Wings for Wednesday

Last Monday Bobby visited the Vet for his six monthly check up. Mike, the vet, said that his vision is now probably limited to seeing light and dark with very little detail as his cataracts have grown thicker. He continues to have a heart murmur but that doesn't stop him from thinking he is 13 months old as against his 13 years.

On our journey there I spotted a tree carving I hadn't seen before so I made a quick stop on the way back. Why are these things near blind bends in the road? A few shots through the windscreen. The trunk has four carvings:

  

At the bottom are a badger and a bird which may be a Curlew. Near the top is a squirrel and pride of place goes to an owl:



 There have been quite a few Blue-tailed Damselflies around my pond. Mainly males but this female allowed me to thrust the TZ7 within a few inches of her face.



Yesterday when I checked my pond for any visitors I spotted what at first I thought was a Harlequin Ladybird. Much relief when I checked on the net and found out it was my first sighting of a 14 Spot Ladybird. It was very small, about 4mm, too small to be a Harlequin.



Most of this year's fledglings have grown up but it is still possible to see the occasional young Goldfinch.



Finally - weekends usually see the occasional private aeroplane on its way between various local small airstrips.



This Thruster Sprint T600N was spotted last weekend as it flew over the village. No, I'm not clued up on the myriad makes of planes. As long as you can get the ID (G-CDGI in this case) a quick Google usually finds all the information. It seems to have quite an unusual shape and engine layout. A good view can be seen on airport-data.com.

Aggressive Copyright Auto Detection

Today I uploaded the same video to YouTube and Photobucket. For the soundtrack I used a short piece of Ravel's Bolero. This was recorded using a MIDI file released into the public domain on a bulletin board many years ago - before the world wide web took off. This I played through my Roland keyboard which has sampled sounds of real instruments. Good as they are it is still possible to detect they are not played live by a human.

YouTube sent me a mail saying it may be copyright of EMI though it did load and display.
Photobucket refused to load and save it as it alleged it was copyright material.

Two examples where very aggressive auto detection software is being used to arbitrarily detect copyright material. I have mailed both companies and it will, possibly, be interesting to see what their responses are. 

Macro on Monday - Guess What + Video Editing Software

Yippee. Another full house last Monday. Congratulations and virtual gold stars go to Keith, Adrian, Wilma and Glo for identifying the hairy monster AKA Bobby. Parts shown were nose, eye, paw and ear.

  

On to this week's macro.
Guess What:


No prizes. Just for fun.


A bit late getting started today in spite of having to get up at 3.30 a.m. this morning.

Then when I did feel somewhat awake I decided to search for a different video editor. For a few years I have used Corel Video Studio Pro X3. Now there is a version 4 but the upgrade price is only £10 cheaper than the full price. It isn't really long since I last upgraded and on the whole some newer programs have better facilities to do the sort of thing I want.

I downloaded the trial version of AVS Video Editor and found it more user friendly and had better choices of effects and titling with more control over them so I decided to 'buy' that. It was cheaper to get a lifetime authorisation code with AVS4YOU, than a one off upgrade with Corel by taking advantage of the 70% reduction until the end of this month. Also the code works with all their programs and covers all updates - not to be sniffed at.

Friday at the Flicks - Goldfinches with a Collared Dove

Not a lot going on here this week. The last few days the seed has hardly been touched. Regulars though still include Goldfinches and a Collared Dove which has worked out how to enjoy Nyjer seeds by balancing on the dish which collects any spillage.



Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.


BTW - if anyone knows of a Windozy program which can colour pop video files I would dearly love to hear about it. I've tried Googling but all I get is info about working with photographs.

Pop Goes the Colour

Some time ago Adrian explained how to colour pop on the PC. Today I happened to come across Color Splash, an app for the iPad which does the job so easily I couldn't resist investing the £1.50 or so. In fact it was more trouble finding out how to transfer the results from the iPad to the PC than it was to go a popping.













It took well under an hour to achieve the above results, including the time to download and install the app and searching for help to transfer the results to the PC. No other processing was used and no wildlife was harmed in the process.

Wings for Wednesday

There are two plants in the front garden which are attracting plenty of winged creatures at the moment. Lavender and Hibiscus.

Bees:




Hoverflies:




Flies:


Wasps:


Notice anything missing? Butterflies! Last year the lavender especially was a great attraction for butterflies. To date this year I haven't seen one on or near these plants.

All photographs were taken with the Lumix TZ7, usually with the lens within three inches of the insect. Not a problem with the bees and hoverflies but can be a bit fraught when it comes to wasps.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Excellent - a full house last Monday with Adrian, Keith, Wilma, Matron and Glo all gaining virtual Gold Stars for identifying the Shield Bug. Congratulation to Matron for solving her first ever anagram and to Glo for further identifying it as Palomena prasina.




On to this week's creature....
Guess What:


... which shouldn't be too difficult, especially for regular readers.

Good luck. No prizes, just for fun.