I thought it’d be easier this evening. I wore drabbier clothes, and poured flatter beer. I draped the cover over the mini-greenhouse and huddled against its backdrop. I practically disappeared.
But the alarm calls of the blue tits where very insistent tonight and they were not for feeding. Time after time I heard the chicks calling for food and observed the adults doing a bodyswerve. Then Rosie, my big fat black cat came along and decided to curl up at my feet, and things were not looking good.
I saw both adults, and witnessed one getting so fed-up at the abortive attempts at returning to the nest that it ate the supper itself (quite tasty it looked too).
Guilt gained the high ground, and I decided to call it a night. I was perplexed that the birds would be more spooked tonight, when, if anything, I was drabber and more familiar. I was also interested to see both adults together. How do they manage to produce the alarm calls with their mouths full? Then as I lost interest in them, they lost interest in me, and suddenly decided I was no threat.
The poor old magpie gets a bad press. The truth is, all birds will do whatever needs to be done to ensure survival. Some methods are more overt than others. Some cute, some not so cute. Whatever your survival mechanism, if it involves attempting to raid the nests of (cute) blue tits, then your PR is going to be dented.
I’ve been registered on the BTO Nestbox challenge for years and some years I’m more thorough than others. One nestbox is used year after year by blue tits. Blue South as it’s registered with the BTO, perhaps should be renamed Old Faithfull as it never fails to get used. There’s a webcam that sometimes points in the general direction but it’s rather a hit or miss affair.
But sitting quietly outside, with beer in one hand, and camera in the other, I am soon rewarded …
He (she?) is nervous at first, as he knows I’m sitting there. For a few minutes I was feeling guilty as I could hear the chicks crying for food inside and the adult made a few approaches then flew away again with a series of loud alarm calls. In previous years they’ve soon accepted my presence. When the adult returned for the 3rd time I decided if he spooked out again I’d leave the scene. He didn’t and I managed to get a few nice photos in the fading light.
Meanwhile on the bird table I could see a Jay munching through the dish of the day. Shy birds, I’ve seen them around, but usually fleetingly, and easily spooked. They must be hungry as I managed to get quite close and it seemed remarkably unperturbed. I’m pretty sure it knew I was there as my fieldcraft is not something that would impress Ray Mears.
In a 2009 blog post called Scratch and Sniff Botany the botanist Phil Gates writes about Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) and how when you crush the leaves they smell like germolene. This is what it looks like:
Meadowsweet has distinctive red stems and made a mental note to crush a few leaves the next time I came across some. I found some and it smelled nothing like germolene. Or so I thought. What I thought I’d found was baby meadowsweet, but clearly it’s something else entirely. Looking at it closely I can see it clearly looks nothing like meadowsweet. This is what I was crushing:
Apart from a passing resemblance they look nothing like each other. I’m not sure what it is but it might be the rather obviously named Silverweed (Potentilla anserina). I think I’ll just wait until the flowers come out.
Well that was a brief moment of unease. Still new to the whole wordpress world I logged on to see a message advising me to upgrade to 3.1.3 and reminding me to backup before proceeding. Yeah, whatever. I’d only just started so hadn’t that much to backup. Plus I was a bit lazy.
I could download 3.1.3 myself or get wordpress to DIY. I chose the latter and all looked well until I tried to login again and:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
That brought me down to earth with a bump and I consulted the University of Google on the message. Lots of references to .htaccess files and problems with add-ons, all of which sounded like hard work. Looking for an easy fix I had a look at my error logs and found lots of Premature end of Script errors and references to various .php files. I had a déjà vu moment and remembered the original tips I’d read on this blog when I was originally struggling with installing wordpress in the first place. Sure enough, same old same old.
I have a webcam pointing at the Blue Tit nest box but unfortunately it gets so much movement ‘noise’ that I end up with skipfuls of images and it’s hard to sort out the good ones and all sorts of empty images get uploaded automatically to my flickr photostream. There’s always the conventional approach of … Continue reading “youngsters at the feeders”
I have a webcam pointing at the Blue Tit nest box but unfortunately it gets so much movement ‘noise’ that I end up with skipfuls of images and it’s hard to sort out the good ones and all sorts of empty images get uploaded automatically to my flickr photostream.
There’s always the conventional approach of pointing a real camera at the birds and pressing the button.
This youngster has landed on top of the fat feeders and is screaming at the adult nearby to come and feed him. The adult, however, is older and wiser, and has spotted me nearby and is keeping a wary eye on me.
I do like this picture and its drama with the youngster screeching for attention. But there’s always something nice about getting a photo of a bird on a natural perch. Here’s the same bird again balancing on a bit of hazel:
Not as excited this time but a more natural backdrop, which I like.
And every year we get young sparrows that are always good to see. I don’t know where they’re nesting because it’s certainly not the expensive roof terrace that I put up for them years ago and has been ignored every year.
Still loads of noise. Time for an extreme mask file: That’s just a small area around the nest-box entrance. But still an awful lot of images I wonder if motion is actually using the mask file. Presumably there’s a debug option I can switch on …
Still loads of noise. Time for an extreme mask file:
That’s just a small area around the nest-box entrance. But still an awful lot of images
I wonder if motion is actually using the mask file. Presumably there’s a debug option I can switch on …
The tweaks don’t seem to be having much effect. Even with the lightswitch option set to 80, and the smart_mask_speed set to 10, it’s still pretty wild and windy out there. # Dynamically create a mask file during operation (default: 0) # Adjust speed of mask changes from 0 (off) to 10 (fast) smart_mask_speed 10 … Continue reading “Mask files, sizes, and motion.conf tweaks”
The tweaks don’t seem to be having much effect. Even with the lightswitch option set to 80, and the smart_mask_speed set to 10, it’s still pretty wild and windy out there.
# Dynamically create a mask file during operation (default: 0)
# Adjust speed of mask changes from 0 (off) to 10 (fast)
smart_mask_speed 10
# Ignore sudden massive light intensity changes given as a percentage of the picture
# area that changed intensity. Valid range: 0 - 100 , default: 0 = disabled
lightswitch 80
So it has to be the mask file. The way the mask file works is by using an identically sized image as the webcam and making all areas to be monitored white, and all not to be monitored black. Or is it the other way around? I did this using the gimp and after a couple of false starts it turned out to be pretty easy. Here’s my rough notes:
Make a copy of an existing webcam image to use as the template. This way the dimensions of the image will be correct
Use the Free Select Tool (it looks like the laso) to select an area that you want to be monitored for movement.
Select Bucket Fill. Under the section for Affected Area make sure it’s ticked for Fill Whole Selection. Make sure your foreground colour is white (I kept getting this wrong. It doesn’t matter. Just click on the arrows to reverse foreground/background and do it again).
Click on the area to be filled and it should fill with white.
For the background, go to Select -> Invert, then swap your foreground and background colours. Click on the area you want to be black
You need to save this as a ‘pgm’ file. For some reason a pgm file is huge compared to a jpeg, e.g.
Hmmmm, there are a few options in the motion.conf file I haven’t seen before. Or at least, that I can’t recall having seeing before. These look promising: # Dynamically create a mask file during operation (default: 0) # Adjust speed of mask changes from 0 (off) to 10 (fast) smart_mask_speed 0 # Ignore sudden massive … Continue reading “motion.conf options”
Hmmmm, there are a few options in the motion.conf file I haven’t seen before. Or at least, that I can’t recall having seeing before. These look promising:
# Dynamically create a mask file during operation (default: 0)
# Adjust speed of mask changes from 0 (off) to 10 (fast)
smart_mask_speed 0
# Ignore sudden massive light intensity changes given as a percentage of the picture
# area that changed intensity. Valid range: 0 - 100 , default: 0 = disabled
lightswitch 0
The trouble with creating a mask file is that it assumes the camera stays fixed in the same position, and that’s pretty unlikely. So I’ll try tweaking these settings and see what happens. Far less effort. Currently running at about 1000 images an hour. Let’s see if I can get that down a bit …
I frequently drive through Brancepeth on my way to Low Barns and recently I’ve been watching with fascination the unfolding drama of this bracket fungus. This is Dryad’s Saddle (Polyporus squamosus), also known as Pheasant’s Back Mushroom, presumably due to the distinctive surface of the top of the fungus that you can’t see in this photo. It’s fruiting from a pruning wound on a sycamore tree (Acer pseudoplatanus) next to the main road in Brancepeth.
Dryad’s Saddle on a Sycamore
I’m passing this tree and fungus almost daily and watching with wonder to see if it’s just going to get bigger and bigger. Who knows, one morning I may drive by and discover it’s gone. Disappearing as suddenly and mysteriously as it arrived.
