Potter/Mud dauber wasp: the making

Respost for folks from Reddit.

(A propos of nothing: some of you may like these)

  

Here's some sense of how the whole process goes. The series also gives you an idea of how long I spent on getting these images. Its only towards the completion of the second or even third pot that I got what I wanted. I think it took a week I think before I nailed the lighting and focus.

I wanted the wasp completely in focus, so absolutely parallel to the lens plane. So I watched it to figure out its behavior and realized it would hover in front of the pot for just a couple of seconds before landing. So I rigged the tripod to be just low enough to be eye level to the wasp and just parallel to its incoming flight path. 

My only light source was either natural light or my handheld manual Vivitar 5000. I did have an extension cable at least. Initially I just worked on getting the exposure right so I got nice wing blur but a stable insect. You can see their bodies are quite still, even when their wings move.

Then I worked on getting enough light on the wasp and on the wall behind the wasp. If you held the light parallel to the wasp body, the light on the wall fell off very fast and the right edge of the image was too dark. Not to mention the ugly shadow of the pot either below or beside the pot (See images 2, 3 and 4). I didn't have a second flash to do a fill light. (I was a poor grad student then.) 

So the light had to be held just so. Once the wasp was hovering, the ring-light was held behind it so the insect was in its centre. And the light was tilted towards the wall, so off at an angle to the wasp and pushing more light to the wall, behind the pot. The light is also slightly above the wasp, pointing down a bit as you can infer from the specular highlights and shadows. This last part wasn't necessarily intended, but altogether it worked. The image hangs together

As you can see there is still some fall off on the wall and the front of the mud ball and the face of the wasp is not as highly lit as the thorax and abdomen. But both those are acceptable compromises. The image hangs. And that is how I made this image. I didn't click it, I didn't snap it, no, no, I stalked it and I made it.

Bring mud to make pot

Shape pot out of the mud brought in 

Stock the pot with alive but paralysed soft bodied prey like caterpillars and spiders.

Lay a single egg and seal the pot. See sealed pot in image no 1.

Potter wasp: National Wildlife Federation photo award winner

So, what if I don't photograph as much any more? My old photographs still win awards! This image which is in my book just took the first position in the Backyard habitats category in the National Wildlife Federation photo contest. The NWF is an American conservation organisation and they've been running this contest for (woah!) 43 years! Some of you may remember I've won before, in 2007, in the Habitats category.

Its not yet at WPY quality, which still is the gold standard, but its pretty good. I was told my image was selected from among 32k images; I'm pretty stoked. The quality of the contest entrants appears to be pretty high and getting better and better through the years. Slideshow below!

Baby steps, baby steps :)

Copyright © Natasha Mhatre If you're reading this without attribution to me anywhere other than at my blog Talking Pictures, its probably being plagiarized.

Flame of the forest

Repost
I'm terribly sorry I haven't really been posting much, there's been a lot to do. With some luck we should be back on schedule shortly.
These trees are blooming all over right now, so I thought it was a good time to resurrect the post.

Flame of the forest
This tree deserves it's name in more ways than one. The flowers look like flames individually. A tree in flower does really look like it's on fire. And every bird within a mile's radius is in love with it. And off course squirrels and insects.

Two days of waiting paid off! Ta dah here they go. The last one, a Spangled drongo, is a western ghats species. If you look at its distribution in the GI and I its painted along the western ghats. Well, it's here and it picked this tree to feast upon.

Flame of the forest
You know sometimes I feel like one of those sad homeless people you see on the streets, clutching at their treasures. Things no one else would find even remotely interesting. I'll be raving about some bird no ones even ever heard of before. Well, fortunately there are a few people who are a bit like that in CES and I'm not considered stark raving, but only moderately mad. Well, the slightly deranged vocabulary that apparently accompanies this enterprise does make up!

Clean up 3: or the story of keep trying

Some of the folks at clean-up 3

You must remember the first two clean-ups (1, 2)? It didn't end with those. The green-gang had yet another clean up and this one unlike the previous one was attended predominantly by students and a fair number. I can't say exactly how many, people kept drifting in and out of the effort depending on their schedules, but lets say at least 15 in all. I was thrilled!

We picked an area around one of the messes, the C mess. The garbage here is largely the responsibility of mant of the very lazy students IISc breeds. Folks won't walk 2 meters to a garbage can, they'll leave things right where they are. It doesn't help that the place is surrounded by residential areas. Much the same thing happens and occasionally domestic waste also ends up in this place. Its a thorough-fare as well, so you can imagine the state. Anyway, we had a long session of picking up after the .... and then we had a discussion about what next.

Mahua recruiting for Green-gang

Many were understandably not happy about the idea of clean ups alone, and wanted to do more to ensure that places we cleaned would remain that way. We initiated a few things, one of these has so far generated a positive response. We decided to ask IISc admin for more dustbins, to begin with in this area. We got much more than that, we were told that the area was ear-marked for 'development' and they asked us to plan what we wanted there. After some back and forth, it was decided we didn't trees and bush hacked away, since the areas actually quite rich in bird life, and we presented a plan for a few extra dustbins, lights and cleared paths. And voila! Work seems to be already underway!

This is the most positive and immediate response I've seen IISc make about just about anything. Good to know it can be done!

The other clean-up efforts had also spawned several initiatives, many of them have gotten quite far in themselves. A post about them in a short while, or maybe Arati who has put in a great deal of effort into many of those endeavors, will pick on this and oblige us with a post on what's been going on?

PS: For those of you wondering why the blog silence for a while, I made the last push needed to finish and submit my thesis. It's done and we'll be back to regular schedule shortly.

Vultures in the main building

Repost
This image to me is iconic IISc. The Faculty building has been the face of IISc for donkeys years, its on every brochure, every handbook, every calender. No one notices the details.

Like the two Scavenger vultures that have been on its ledges for the many years (don't ask a lady her age, and a PhD student how long they've been) that I have been here. I'm told they've been there well over thirty years. They're reputed to mate for life and I think larger birds are relatively long lived (but 30 years? maybe they've turned over...) I wonder if Tsundue had a word with them when he was up there?

Anyway, a few years ago Nature news had a feature to which the title was "Faeces brings colour to birds' faces: endangered vulture eats shit to impress females". Now see thats just a brilliant feature to read with your breakfast chai. Its also the sort of thing that adds to the perception that theres not much 'substance' to biology just these silly 'observations', particularly the more classical branches like mine.

But lets put this whole observation in perspective. These birds eat feces in order to accumulate carotenoids which give their heads that characteristic yellow colour. This colour is a signal they can't fake as far as we know, they must eat shit to be yellow, hence its an 'honest signal'. The birds when they eat the shit are obviously taking a risk with endoparasites, enteric infection and so on. And a female could judge from the colour just how much of a risk a particular male took. She could also asses his present condition and tell whether he got away with the risk. Now then, the male bird is in essence signaling to her saying in a sense 'I can do well despite my handicap, hence I must have good genes!'.

Amotz Zahavi sometime ago came up with a brilliant theory called the handicap principle which he says explains many many examples of exuberant sexual display in organisms, which are hard to explain in terms of plain old natural selection. And this behavioral observation seems to fit quite well with his theory. And off course there is an opposing theory, which is Fisher's runaway selection hypothesis.

Here's the paper for the work I referred to. Here's the theoretical work that proved that the handicap principle can work as model. The history of the theory itself is full of some nice internecine evolutionary biology warfare, but I'll leave that to you to find out.

IISc green gang: Clean up 2

Some of the folks in this Saturdays clean up
The Green gang revived itself. We sent out a mail last week asking for people who were interested in green issues particularly as regards the IISc campus. We got a few responses, not overwhelmingly large in number but definitely some. Some of the folks who wrote couldn't be there this Saturday, but there's always next time. A big thank you to those who did turn up and participate.

What I'm really hoping for though is to see more students involved in this. A lot of the responses to this little project was from IISc faculty (which is great!), but not as many students as I had hoped (whys that?). Apart from CES students and Satyam, there were no others! (I love my juniors for their candor, by the way, credit where it is due.) I can't believe the rest of the students care so little and take so for granted the place we live in, that we're so complacent. C'mon folks, show a little something, signs of life? Is this why the place is such a mess in the first place?

A discarded chair: was against the wall. Was it being used for unauthorized entry?
We did our first round of cleaning up this Saturday around the GPS and the path in Jubilee. We did do a bit of cleaning along the CPRI wall but really that seemed too much for us to handle by then and by ourselves. That'll need a bigger group and implements. It's smaller than the huge dump I wrote about earlier but bigger than a quick job. And the junk is truly bizarre. There were the inevitable bottles of booze, plastic cups, bottled water bottles and other food type stuff from the CPRI community centre. There were old clothes(!) and a blanket. There was glass tubing of different gauges(?). In the area of the wall near their pump-house, there were car seats, shoes, the usual stuff and ...two chairs. The place is due and ripe for a garbological study.

The two chairs I speak of
There will off course be more coming up soon. Feel free to mail us at the addresses below, to join or even to suggest things that need to be looked into.

The clean up

Vidur's bag of garbage
As you might have guessed from Joyshree's comment on the last post, something did happen. Abi sent a mail to many people who live in those quarters. One of them was Arati who decided the best way to begin tackling the mess, was to at least begin ourselves.

A whole bunch of people, faculty, their families and some students turned up there this Sunday at 10:00 and began cleaning up the place. I think I can safely say we made a dent. We hauled a lot of garbage away. The pile in the picture is just about half of it, the other half had already been safely transported to a nearby garbage bin. And the picture is short on a few people as well, some folks left before we took the pictures.

Group photo: not everyone's here (PS. Take a look at the sign)
After the clean-up there was a discussion on what could be done about this specific problem and about waste management in general. A few things got chalked out and various people have taken up responsibilities. I think it's got the ball rolling on many issues and I hope that the group can sustain momentum. In all, it was a really great afternoon.

I can't say enough to thank all the people who got down and dirty! Thanks! Especially Abi and Arati.


Full size images in the Picassa gallery here.

An appeal to IISc faculty in the new quarters

Garbage piles as far as the eye can see (click for larger image)
A little history first. Sometime last year, when the construction of the new faculty quarters had just started, someone, most likely the builders knocked down a piece of the Jubilee park back wall. Whether this was done with authorization or not, I don't know. This piece stayed knocked down. The construction workers began dumping debri and garbage there. With most of them living there full time you can imagine how much garbage that was. Most of it is still there.


Another view from the same place
A depression in the ground in this area of the park gets filled up with water. That year the rains were good and the pond that formed was quite large. It got used by the workers as a convenient shit spot. The place was a land-mine. Shit fortunately eventually degrades and so it doesn't seem to be there right now. I don't know what the arrangements are like for the workers working at the new buildings and I don't know if there's a risk of this recurring, here or elsewhere. I don't know what this place's situation is vis-a-vis the current construction. Not much I think, because now its largely abandoned.

The rough locations of these places on a satellite image from Google earth
The problem here right now is that the old garbage remains and seemingly is added to from the new faculty quarters. I don't know what garbage collection is like in that quarters, but my guess is it's spotty. At any rate, people tend to be lazy and garbage in India is often dumped at the closest available place . If there is a small garbage pile, it will soon be added to and there will be a large pile. Another pile will erupt when one overflows and so on the march of progress.

This was never your classical beautiful place, but it was not littered with plastic, shards of broken bottles, thermacol and a million polythene bags. It was not full of rats, never patrolled by a quite territorial pack of dogs who are understandably possessive of a rich pile of goodies. Its did not have the bones of many dead rats, eaten by someone, snakes most likely. And it most certainly did not teem, absolutely teem, with what to my overwhelmed ears sound like a million mosquitoes.

Aggregating caterpillars
My appeal to you is this, please have the place cleaned up and the wall sealed again. The place is a health hazard, to you, in more ways than one. To point each of them out again would be unsubtle and insulting to your intelligence. It is also a pretty nasty thing to do to a place if you respect and appreciate it. If there is to be any hope of this place getting any cleaner and not becoming a dumpyard, you will have to do something about it. There are few others who can and besides you have the strongest grounds for wanting something done.

The other images are also from the same area, from before, just to convince you that it's worth saving and to show what you might be saving.

Blue capped rock thrush
Directions from faculty apartments: Walk out of your gate, turn left, away from the Janata Bazaar and towards the end of that road. A little further down the mud road, you'll see a breached stone wall. Walk in and you'll be there.

Directions from the main Jubilee entrance: Walk in the gate, take the path directly to your right. The path is straight down and then you have to take a left. Keep an eye on the wire fence to your left, and walk in to the first breach in the fence. A little further in and you'll be there.

PS: Please those of you that read this blog pass this around

And finally: the Paradise flycatcher

Oh there are things to talk about

(Disclaimer: There is a genuine effort to keep intact as much as possible of the local ecology on the part of IISc during it's new construction/expansion. Change is inevitable, this post is merely about that inevitable consequence. Call it nostalgia and dismiss it.)

But right now I'm just a bit devoid of, shall I say, inspiration. It's usually very bad photography trying to chase an image of that one bird that has always eluded you by being quicker. You (or actually I in this case) get the perfectly sharp and well filled shot and you know it was silly and not worth it.

The elusive White browed bulbul

What I did not mind though was spending time in the Airfield, I never do. But now is particularly poignant, because come a few months there will be no Airfield. There will be something that is a shade of that beautiful place. It will be used more (by humans), disturbed more and already they are moving trees around (much like this).

Construction in new areas is necessary, I am told, and perhaps, maybe, not really, convinced. We need more land. Things need to go somewhere. It was inevitable, I had something (little) to do with the decisions on where it would happen. And yet it wrenches me a fair bit. I know, I know, IISc, is a research institute not a sanctuary / park(!). The priority is ...doo doo daah daah (cover my ears! run!). Call me a fool, I hate to see land use change especially from wild to otherwise. (Hum 'Big Yellow Taxi' to yourself.)

Moving trees
Anyhow, none of these dire predictions of mine may come to pass. And the Airfield now locked on all four sides by human habitation will still somehow remain the same. (All four sides? Go take a walk around it, you'll see what I mean. Past the faculty quarters over on the other side theres some clearing for something, my guess? A building!). Dogs won't be attracted to garbage, killing every thing in their path & fires won't be carelessly started. The Airfield won't turn into a drinking / goofing off / making out haunt littered with all our 'Fruity' tetra packs and carelessly tossed 'Fresh and honest coffee' paper cups and 'Ruffles Lays' and 'Will's navy cut' packs. And I won't be here to see it.


I really feel like a doom-sayer, like someone who is completely inimical to all progress and even sense. I don't want to be, this is merely my elegy for a well loved friend.





A surprisingly rare Red vented bulbul
















I will as compensation for that non-post ask you to read this very good post about layers. No no, not photoshop layers....layers in you image, layers of meaning or even layers of interest...layers to keep your viewers occupied.

Bricks not in a wall

Would you? I'd much rather just write a cheque...if I could that is!

"Call it a grand idea, good enough to beat all laws of appreciation.

The Indian Institute of Science is planning to sell bricks that once formed hostel blocks, for $1,000 (more than Rs 40,000) each. These bricks are not made of gold but of golden memories, the institute says.

The IISc is confident that its old boys, many of whom are now top researchers and scientists in India and abroad, will pay more than that to take home one of the 8,000 bricks up for sale as centenary souvenirs. "

Somehow that phrase 'old boys' catches my eye....Off course it was a boys hostel...and I imagine girls wouldn't want any part of it :)

From here, first seen here

Not good...not good at all...

" Two youths working as security guards at the IISC campus allegedly raped a 30-year-old married woman on Saturday night."

From the Deccan Herald.

For the most part I've found security guards extremely helpful. IISc is huge and well I wander around parts where there is no one within sight or earshot. Many students work late at night and leave when theres no one on the streets.

I've and no I know as ever had anything serious happen to them, mostly verbal abuse, one flashing. I've always thanked my lucky stars that I got to begin shooting in a relatively safe place before I head out into the big bad world (I suppose I'll have to at some point). This does not make me happy at all...

Some more of...(or less, depending on how you see it)

Water. I missed World water day on the 22nd. Fortunately Magnum didn't and has not one but two fabulous features on it. The second is particularly...refreshing.

The other is merely a reminder. If you still haven't done this, Go up to your roof today, or to whatever is the highest point you can get to in IISc at 6:00 PM, stay there till the light dies. Take your camera if you're so inclined. This thing won't last much longer. Tell people you think might enjoy it.

Finally click on the second image to see the full size image. I ran a quick crude image analysis on that picture, there are at least 1200 birds in it. That's probably a third to a fourth of the whole flock. Its lovely, really.

Schadenfreude and water

I'm considering becoming a lawn ornament. That way I can have a regular bath!

Someone wants to make a point and it's being made right now. Crisis has come very close on the heels of the warning. I'm amazed we have a warning system, not so much that it isn't an early warning one.

IISc has next to no water in the hostels, messes and the departments. They asked us to use fewer utensils this morning cause they didn't have any water to wash them with. Soon it will all be finger food. They were shouting at a kid for using drinking water to wash up, there was no water on the tap. We haven't had water in the hostel for two days, none in the lab now for one. Several depts haven't had any for days. IISc is considering (considering!) buying water I am told.

We've had four years of drought in Bangalore in my time here, between roughly 2001 and 2005 there were next to no rains. I lost the local population of my study animals to this drought, ask me I know. In those four years, there were maybe 10-15 days altogether that there was no water in my hostel, never a cut in the lab.

It just amazes me that theres a problem this year after its rained well two years in a row (Admittedly not in B'lore but elsewhere certainly and most of our water come from other catchments, I think, notably Kaveri which is kinda full right now). The problem is apparently at the 'corporation' level. So if they aren't sending us water right now, its either judicious preservation (yeah right!) or political need creation.

Whatever it is, it is fun, everyones already sprouting water bottles, hoarding. People are beginning look irritated, marginally dirtier and suddenly everyones interested in water. A few people are even giving the lawn waterers dirty looks. Maybe eventually someone will think of the very clever idea of hooking those perennially on lawn hoses (which get water from where? a borewell?) into underground sumps that go the rest of the institute and maybe it will tide us over a few days. If all else fails, see you on the lawns.

P.S. The block on blogspot and typepad seems to be here to stay. The guys at SERC never actually got back to me, which I suspect is code for 'Yes, it's blocked, whatcha gonna do about it?' Maybe I laughed too soon at my mates in NCBS and their incompatibility with Yahoo!

Access denied

I can't seem to access blogspot (or typepad) in IISc over some of last week and this one. So I hope those who read this site have feeds or know how to get around the block. Just google blogspot blocked and you'll get the cheats, posted when GOI decided to do the same.

I wonder whether it's the traffic watchers in SERC or the content watchers elsewhere....hmmm....Or off course technical glitches somewhere. IISc is not usually heavy-handed and blocks few things. Except off course images/files that have the words s*x, etc in them. Which is fun and games for reproductive biologists and people like me who work on cricket s*x! ('Long' distance foreplay actually.)

Water

They are all over campus, and get called by all kinds of names, herons, storks, cranes. Get it right people, they are Cattle egrets! And while they are closely related to those water-birds, they aren't actually that attached to water. Which is how they got to be on our relatively dry campus.

They get their names from the fact that they are seen following grazing cattle all over the countryside, picking up the insects kicked up from the grass. The downward bent head and intense stare, followed by a quick side to side bobbing of the head to judge distance by parallax, and then, wham, strike. A speared insect and a happy bird. But there are no cattle on campus and the birds needed to kick up their own prey.

Until they found a little trick. It probably began with wanting to cool off. They leave a little dish of water out for the birds in front of the library, I've seen them stand in it during the hot part of the day. Then I noticed the thing in the second picture. A bunch of them have learned to follow the gardener who waters the lawns everyday.

Maybe it was a cooling off instinct, and I was intrigued. So I watched them one afternoon, it was a cooler afternoon than many. They did follow the gardener around, not oblivious but not too wary of me. While they did seem to enjoy the water, the principal reason behind this activity seemed to be to pick up the insects the strong jet of water kicked up!

Now an aside and a rant, I watched them a while maybe an hour and half. The hose was running full blast the whole time, it was still running when I left. This lawn gets sprayed everyday. That night there was no water in my hostel, the previous day there was no water all day at my lab!

We got a mail a weekish ago asking us to conserve water and I believe this is a sensible thing to ask, we are very wasteful here. But the excesses are hardly happening in the labs, they are here. Spraying thousands of litres on a lawn in a year in which Bangalore has seen next to no rain!

I don't know how these things function, or actually I know. There is no regulation whatsoever of who does what! The nursery knows not or cares not of water shortages and no one will tell them. Its my pet peeve, this water business. A sump overflowed for three days before the same water dept turned up to fix it, I called thrice! Ah and calling! The folks who take civil/electrical complaints in this place will take complaints only in person! You can't email them or even call them. So you've to leave your lab during working hours and make a trip to their office to report a dripping tap which will maybe kinda get fixed. And working hours is very open you know, they turn up at 10:30, leave for coffee, lunch till two...indian govt office! So guess how many people actually report leaking taps? And then theres the leaking overheads, don't get me started...

So yes, I'll conserve water and for every drop I save, theres a tanker flowing down the drain! Here's a bit from Vikram Seth's 'The Elephant and the Tragopan' possibly based on the agitation against dams in Manipur and Nagaland. " Your pipes cry out for renovation./ Your storage tanks corrode and leak;/ The valves are loose, the washers weak./ I've seen the water gushing out/ From every reservoir and spout./ Repair them it will cost far less/ Than driving us to homelessness."

Like that story this one doesn't have an end, yet.

Recovering

Winter is the season of decline and decay. The year ends, the days die earlier everyday. Trees shed their leaves, leaving little but bare bones, the grass dries leaving fuel for fires and seed to prick your skin while walking among them. The cold weather drives the cold-blooded creatures underground, the insects and snakes are few and sluggardly, basking, collecting the suns energy before they melt again into the tall grass I must tramp through.

And yet, here, it is the season of recovery. While we wait, for the year must turn around and the days get warmer longer. The flowers remind us of summer and spring although the temperature speaks otherwise.

The migrants that come year after year keep us company in our waiting in their exile from their homes tell a story of their own. IISc has lost many bird species over the years. Due to habitat loss and the changing congealing concrete matrix in which this green space sits. As the favoured spaces disappear so do the birds they attracted, the marshes cost us many a species and the shrinking open space of the airfield and dump some more. Yet some return, some after long hiatuses, their absences deeply felt.

I saw a Hoopoe here last year for the first time in 6 years and it returned again this year to afford me a go at an image. And a Brown shrike which was a first on the campus for me. Both birds were listed as locally extinct. A few regular sightings and we can return them to our lists of those that have returned. With a little luck and a little foresight the returns can be prodigal.

Fire stomping

After a long not very satisfying shoot (the highlight was a Hoopoe sighting) at the airfield, a group of kids ran out of the close-by colony asking to see the snake I was carrying. I wasn't, off course, and told them so. They carried on then with their games, whizzing around the airfield on little bikes. As I got ready to leave, some them started yelling 'fire, fire' and indeed there was one. Someone had carelessly thrown a cigarette. They put out this fire, along with the sole security guard there, using leafy branches, a little piss, water and their little feet. Just as they put one out another smaller one broke out, and threatened to be worse than the first. It was put out post haste.

They told me of a huge fire that had raged here some years ago threatening their houses. Their methods of fire control had proved ineffective and eventually fire engines had been called in. This is the second very large fire thats happened here (that I know of) in the last couple of years. There are always a few small ones, quickly put out by security guards or someone nearby. I helped put out the one in the second picture along with 10-15 guards. Its a scary experience, little ones start from nowhere just under your feet. The smoke is suffocating and your face and eyebrows get singed.

Fire is probably a part of the local ecology and there might be some seeds that need it to germinate. This grassland is a tinderbox in the dry season, waiting for the smallest spark. In the long run, it's going to be a serious hazard. Many of the new buildings that IISc is planning are going to be built around this area. I can just imagine the damage if a serious fire takes root. A glass bottle thrown carelessly concentrating the suns energy on dry fuel, a cigarette carelessly chucked into dry grass. We are so used to doing it in these parts of campus, I can't expect people in IISc will suddenly become careful when they get there. I hope there will be fire management systems in place when they do move. And walls, to keep the fools and their wastes in, and away from the airfield. At least, a designated smoking area (people will smoke, theres no way around it), with those huge ashtrays that used to be seen in old cinemas. And a waste disposal plan that doesn't involve chucking chemical bottles over the wall/fence. And off course plenty of hoses and fire fighting equipment and sprinklers...

Off course, the way IISc deals with trouble usually is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I expect that the whole area will be bull-dozed and shorn to nothing (after the first fire, never before) and we will have lost a unique little ecological system. Or maybe not, maybe someone will think of it, maybe safeguards will be designed? And people will be able to peer out of their high windows over rolling grasslands and hear sweet sweet sweet.

(9th Feb '07: This post has nothing to do with the fire that occurred at MCBL last night. The two places are quite far apart.)