local and preferably recycled (even recycled copper), rather than assuming that one project in a far corner of the world could have an influence on the whole mining industry. The Core is an extremely sustainable and well-thought out building in many ways, from its super-insulated walls and solar panels on the roof to the floor tiles made from recycled Heineken bottles. However, getting into a relationship with Rio Tinto will undermine the sustainability credentials of this impressive building in the minds of anyone who hears the name of the company and remembers the long list of human rights and environmental concerns, the latest being the destruction of a cave sacred to the peoples of the Juukan Gorge in Western Australia, which had evidence of 46,000 years of human habitation. Plus, Rio Tinto has been listed as one of the 100 top industrial greenhouse gas polluters in the world in a Guardian report in 2017. The company refused to bow to a shareholder request to follow the guidelines of the Paris Accord (to limit temperature rise to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Centigrade) on the grounds that they were already making a lot of progress. It seems to me that having a relationship with Rio Tinto is only ever going to benefit the company and enhance its attempts to ‘greenwash’ its reputation.

It is still a very fine building though. Now, if they could only do something about the estimated 76% of people who still arrive at the venue by car that would help…

Photo Two

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://www.edenproject.com/visit/whats-here/core

Photo Two from https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/04/there-s-a-whole-world-of-ignorance-out-there-sir-tim-smit-ceo-eden-project/

Dear Readers, I have been very much enjoying the talks organised by the London Natural History Society during the lockdown, and this week’s talk was especially intriguing. It’s true that we listen to birds all the time (though we rarely really understand what they’re saying), but are the birds listening to us, and if so, what do they understand, and why are they doing it? Sabrina Schalz specialises in the study of birds and the attention they pay to human language, and her presentation raised all kinds of interesting questions. You can listen to the whole thing here (and if you live in London and haven’t yet signed up to the LNHS, I can heartily recommend it as a source of information and camaraderie on flora and fauna in the Capital).

First of all, though, what do we mean by ‘eavesdropping’? There are two kinds: when two people are talking, and a third person listens in: or when someone is broadcasting a message to a particular group, but members of other groups can also listen. The example given was a bird sitting in a tree and singing to attract a mate: the bird is only interested in female birds of the same species, but predators might also be attracted to the song, and humans may admire it.

Now, anyone who has had pet birds will know that they listen to us, but why? Birds in captivity may think of humans as their social group, and will listen to work out if food is coming, or if a visit to the vet is in the offing. As is well known, birds of a wide range of species will imitate human speech, and it was shown that some birds are not just imitating, but actually understand what the words mean – the story of African Grey Parrot Alex, who could distinguish between a ‘yellow cube’ and a ‘green ball’ is one case in point.

However, these are very specialised conditions. Why might a wild bird want to listen to humans? One clear example would be when birds are persecuted, and experiments have shown that captive birds are more alert when they hear unfamiliar voices, so this probably translates into the wild. I know personally that woodpigeons in Dorset were much more flighty than the woodpigeons that visit my garden in London, probably because the chance of the rural birds being shot is so much higher.

A third example would be when the bird wants to exploit the human; the example given was the honey guides of Africa, small birds who, when a human whistles, will lead them to a bee’s nest, so that the human can do the hard work of breaking it open, and the bird can then feast on the eggs and grubs. But in an urban environment it’s clear to see that pigeons and seagulls are extremely attuned to human behaviour, to the extent that London pigeons start to gather in parks and squares in the City well before lunchtime in the hope of a few scraps. This isn’t exactly eavesdropping as defined (unless they can recognise the words ‘Marks and Spencer sandwich) but it does show that birds are watching us and trying to work out what we’re going to do all the time. Their survival may well depend on predicting what we’re going to do.

Anyway, I digress as usual. Back to the talk. Schaltz raises the very interesting question of what exactly birds are picking up on when we speak. Birds can distinguish between vowels (Zebra finches were taught to recognise the difference between ‘wit’ and ‘wet’) and also between consonants (Japanese Quail have been taught to distinguish ‘das’, ‘bas’ and ‘gas’).

Budgies and zebra finches can also tell the differences between words that are stressed on their first syllable (‘permit’ as in ‘an authorisation’) and their second syllable (‘permit’ as in ‘allow to do something’).

And finally, and this is probably the most interesting, birds can learn to tell the difference between tone. Some Java sparrows were taught to distinguish between a sentence said in an admiring tone (presumably not ‘who’s a pretty boy?’) and a sentence said with suspicion. Not only this, but they could from the sentence taught to other sentences in the same tone.

Now, onto the subject of Schaltz’s PhD. She studied large-billed crows in Tokyo – these birds are often persecuted in the city, with many being captured and relocated, and she worked with a number of these birds. The aim of the experiment was to see if the birds could distinguish between Japanese (with which they should have been very familiar) and Dutch (a language that they were unlikely to have heard). The birds were played 25 second bursts of each language, and their degree of attentiveness was measured from both their head position (the head is raised when the bird is interested/vigilant) and from the length of time that they spent close to the speaker. All the adult birds spent longer and were more attentive when Dutch was played, though the juveniles seemed pretty much equally interested in both.

How do they tell the difference between the languages? The rhythm of Dutch is very different from that of Japanese, and as it’s already been shown that the ubiquitous Java Sparrows can tell the difference between Chinese (which is syllable-timed) and English (which is stress-timed), this is probably the key factor.

The birds in Schaltz’s experiment were not trained in any way, and so they were self-motivated to listen. The working hypothesis is that because the crows were already persecuted, they would be especially wary of anything unfamiliar, because they couldn’t yet understand the ‘cues’. It’s probably possible that the crows already understand things about tone of voice, volume and even rhythm in Japanese, but don’t yet know these things in Dutch. Learning to anticipate the behaviour of those around you is a key survival skill, and it’s no surprise that these intelligent, adaptable birds are both watchful and curious.

Schaltz’s next study will be on wild carrion crows in London, and she’s trying to find out three things: whether there are differences between species in terms of their understanding of languages, whether there are differences between cities (Tokyo is 97% Japanese speaking, whereas in London 77% of people have English as their main language) and whether the differences in persecution between Tokyo and London will have an impact on behaviour.

I really enjoyed Schaltz’s talk – it’s clear that she’s passionate about the interactions between birds and humans, and she’s really trying to understand things from the perspective of the bird. She wants to increase human understanding and appreciation of the crow family, a group who are much maligned pretty much throughout their range. Finally, as urbanisation grows, she wants to look at the factors that make a successful urban species, and to try to see what would make our cities more welcoming to the many refugee species who are finding the industrialised countryside a less conducive place to live. And, as a family of jackdaws land on the chimney pots opposite my window as I write, I can only wish her luck. Other species have been squeezed to the margins, and anything that increases our wonder and compassion can only be for the good.

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0sgy6pgGw

Photo Two by gisela gerson lohman-braun, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three by Mike Prince from Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons