Protecting Monty the Moose

I was putting the sweeper over the carpet when Penny comes rushing past and puts a paw firmly on her Monty the Moose to make sure it didn't get sucked up in the process:

That Mystery Plant

Last Tuesday I showed the buds from one of my house plants and asked if anyone could guess what the plant was. Only Jan was brave enough to have a go. Unfortunately Jan it isn't an orchid. In fact it is a Venus Fly Trap. I have had a few over the years but this is the first time I have seen one produce flowers; and over night the first one opened. Nothing spectacular but none the less interesting, to me anyway.



The flower spikes really are long compared with the size of the plant.

Friday at the Flicks - Garden Snail - Juvenile Birds

I was partly wrong the other day when I said only slugs and snails like all the wet weather we have been having. I forgot to include the Blackbirds. They love it when the ground becomes waterlogged as it drives the worms to the surface!

Here is the snail I saw the other day:



There have been quite a few different fledgelings visiting the garden, usually with the adults:



Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Great Tits - House Sparrow

This morning I spent some time watching adult Great Tits feeding a brood of three or four fledglings. I wonder if this is a second hatching or a pair who left things late in getting started.
They were right down the bottom of the garden so this is a small crop:
 
Who ordered the chopped peanut?


The House Sparrows which nest under the tiles of my property have raised quite a few babies and the parents are used to me walking right under their nesting site. This adult male was quite content for me to get reasonably close for a portrait shot:

Something Has to Like This Weather

Hardly a day seems to go by without several doses of heavy rain. Today it was a case of sunny intervals mixed with showers where the rain came down like stair rods. The only creatures in my garden which seem to enjoy continual damp conditions are slugs and snails, like this one spotted as the rain stopped for a few minutes:

Guess What

I have an indoor plant which, personally,  I have never seen flower before.
It has several long spikes each tipped with a group of buds.



This plant is in a 7cm pot, needs lots of water and the edges of the leaves are trimmed with what look like long spikes.

I wonder if you can guess what the plant is.

Answer in a few days when the flowers open.


Intervalometer:

As an addendum to my description of the intervalometer in my last post -  it is not limited to a maximum of 399 shots. That is the maximum fixed number of shots which can be chosen. As well as that it can be set for an infinite count where it will keep taking time lapse shots until it is switched off.

Time Lapse Visited Again

Regular readers may remember my earlier experiments using the 350D and a home brew intervalometer to make a time lapse video of cloud formations. A few months ago I looked in to buying a commercial intervalometer (a gadget which fires the camera at set intervals). The Canon one is more that a bit expensive at over £100 but I found there are third party makes which are considerably cheaper at £12 to £25 a time. I bought one of the cheap ones from Amazon UK and have finally got Round Tuit and given it a trial.

The unit can be set to any delay before taking a photo, any delay time between shots and any number of shots up to 399. It runs on two AAA cells and has a decent sized clear LCD display. You have to buy one with the correct plug to suit the make / model of camera you want to connect it to.

Here is the camera set up with the intervalometer:




A close view of the LCD display.
Top right is an LED which goes green two seconds before a shot as it sends a signal to focus the camera then red as it fires the camera.
(the dark line is a reflection) .....



..... showing 7 seconds to the next shot and the next shot is number 335 (counting down from 399)

For this video shots were taken at 15 second intervals:
Canon 350D, Canon EF 70-200mm f2.4 lens
Set to 70mm, manual focus, auto exposure.
The Windows program  'Images to Video' was used to make the still shots into a video.



I'm not sure why the camera seems to wobble a bit, maybe the gusty wind though the tripod seemed very firm. On reflection I think it was caused by the image stabilizer in the lens making slight alterations. I must remember to switch that off for such activities.