Macro on Monday - Guess What

Three correct guesses for last week's Guess What. Congratulations and virtual gold stars go to Bonnie, John and Jan for thinking it was part of an apple. It was what was left after several Starlings had had their fill.

  

I sliced off the top of the apple to make it easier for the birds to get started. The Starlings rapidly ate the soft inner and eventually the circle of skin that was left dropped off leaving the core.

A man made object for the new mystery object...

Guess What:

iPhone4 with add on macro lens

Clue: It's not getting any use in this weather.
No prizes. Just for fun.

Weird Visitor Statistics

Occasionally I check the HiStats statistics. Today it was showing an unheard of, for me anyway, 597 visitors of which 555 are new. Something strange here. Normally I would only see a handful.

 

The majority of this large number are shown to have come through goo which appears to be a Google system for shortening URLs and more than a few through gemscool which seems to be connected with an Indonesian games site. All these visits accessed only one page.



Looking at the geolocations shown most appear to have come from Mountain View in the US (nearly 500).



I'm not sure whether HiStats is playing silly beggars or what.
A DoS attack on Blogger?

Later:
Jan put me on the right track. Google is located in Mountain View and searching elsewhere showed that Midmarsh Jottings is hosted in Mountain View so I guess it was some internal goings on between the Google search engine and Blogspot. I wonder if anyone else using HiStats has seen a similar occurrance.

Friday at the Flicks - Wet Feathers

During last Wednesday's persistent rain a group of Goldfinches came to the Birdy Bistro. Also spotted, first time since last Spring, was a Cock Pheasant which sat on the top of the fruit cage for hours in the pouring rain. I often see Wood Pigeons taking advantage of rain to have a shower. They lean over and lift each wing in turn to have a good wash. The Pheasant just sat there looking thoroughly miserable:



During part of the video you can hear a noisy group of House Sparrows which were sheltering in a nearby evergreen bush.

Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

So Far So Good

Yesterday was the first proper test of the rain gauge with the rain collector outdoors. 'Twas one of those days where it started raining before daybreak, kept it up constantly through daylight hours and continued after dark until about 6 p.m.. Rainfall was never particularly heavy, just persistent.

While it was light enough I took a few photos of the readout. By tea time it had recorded 17 mm (near three quarters of an inch) of rain which should be about right considering how much of the lawn was slowly turning in to a second pond. (background to the illustration) As if the ground wasn't saturated enough already.

I am pleased to say that the real time clock module is keeping excellent time so it was well worth the extra money.

Wings on Wednesday

It is a long time since I last had a Wings on Wednesday entry. Amazingly, for the time of year, there has been a dearth of birds visiting the garden this month. Every now and then there is a rush of House Sparrows or Starlings and the Great Tits and Coal Tits are pretty regular but the numbers are well down so far this Winter.

One fleeting visitor was a Stock Dove. I haven't seen one of those for months so this was a welcome sighting.



Not quite so welcome was an early morning visit from a Sparrowhawk. This one was sat on the back of an old wooden chair right next to the Birdy Bistro. What I particularly noticed was the way it had its darker back facing outwards which made it blend in better with the fence in the background.



As soon as it spotted me it flew away to hunt for breakfast elsewhere.

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Rain Gauge:

Only a little further with the rain gauge project. Added the ability to switch off the lCD readout in software. The collector is now outside and the electronics in the conservatory while I see how well it works. 3 mm rain recorded yesterday, 4 mm so far this morning.

The unit uses a 9V wall wart power supply but also automatically changes over to a battery during any power interruption - a far from unknown event in this area.

I have decided to change the Arduino Nano for a Mega as the Mega has internal memory I can use to store the results which looks easier to program than the SD card.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Two Gold Stars awarded for last week's Guess What. Adrian for correctly identifying Lichen and Bonnie for saying some sort of fungi and a Lichen is a combination of a fungus and algae (see British Lichens, What are Lichens?). Well done both of you.

I wonder how you will get on with this week's Guess What.

iPhone4 using Camera+ app and add on macro lens

Clue: Was it Blackbirds or Starlings whot done it?

No prizes, just for fun.

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When I am building my electronic projects I usually end up with a rats nest of wiring. I couldn't resist taking this shot of a BT engineer working on the phone line junction box opposite my bungalow. How do they ever work out which wire goes to which building? Makes me wonder how I manage to get up to 7Mbits download through copper wire.

Still - as long as it keeps working!

An Experiment for Shirl

Shirl (Shirl's Gardenwatch) mentioned to me about the ability to use nature reserve scopes with a mobile phone camera. This morning I experimented with my binoculars and iPhone4. I clamped the binoculars to a tripod to hold them steady, focussed on the bird table down the end of the garden and, using the basic camera app, just held the phone camera tight up to the binoculars. A bit of jiggling about to get the phone lens in the right place. No processing of any sort on these photos, apart from the final crop.

The view as seen by the iPhone through the kitchen window:




The shot as taken through the binoculars:

 

Same thing cropped as the view through the binoculars does not fill the frame:



The phone needs to be as near as possible to the binoculars / scope lens so the rubber eye cup was pushed back as far as it would go. The auto focus on the phone camera did the rest as far as focus and exposure went.

Certainly worth a try if the phone is the only camera you have with you in that sort of situation. Gives a reasonable record shot if nothing else.