A few favourites from 2019

Another year almost over and time to look back.  I have chosen a few of my favourite photos from the last 12 months. You won't be surprised to see foxes, sparrowhawks and otters amongst them.  Let's hope 2020 provides a lot of new photo opportunities.

Merry Christmas

OtterCam in December - part II

Here is a quick follow-up to yesterday's post.  When I got to the sluice gate this morning there were new tracks with a tail drag so I knew an otter had been past in the night and hoped the cameras had seen it.  You can see that the otter's feet slip on the slimy surface so it doesn't make classical paw prints.

The otter had passed very close to one camera so all there was was a glimpse of its tail.  The other one was much better.

Over seven hours later it went back the other way.

The camera can't "see" the otter before it arrives and takes about 0.5s to switch on and start recording so the video clip is very short.  The otter has obviously seen the infrared light from the cameras as well so it didn't hang around.

The close-focus adapter works well so I have also made a slow motion version so you can see how it moves.

This otter was alone and has no obvious marks so I don't know which individual it is.  I'll keep monitoring and hope to see the pups again, something I haven't done since I saw the family together in daylight last month.

OtterCam in December - part I

I had two cameras set near the edge of the lake on three consecutive weekends but only picked up one recording of an otter.  This was the mother looking around at 0400.  By that time the moorhen and the rats had eaten the sardines and the battery on the auxiliary infrared LED had run flat.  And the camera lens was slightly misted up.  On the video the mother sniffed around and returned, staying in shot only briefly.

A couple of weeks ago I also had a camera set up in the pipeline for severals days without any recordings being triggered.  Despite that, at least one otter was using the pipe, as shown by fresh tracks on the sluice gate, possibly heading in both directions. The water is still fairly deep in the pipe so the otter would have to swim rather than walk through.  A wet otter in cold water has very little heat signature and may not be enough to trigger the PIR sensor on the camera, especially if it was going away from the camera.

Yesterday I saw more tracks, very probably of more than one animal (the tracks don't last very long in the water so it probably wasn't just one over several nights).

So last night I set two cameras balanced on bricks in the water between the sluice gate (which is still in a "down" position) and the entrance to the pipe, hoping that the otters wouldn't knock them into the water.

When I checked this morning there were no fresh tracks so I wasn't surprised that the cameras hadn't picked anything up.  I'll set them up again tonight and keep trying.  If anything turns up I'll post it here.

Kingfisher

I met a kingfisher recently while I was sitting hoping to see an otter.  This is a first year female, young as shown by the dark feet and female with an orange lower mandible.  She didn't stay long but she brightened up my day.

SparrowhawkCam

I haven't seen much of the sparrowhawks recently but they continue to visit the garden nearly every day.  I check the perch when I walk past the window but to get a better idea of what they are up to I have been using a trail camera to keep an eye on them.

The more frequent visitor is the adult bird.  The top photo is a composite of three processed and cropped images. Below is an unprocessed screen grab from the video.  I think the quality is OK although the highlights are a bit blown.

The videos show that he usually stays only for a minute or two.  I am not sure whether he flies off after looking around and deciding it isn't worth staying or because he launches an attack and catches something.  It may also be because the weather has been so windy recently that he has difficulty keeping his balance, as you can see on this video.  (As a measure of how slow my BT broadband is, uploading this one clip to YouTube took over an hour!)  

The adult bird doesn't usually pay much attention to the birds hiding in the gooseberry bushes but he did this time and dived down in attack.  He didn't return to the perch so perhaps he caught something - if he did so all the remaining feathers had blown away before I got home.

All the pictures above were recorded with a Browning camera (with the Poundland close-focus adapter!).  At one point both Brownings were deployed elsewhere, looking for otters, so I used the Wingscapes BirdCam Pro for a while.  It has an adjustable pre-set focus but it isn't accurately calibrated.  It also seems to have a fairly low (non-adjustable) shutter speed for still photos so for both reasons the first time I set it up the bird was blurred, but at least the photo was good enough to confirm a visit from the juvenile bird. 

This camera uses white light LEDs for video rather than infrared so it records colour video but it tends to switch on the light as soon as the natural light level is a bit low.  Unfortunately it then produces overexposed pictures with exaggerated vibrance and saturation which are impossible to correct in post-processing.  As I found last winter, the sparrowhawks take absolutely no notice of the lights coming on.  So far I can't find any way of adjusting the strength of the lights, or any way of switching them off.  Here is a recording of the adult bird, a bit too close and again on a windy day.  You can see the lower image quality but he doesn't mind the lights.

And here is the juvenile the next day, very over-exposed with blown out highlights.

A couple of days ago the adult bird was here and the Browning camera shows he was jumping onto the top of the hedge to get a view from there.  Again the highlights are blown out so I can't correct the overexposure on the frame grabs or on the video.  I think this is just a result of having a darker background and automatic exposure control with no override but it is less of a problem with the Browning than with the Wingscapes camera.

This video is a composite of three consecutive recordings a few minutes apart.  The camera doesn't see him arrive because it doesn't start until triggered and there is then a 0.5s reaction time.  You can hear the panic in the alarm calls of the small birds in the gooseberry bushes.

Yesterday it was the turn of the juvenile.  You can see he takes more interest in the besieged birds in the gooseberries, although his brief attack was unsuccessful.  He also likes the view from the top of the hedge.

It looks as though both birds will grace the garden with their presence throughout the winter. I am looking forward to it more than all the small birds in the garden.

Time for a nap

At this time of year most of our local grey seals are on the Farne Islands.  They go there for the females to give birth in November and for the bulls to establish a territory on the beach and recruit a harem.  Last year over 2,700 pups were born and the grey seal population was almost 10,000.

Grey seals don't breed until they are at least four years old so some of the younger adults don't trouble to go to the Farnes.  A few stay around St Mary's Island at Whitley Bay and last weekend seven were hauled out at low tide for a spot of sunbathing (in a temperature of 3℃).  In fact they usually don't haul out but swim to the rocks at high tide and stay there as the water recedes, refloating on the next high tide.  I walked over to the island (which isn't an island at low tide) to see them.  There were six females and one bull, apparently asleep most of the time.  This is the bull.

This is a female.  Colours vary greatly in "grey" seals.

This photo shows the size difference between male and female.  Bulls weigh 170-310kg while females are 100-190kg.

If they were sleeping it was a fairly fitful sleep as there was a lot of yawning, stretching and scratching going on.

Although grey seals are gregarious they aren't very sociable and like to keep a space around them.  One female got a bit close to the bull which led to a bit of snarling.

One of the females had injuries on her chest and flipper, possibly from sharp rocks or fishing gear.

Many of them had scars.

Watching them is great fun and they often seem to produce almost human gestures and expressions.

There were two more seals in the water.  One of them made an attempt to get out, trying to use the waves to heave itself up onto the rocks but after a few minutes it gave up and returned to the sea.

On the way back to the car I saw a fox, also asleep.  Foxes only live in dens or earths when the vixens are raising cubs and for the rest of the time they sleep when and where they can.  This one was sunbathing in a very sheltered spot, only occasionally opening an eye or looking up when it heard a dog bark.