Was it Henry or Honey

... or something else?  At bedtime three nights ago Bobby was dashing round the garden following a scent he had picked up. Nothing was to be seen and I assumed it had been an unwelcome four legged furry nocturnal visitor. Nothing was noticed the following night. Last night at bedtime Bobby made a dash across the lawn to the ground feeder. At first I couldn't make out anything but as my eyes became accustomed to the torchlight I made out the unmistakable shape of a large Hedgehog. Needless to say I rushed in to grab a camera but by the time I returned it had vanished.

To say the least I was surprised to see a Hedgehog at this time of year, especially as temperatures have been around 3C for nearly a week. They do occasionally wake from hibernation on warm days. I wonder whether Bobby had disturbed it. There have been occasions when I have wondered if something was nesting under one of my hedges as every so often Bobby would gently creep under wagging his tail like mad.

Fortunately I had been putting out some bird food, including kibbled peanut, at night ready for the early birds so I guess that was what hedgie was eating. At least it had access to a reasonable protein diet as there won't be many beetles around for it to eat at this time of year. Also it will be able to get access to water as I have seen Hedgehogs climb up to the pond waterfall in the past.

I had though I had lost all the Hedgehogs when the three regulars stopped visiting somewhere around late August last year. Far too early to have started hibernation. It was great to see I could possibly have a resident.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Oh dear, it looks as though I get to keep my gold stars once again. Jan was getting close with her thought of a bird's nest. What I had photographed was the entrance to a roosting pocket. I have a couple of these hung up but I haven't noticed them being used as a roost though the occasional Sparrow has briefly investigated them. The one I photographed was a spare which had been stored in the shed.

   

Right - I wonder how you will get on with this one. It is a small crop from a photo taken a couple of days ago with the Lumix. The camera is not waterproof so it is not a sea anemone. The red / pink part is, at the most, about 5mm across.



Very hard to think of a clue which doesn't give the game away. Let's just say I had to twist and turn to get a good view of it.

Many thanks as ever to those who tried to guess the last photo and good luck for this week. No prizes for a correct identification. Just for fun.

Friday at the Flicks - Corvids, Doves, Goldfinches

Apart from Wednesday which was gloriously sunny most of the day it has been dull and very cloudy - not the best of conditions for photography of any sort. Even more so early mornings when any of the corvid family visit the garden. In fact I have never seen a Carrion Crow actually in the garden and I was surprised to see a couple on the very top of my leylandii tree. I was interested to note the consideration one crow showed as it moved over to make room for another to join it.



Over the past week or so I have spotted a couple of Stock Doves visit daily which makes a change from the regular Collared Doves. It really needs brilliant sunshine to show off the metallic sheen on the Stock Doves' necks.



It doesn't seem that long ago when I could count up to thirty Goldfinches visiting the feeders but this year I am lucky to see three. Usuall there are only a couple.



 Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Checking some aurora sites this morning it would appear the jet of plasma emitted from the Sun slowed down as it approached the earth and didn't produce the effect initially expected.
Spaceweather.com looks to be an interesting site which has, at the moment, a marvellous photo of the Sun's surface activity taken in a UK backyard observatory. Also HERE on the site is a map showing recently uploaded photos from around the world. Click on a pin and then on the thumbnail image to see them larger.

Possible Aurora Tonight

I see from the BBC News site that there is a possibility of an aurora tonight as the Sun sent out a massive solar flare in our direction. Unfortunately the amount of cloud over the UK at the moment could make any sighting impossible.

BBC report is HERE.

17.17 GMT  Aurorawatch have just issued an Amber Alert for possible aurora activity but their site is showing little activity at the moment. The site can be found HERE.

Experimenting With Pictures

One of the things I enjoy when visiting Adrian's blog - Adrian's Images - is to see what he has been doing with Photoshop. One technique which has always intrigued me is colour popping, though I had no idea what it was called until very recently. Adrian put a detailed 'how to' on his other blog - Seeing to Pictures. I don't use Photoshop. I have used Paint Shop Pro since about version 2 so the method was slightly different but I decided to have a go. The picture I chose was taken at least a year ago and a bit grainy but the subject seemed to me to be ideal for the technique of only having colour on the main subject of the photo.

Here is before and after:



My thanks to Adrian for his detailed explanation. I very rarely head towards the complication of playing with layers and it turned out to be easier than I had thought.

Talking of layers - the sky was pretty clear towards tea time yesterday and the Moon was fully visible so I plonked the Canon XL2 outside with the Canon 70-200mm L series lens fitted. There is a special adaptor which enables EF lenses to fit the XL. This has its own lens system which gives just over 7x magnification. Thus at 200mm the EF lens acts like a 1400mm. At this magnification the Moon filled quite a large amount of the frame but looked very bare as the rest of the view and sky was bare.

After filming the Moon I moved the camcorder and filmed some nearby tree branches with the lens at the 70mm setting. Using Video Studio Pro X3 the Moon shot was put on the main video track and the tree branches on the overlay track with 68% transparency. The colour temperature of the main video track was altered to give the Moon a slightly blue hue.



Music is an old MIDI file played through a Roland keyboard. The Moon is not moving but the Earth is so to a fixed camera it appears to move across the sky. The movement is in real time, not speeded up.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Congratulations to Adrian, Glo, Keith and Jan for deserving a gold star for last week's identification of a cone. Not sure from what tree as I picked it up on our perambulations.

   

Let us see how well you get on with the new puzzle picture:

Done in a bit of a rush as I only made my mind up what to use at the last minute.

Clue: Could be a snug hide away.

No prizes for a correct identification. Just for fun.

Blue Tit and Tree Sparrows

It has taken literally hours to upload less than 150MB of video. YouTube kept stalling and even when one eventually uploaded I was informed it had failed because of  'an unexplained error'. Eventually I uploaded them to Photobucket.

A Blue Tit at the peanut feeder:



I think there were three Tree Sparrows visiting the bird table. The wire mesh is to keep the larger birds out and give the smaller ones a chance.