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From today's featured article

Abberton Reservoir is a pumped storage freshwater reservoir in England near the Essex coast, with an area of 700 hectares (1,700 acres). Most of its water is pumped in from the River Stour. Constructed between 1935 and 1939, it is currently owned by Essex and Suffolk Water, and lies 6 km (4 mi) south-west of Colchester. In World War II, the reservoir was mined to deter invading seaplanes, and it was used by the RAF's No. 617 Squadron ("The Dam Busters") to practise for the bombing of the German dams in the Ruhr. A project to increase the reservoir's capacity to 41,000 megalitres (9.0×10⁹ imperial gallons) was completed in 2013, along with a new link to transfer water from Norfolk's River Ouse to the Stour. The reservoir is important for its breeding cormorants, wintering and moulting waterfowl, and migrating birds. It is an internationally important wetland, designated as a Ramsar site, SSSI and SPA and listed in A Nature Conservation Review. A small part of the site is managed by the Essex Wildlife Trust. (Full article...)

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Miguelina Acosta Cárdenas

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In the news

Flooding in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania

Hurricane Ida leaves at least 70 people dead and causes flooding (pictured) in the Gulf Coast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States, leading to widespread power outages.
Amid evacuations from Afghanistan, a suicide bombing kills at least 182 people at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
The Summer Paralympics are held in Tokyo, Japan.

On this day

September 5

Sam Houston

917 – Liu Yan declared himself emperor, establishing the state of Southern Han at his capital of Panyu (present-day Guangzhou) in southern China.
1697 – Nine Years' War: A French warship captured York Factory, a trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company in present-day Manitoba, Canada.
1836 – Sam Houston (pictured) became the first popularly elected president of the Republic of Texas.
1905 – Under the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, the Russo-Japanese War officially ended with the signing of a treaty at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire.
1943 – World War II: American and Australian airborne forces landed at Nadzab as part of the New Guinea campaign against Japan.

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (b. 1817)
Sarah Emma Edmonds (d. 1898)
Freddie Mercury (b. 1946)

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Today's featured picture

The orange-headed thrush (Geokichla citrina) is a species of bird in the thrush family, Turdidae. About 225 mm (9 in) in length, it is common in well-wooded areas of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, but is a shy, secretive bird, usually occurring alone or in pairs. It mainly feeds on the ground in dense undergrowth, and is most active at dawn and dusk, probing the leaf litter for insects and their larvae, spiders, other invertebrates and fruit. This male orange-headed thrush, of the subspecies G. c. innotata, was photographed in Khao Yai National Park in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand.

Photograph credit: John Harrison

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