It’s hard to tell whether Mitts is loving or loathing the Phantom of the Opera.
Trailcam
Another quiet couple of days. Good to see the wren and a thrush. A couple of female pheasants stirring up the leaves, and a magpie attacks an apple. And squirrels of course. There are always squirrels.
Duolingo Crisis
They both seem ok to me.
You shall not pass
Business as usual on the trailcam
19 Nov 2020 to 01 Dec 2020
A new spot for the trailcam. I decided to see how much it would see on the bird feeders. It took a few attempts as it’s quite hard to find a decent mount point, that’s stable and doesn’t blow around in the wind. It’s been an interesting diversion but on the whole not as interesting as I thought. Focus is problematic as the camera often wants to focus on the distance as the birds are two small. Squirrels seem ok!
Another complication was noticeable if the camera was tilted up a little. I think condensation or water is more likely to cover the lens when it’s angled upwards and this messes up the picture quality.
That aside, not a lot of surprises. Nice if you like squirrels. Grey ones. The occasional magpie, woodpecker and sometimes a nice flurry of tree sparrows. But on the whole no drama.
A few quiet trailcam days
I think I’ll move it tomorrow. Nothing much of interest in its current spot: Squirrel Corner. Squirrels, magpies, a brief glimpse of a wren, more squirrels, and Mr and Mrs Pheasant.
Trailcam: 28 Sep to 15 Oct
A new spot. And a quiet one. This is a newly cleared area where I used to dump stuff for shredding. It’s all shredded now and I thought it would be a popular nocturnal thoroughfare. It doesn’t seem to be used much at all. The odd squirrel and magpie. The camera is tilted a little to high, so I’ll tilt that down a bit and perhaps put a bit of food down.
Birdwatching
It takes a lot to distract Willow when he’s watching the birds.
Some posts have ‘Continue Reading …’
They shouldn’t though. I couldn’t figure it out at all. Why should posts, mostly from the older pages, suddenly start showing the Continue Reading link. Here’s an example:
There are lots of posts like this. All in the later pages. I’ve checked the theme settings and it’s fine. The next obvious thing was the blocks or raw HTML itself to see if there was some sneakily embedded tag that was causing mischief. Nope. All looks fine.
I finally found the problem. White space in the excerpt widget. Easily resolved by deleting it. But why? How has this happened? And it looks like it’s always the same amount of whitespace. In the screenshot below you can see the highlighted whitespace just before deletion.
It’s annoying, and what’s also annoying, is whether it’s going to happen again. I’m wondering whether a recent update caused this but I can’t think why it should.
By copying the whitespace and pasting it into vi, then saving and running od on it I get:
dougie@office:~$ od -c temp 0000000 \n \t \t \t \t \t \t \n 0000010
I’m not sure how meaningful that is, but if it’s accurate it looks like that, for whatever reason, lots of my posts have acquired a newline, 6 tabs, and a newline. I wonder why.
A week on the trailcam
12 to 21 Aug 2020
This new spot for the trailcam is proving to be quite interesting. Despite being just a few metres from the house and close to the feeders it’s just out of view, and it’s surprising how much wanders by that I normally miss.
Quite a lot of scraggily looking birds. I’m not sure if they’re in moult, or juvinile birds, or both. There’s also quite a lot of the greater spotted woodpecker drinking, both adult and juvenile. I think it’s the same juvenile each time. It has quite a distinctive red dot on the right-hand-side of the nape of its neck, but it’s not always easy to see, and I suspect there may be more than one juvenile around.
Hedgehogs and mice appear in the dead of night.
The water is a huge hit. Birds that I don’t often associate with drinking from the ground level seem quite content to spend a bit of time there. Chaffinches, robins, blue tits, lots of long-tailed tits, and I’m pretty sure there’s a treecreeper that makes a brief appearance. The water depth may be a little too uncertain for them but a few of the bigger birds certainly have a dip. The greater-spotted woodpecker having a good bath at 13:10 is, I’m fairly certain, not the same juvenile that appears earlier.
There’s often a bit of background action too on the feeders, mostly Jackdaws and woodpeckers.