Aurora, BioCafe, and wildlife photography

I hopped into bed just after 10pm last night and began scrolling social media where I discovered we were in the midst of a red alert aurora. I looked out the bedroom window and took this photo. Not bad for the middle of a city and quite a lot of cloud cover as you can see. This is the first time I’ve seen it from our house before because of all the light pollution in the city.

It’s Ben’s birthday today so he and I went for brunch at BioCafe followed by a wander around the art gallery. BioCafe is a delightful place on Rosemount Viaduct that’s known for making healthy vegan breakfast and lunch.

We don’t eat out very often these days because of my low-salt diet but the tofu scramble I had was very low in salt as I’m quite sensitive to it now and can taste it. Even if you’re not worried about high blood pressure, salt also raises the risk of kidney disease, osteoporosis, stomach cancer and dementia (Action on Salt, Salt and dementia) as well as causing fluid retention. I left the hollandaise sauce though as that will have been very salty. I had the tofu scramble on flat bread.

The desserts look amazing too if you want to indulge yourself.

Then we went to the art gallery to see the National History Museum exhibition of Wildlife Photographer of the year. The photos were excellent and moving.

The winner of the young photographer award for 2023 was Carmel Bechler from Israel who photographed these barn owls in a rundown building next to a very busy road. The lights in the foreground are from traffic. Israel apparently has the highest density of barn owls in the world due to efforts to encourage them as a predator of rodents, thus reducing reliance on rodenticides. It has been a huge success and the initiative is now spreading to neighbouring countries in the region.

The initiative is a win-win-win. Owls eat. Mice get quickly swallowed whole rather than suffer a slow, agonizing death by poison. We eat chemically cleaner food. The wild animals who eat rodents are spared. The farmer economizes on chemicals and gets rodenticide services for free, providing only maintenance for the boxes. 

The winner of the wildlife photographer of the year 2023 award is this next photo of a horseshoe crab in the Philippines near Pangatalan Island. I saw it and immediately thought it looked a spaceship in a science fiction movie. These animals have existed for 445 millions years but now, thanks to us, they are highly endangered and at risk of extinction.

Then we visited Victoria and Albert who stand proudly in the Balmoral section on level 1 of the art gallery.

They’re right beside this painting by Edwin Henry Landseer, Flood in the Highlands.