Ancient Sheep Circle

I missed some beautiful dawn light first thing by sleeping in a bit, but I did sneak a cycle out to Burnsall this morning to enjoy a rare little window of stillness and dryness! Just after I got back the rain arrived and the strong winds are set to return tomorrow. Rather spoiled for choice today between three shots taken from exactly the same spot. I've been a bit boring in a way and chosen the one that continues the current mood. I'm seeing skeletal tress wherever I look at the moment and I find them mesmerisingly beautiful. I always have done. I'm really enjoying trying to capture that beauty with the camera. I'm finding it's not that easy!

It was interesting to have three very different pictures all taken while standing at the same spot. I've put the other two on my blipfolio as Branches and Floppy Ear. Did I make the right choice? And a second question for the naturalists out there: is it possible to determine the species of a tree merely from its shape? If you look at the link to 'Branches', does the pattern of the bark identify the tree in any way?

The response to yesterday's straw poll has been fantastic. Thank you all so much for engaging with this so enthusiastically. All the comments make great reading. As I think everyone would have expected, A was the very clear winner. As I go to press, so to speak (although the lines are still open), the results are as follows (slightly changing the categories in the light of the results):

1. A) 40 votes: directly by word of mouth from friend or family
2. B) 10 votes: by chance, mainly through stumbling across a link on another web page
3. D) 6 votes: by reading a newspaper article about blip
4. E) 4 votes: via a Twitter feed
5. F) 0 votes: through searching for a site such as blip

Drmackem made the suggestion that blip spreads a bit like infectious disease, and that analogy is a good one on a number of different levels. We get infected with the bug and inevitably pass it on to our friends and 'nearest and dearest'. It would make for a fascinating epidemiological study.

Some wonderful blip relationships have emerged. In the blip family tree your mother can be your daughter and your grandson can be a cousin. The possibilities (and realities) are endless. Blip has spawned quite a lot of unique words like blipmeet, blipnic, blipmate etc., but I think a few new ones have now been coined. Most of us it seems have a blipmother or blipfather, and we subsequently breed our own blipsons and blipdaughters. Shotlandka has labelled herself a blipisland as she stumbled across blip by chance and has yet to pass the bug on - although I'm sure no one will ever be an island here for long. Perhaps we should coin those without a blipmother or blipfather a bliporphan! It's been a lot of fun to play with these ideas. Once again, thanks so much for contributing.