Seen in a new light

Most nights I leave the foxes to it but occasionally I take a few photos.  For these I left out a rechargeable portable LED work light (to the fox's right as we look) as well as the new security light and the fox was quite happy.

The foxes don't come to see me but come for the food.  If they are good I give them some dog food which vanishes quickly.

Most nights they have peanuts which they are quite happy with.

This one appears to be looking very fierce but in fact is chewing peanuts while absent-mindedly looking at the light.

However much they are enjoying the food the foxes are constantly on the look out for rivals.

One year on

The past few days have been amazingly warm across the country, even up here in the North East.  Here are a couple of photos from today when the weather feels more like late May than late February.

Here is a photo from exactly a year ago.

Last year's weather was pretty crazy overall, with a cold winter, wet spring, hot summer and dry autumn.  The first map shows 2018 winter temperature; blue = colder then average.

This is 2018 spring rainfall; blue = more than average.

This is 2018 summer temperature; red = warmer than average.

This is 2018 summer rainfall; brown = less than average.

And this is 2018 autumn temperature; red = warmer than average.

And this is 2018 autumn rainfall; brown = less than average.

Maybe we'll be in for another crazy year this year as well.  It has certainly started off like that.

OtterCam returns

It is over two years since I went after otters with the trail cameras.  This time I chose a new location where I had seen promising-looking trails leading out of the water.  I got videos of an otter first time but the camera lenses were all fogged up.  The same happened the second night and this clip is a "what might have been" if only it was clear.

Third time lucky, on a breezy night, the lenses stayed clear and both cameras recorded several good videos.  Here are a couple of examples.

On the third night the otter(s) visited at 1930, 2140, 0210 and 0530.  I watched all the clips several times and couldn't decide whether it was all the same animal or more than one.  Then on the fourth night there was clear evidence of three - a mother and two pups.  In this clip one of the pups is calling to the mother who is just out of shot on the left.

Here are all three.  I think it is mother on the bank, one pup in the water and if you watch carefully the second one swims across in the background.  Either that or it is an alligator!  The camera will only record 20s at a time at night and then takes a 3-4s break while it saves the result to the card.  I have merged three clips here but the joins are quite noticeable.

Here is another clip showing two otters getting out of the water seconds apart.

As you can see below, the frame grabs from the infrared videos have been less successful than with the foxes in the garden, probably because the cameras are performing right at their limit.

So far two nights with the colour flash camera have been disappointing.  The first time the positioning wasn't quite right.

The second time I had left grass in the way.

This camera was in last night and will be tonight so I hope there will be more images to come.

Early season pollinators

While watching the honey bees foraging on the snowdrops and looking out for my first bumblebee the other day I noticed several hoverflies on the flowers as well.  With the help of the kind folks at the UK Hoverflies Facebook page they have been identified.  This is Eristalis tenax ♀, a female drone fly.  It is so called because it resembles a drone, a male honey bee.  This might be Batesian mimicry but it seems odd that a female fly would disguise itself as a male honey bee (which doesn't have a sting).  Perhaps it is just coincidence that it looks like a drone.

This one is a female Episyrphus balteatus, the marmalade hoverfly, presumably named for its colour.

The third one caused some difficulty but was identified as Syrphus torvus, also known as the hairy-eyed syrphus.

I hope I don't get too interested in hoverflies as there are nearly 300 UK species, although it will be good to see which ones turn up in the garden.

Sparrowhawk news

The sparrowhawk continues to visit the garden every day.  Yesterday he arrived at sunrise and was here until sunset. The light was a little better so I took a few portraits.

Life is very marginal for a bird like this.  He spends all day every day trying to get enough to eat.  And he has been all on his own since soon after fledging so he has to work it out for himself.  If he gets an injury or doesn't make enough kills he will die of starvation, as 80% of young sparrowhawks do.  It has been interesting to watch his change of tactics as the weeks have gone by.  He now rarely sits on the "sparrowhawk perch" and rarely sits under the gooseberry bushes, both tactics that presumably weren't working.

He does still sometimes sit on top of the feeder and dive around the gooseberries, trying to flush out any small birds trapped there.

Mostly he now likes to sit on top of the compost bins across the other side of the kitchen garden.  This makes it very difficult for photos as it is a very oblique view through the double glazing and he is behind the blackcurrants.  But it probably gives more cover for ambush and is more sheltered from the recent windy weather.  It must be working for him because he was back again before 8.00 this morning.

One recent rainy day was very miserable.  He was all over the garden trying to make a kill but I don't think he did that day.  I expect he went hungry.

The sparrowhawk is now having a significant effect on the behaviour of the other birds in the garden.  They still use the feeders when he is away or on the other side of the house but are constantly on edge.  Most noticeably I have only once seen a tree sparrow this year, whereas normally they would be sitting on the top of every nest box, chirruping to proclaim ownership.  They obviously know why he is called a sparrowhawk.  I hope they return in time to nest when he moves on.

First bumblebee

The weather has been amazingly mild for mid February and the insects have been taking advantage.  Yesterday I saw my first bumblebee of the year in the garden, a newly emerged queen buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris.  She was fuelling up on clematis cirrhosa.  

I haven't recorded the precise date of the first bumblebee in my garden in previous years but I am sure this is very early.  I checked with my garden records in the BTO Garden BirdWatch, which also records insects and other fauna. My first record of a bumblebee there was in week 12 in 2016, in week 11 in 2017, in week 15 in 2018 ( a very cold spring).  We are now in week 7 so this is 4-8 weeks earlier than the last three years.  What is also amazing is that new sightings of bumblebees have only appeared on the UK Bees, Wasps and Ants Facebook page in the last three days from the south of England.  I would normally expect us to be a few weeks behind up here.

The forecast looks set fair for the next couple of weeks so I expect the bumblebees will make the most of it.  Let's hope the weather doesn't catch them out.

The early days of bird photography

I was recently given this little book by my friends Viv & David.  It is Birds in the Garden: Studies with a Camera, written by Granville Sharpe and published in 1902.

Much of the book is a description of the birds and the way they live but what interested me most was the technique of taking the photos.  The camera used was "an ordinary half-plate camera" with "a good long-focus lens".  The camera was wrapped in several layers of material to reduce the noise of the focal plane shutter.  The long pneumatic shutter release went into the house through the open window where the photographer was hiding behind a blind.  The photogenic perch for the bird was fixed to the back of a chair and the food to attract the bird was placed on a box on the seat of the chair.  Because the photos were monochrome a white back ground was positioned so the bird would stand out.  All that remained was for the photographer to wait until the bird was sitting still on the perch and then to trigger the shutter.  No details are given of shutter speed but it must have been low - if the bird moved because of the sound of the shutter then the photo would be blurred.  And of course the camera could only take one picture before the photographer had to come out, unwrap the camera, and change the plate.  Here is the set up.

The birds chosen for inclusion in the book were blue tit, great tit, coal tit, marsh tit, spotted flycatcher, pied flycatcher, robin, chaffinch and willow wren (willow warbler), at least four of which certainly wouldn't be in the top nine these days. The author does concede that pied flycatchers were not common.  I suspect he chose these nine birds because they were the ones he had good photos of.  The book contains over 100 photographs and eight photogravures.  I had to look it up but Wikipedia says photogravure is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.  The photogravures are certainly better quality illustrations.

This fascinating book offers an interesting comparison to the way we take photos of garden bird these days, with auto focus, automatic exposure control and up to 10 frames per second.  Some things, though, are much the same after more than 100 years.