Wings on Wednesday - It's My Garden

A few days ago I spotted a couple of Wood Pigeons having a bit of a contretemps. It looked as though one had decided the other wasn't welcome in his garden.









There was a lot of fluttering and leaping about but neither came to any harm.

The slideshow was put together using the app Splice (free version) on the iPad.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Only two winners of a     for correctly identifying the acorn in last Monday's Guess What. Congratulations to Wilma and Keith.

   

This week the macros are a bit on the fuzzy side as they are very small crops but I think it should be fairly easy to identify.

Guess What:


No prizes - just for fun.

Friday at the Flicks - Greenfinch

I didn't have anything new last Wednesday for the Wings and today is no better as the weather has been awful most of the week with lighting levels less than an average mid winter. Here is a short video of a Greenfinch which visited the feeders last March - good job I have a few clips which I haven't uploaded yet.





Easy to tell yesterday was a 13th. Decided to update my iPad1 to the latest iOS5 and wished I hadn't bothered. All told it took 12 hours to get the iPad back to a reasonable, though not fully, working order. Looking round some of the blogs I see I was far from being alone in having problems. The installation of the new operating system seemed to go smoothly but when it came to restoring all the apps there were many problems, crashes, loud ungentlemanly mutterings and lots of cold cups of tea.

One 'bright light in a wicked world'  A favourite free app of mine is 'eBook Search' which is great for finding and downloading free ebooks on the iPad. This stopped downloading with iOS5 so I emailed Patrick Thompson, the founder of Inkstone Software, who maintains the app and within a few hours he had an updated version available for download. I tested that. Brilliant, it is now back to a fully working piece of software.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

I don't know about you, but to me the weeks seem to be rushing past these days. Here we are again, another Monday galloped up on me.
Anyway - five virtual to award to Adrian, John, Wilma, Matron and Glo as they all correctly identified the spider in last Monday's Guess What.

The Nursery Rhyme goes:

The itsy, bitsy spider, climbed up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,
So the itsy, bitsy spider went up the spout again.

but this one was a bit on the larger size.



I wonder if I will get as many correct answers for this one...

Guess What:

Don't be shy. Have a guess. No prizes, just for fun.

Friday at the Flicks - Bobby

And now, as they say, for something completely different. A few weeks ago there was a news item about some slow motion film made which showed how dogs drink. It showed how a dog curves the tongue backwards to scoop up the liquid. The speed at which this happens draws up a column of liquid and by quickly closing the mouth a quantity is trapped in the mouth.

I wondered if I could film this myself with Bobby just using the TZ7 and slowing the playback down enough to see what was going on. The result is shown below. The first part of the video runs at 1/10 speed and it does a reasonable job of showing the drinking action.



Some of the original film, shown on the Discovery channel, can be found here on YouTube.

Have a great weekend observing the wildlife, and domestic life, around you.

Wings on Wednesday

There are often light aircraft flying near or over the village, especially at weekends. A very distinctive one I have seen several times over the past few years is this Pitts S1-C amateur build biplane.



A very smart looking aeroplane designed for aerobatics. I see, from looking round the net, that at one stage it had been rebuilt as a seven year project and was on sale for £26,000

Back nearer earth sees the return of Jackdaws. They had been missing for a couple of months but are now back attacking the bread I put out for the corvids.



They don't stay for long when they notice anyone watching.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

I would reckon on two and a half last week. It was weathered stone but Adrian and Glo completed the identification of a stone cross which is one of the gravestones in the village churchyard. Glo even went and found the meaning of the carved inscription. (See her comment last Monday)

   

Back to macro this week with a few small crops from a photo.

Guess what:


All are welcome to try. Just for fun. No prizes apart from the virtual gold stars for correct identifications.