Penny Meets a Hedgehog

Every night Penny's first task on exiting the back door is to search the regular haunts of the Hedgehog. A couple of nights ago I guessed she had found one. I could only see her reflective collar bobbing up and down as she kept putting her nose on a spiky back. I think she was encouraging it to run but it wisely hunched down and stayed put.



Finally the Hedgehog made a dash for a more sheltered spot while Penny tried to work out why it tickled every time she got her nose too close.



Finally she decided to approach from a different angle where she could stand and watch.



It made me smile as I remembered an incident about a week ago. That night I opened the back door but Penny refused to go out. She kept looking closely at the ground just outside the door. What monster was keeping her in? A small frog! Maybe she is wary of the way they leap about in the dark when she gets too close. Whatever the reason she didn't step outside until I tickled the frog to make it move away. It disappeared under a wheelie bin and Penny spent ages trying to track the monster down.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

There were a couple of close guesses for last week's Guess What.



It could well be described as embroidery Adrian. Glo was so very close in thinking it was part of Penny's reflective collar. In fact it was a different collar. I had bought this one as it looked very swish with its gold and purple.



Unfortunately having embroidery was not a good choice. I think it was a bit itchy in spite of having a silky lining. Every time she had a good scratch at it her claws caught and pulled the threads. In less that a week it looked really tatty. Lesson learned - for house collars stick to printed materials.

My thanks to those who were brave enough to have a guess.

On to a new Guess What.
Can you work out what this is part of?



Clue; What little boys are made of?

No prizes. Just for fun.

The Next Project

A week or so ago the rain gauge on my weather station stopped recording. I wound the mast down and checked things over but couldn't find anything wrong. This is the second time it has happened with my rain recorders. From what I can gather it seems to be a common fault with the cheaper systems.

I had considered buying another one but got to thinking - a dangerous habit which one should try to avoid at all costs. Checking the old rain gauge mechanical bit I found it was still working OK so what about building my own rain gauge? It is a good 18 months since I last had a play with an Arduino micro processor system but that seemed the best route to take as I already had one and other associated bits in the 'junk box'.

Of course in that time the PC software for writing the Arduino programming code had been updated several times so I had to get everything up to date. The idea will be for an Arduino to count the number of times the 'seasaw' buckets in the rain gauge flip and calculate the equivalent rainfall in mm.



This information needs to be stored and retrievable on an LCD readout. This is a first test just to make sure I can send what is needed to a two line LCD module. The Arduino version I am using is the Nano, one of the smallest available, which can be seen towards the bottom of the photo.

 

There is a long was to go as my one remaining grey cell soon gets rusty and 18 months gives plenty of time to forget how to program the thing. No doubt there will be lots of cursing along the way but it is more entertaining than the pap they shove out on the idiot lantern these days.

Friday at the Flicks - Bath Time - Squirrel

As all of us who have regular visits from Starlings know, they will bathe in any available water. I had to smile the other day when one decided to use a plant pot saucer as a bath while a few others lined up on the edge of the bird bath to wait their turn. Not one used the bird bath.




A fairly regular visitor at the moment is a particularly bold Grey Squirrel. If I see it I go out to shoo it away before Penny notices as she goes wild in her efforts to catch it. This particular squirrel is hard to scare away and will not move until I get very close. Even then it only moves a short distance in the hope I will go away and it can return to its peanut feast.



When I went to get the code for the squirrel video there was a note from YouTube which said it had been detected as possibly being shaky and asking whether I would like them to fix it. My silent response was 'on yer bike' or words to that effect.

The sound tracks for both videos were produced using MIDI files played back through the iPad app Animoog. (A bit of Handle's Water Music and the Minute Waltz)

Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Not Hibernating Yet

It can't be very long before the Hedgehogs think about hibernating. Night temperatures are still reasonable at the moment and this one was seen helping itself to dried mealworms just before dawn this morning:



Penny knew it had been about and spent ages at the hole in the fence they use to gain access to the garden.

No sign recently of any activity in the Hedgehog House, not even the mouse.

European Garden Spider

Spotted a very large orb web in the garden strung between two uprights which are 68 inches (1730mm) apart. It is amazing the effort a spider has to go to in bridging the gap with the first couple of connections before it can start building the web. This usually has to be done every day / night as the web soon becomes damaged by clumsy humans walking through it!

The question that springs to my mind is - when the spider first uses those two uprights and having made its first anchor point on one upright, has it already chosen the second upright or does it come across it accidentally?

Getting the web and spider in focus was problematic as, with such a large span, the slightest breeze was making the whole thing move quite a distance.

This wider view was given a pseudo HDR treatment to make the web strands stand out better.




The owner - a European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus)
Probably the most common spider in Europe





This individual was about an inch (24mm) across the outstretched legs.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Can you guess what this is a close up of?

iPhone4 + miniature microscope

No prizes, just for fun.
Any guesses will be kept hidden until next Monday when all will be revealed.

Clue: A Penny for your thoughts