Night Visitors

A quick glimpse of a mouse and a visit by a Hedgehog:


Night Visitors from Midmarsh on Vimeo.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

I will agree that last week one of the pictures did make it look like a ladybird. It was actually a butterfly - a Small Tortoiseshell. This was correctly guessed by Jan and Ragged Robin who gain the virtual gold stars with an honourable mention to TexWisGirl and Adrian who got the butterfly but the wrong type. As always my thanks to all who took part.


 




On to a new 'macro', actually a small crop from a larger photograph.
Guess What:



Clue: Penny says it grunts instead of snuffling.
No prizes. Just for fun.


This morning I could see five eggs in the Great Tit nestbox. There will probably be one or two more then Mrs GT should start incubating them. That will be more interesting to watch, especially as they start to hatch and the male brings in food for all of them. At the moment it seems to be an empty nest for most of the day.

On the Hedgehog front - The regular, I assume, visited the night before last but was not spotted last night. Also it looks as though a mouse has taken up residence under the summer house, or at least uses it as a safe haven at night for raiding the hedgehog food.

Testing Live Streaming

Four eggs so far in the nestbox. They are not being incubated yet so the Great Tit leaves the nest for long periods.

 


Finally found out how to get Camstreams to work through my router. It can take up to 15 seconds for the stream to start. Works for me in Opera, IE and Firefox! Also works on some Macs and with Chrome. Windows Media Player or VLC plugin needed.

As it uses Windows Media Player it looks like the video cannot be seen on an iPad using the available browsers - certainly not on those I tried today - Camstreams are developing a free app for iPhone / iPad. Hopefully this will be available in the not too distant future and will let you know when it is available.

I am very grateful to Camstreams for providing this free service advert free.
Clicking on their link at the bottom of the streaming video window takes you to their site where you can find a few more animal related streams amongst other things.

The test was running for about 12 hours and all seemed OK so I have put the streaming window at the top of the blog so it is always available though I do not guarantee that it will always be live. Sometimes, with my poor bandwith on uploads, I have to pause or stop it to allow other uploads of video files or photos. It will only run when my PC is on during the day (approximately 7am to 10pm British Summer Time).

Visiting Hedgehog

I haven't noticed a Hedgehog this week. This happens sometimes. It might be the usual route has been blocked by something so it takes a while to find another way. This photo was taken about ten days ago. I just managed the one shot before it made a dash for cover.





I think this is the one which visits most nights.

Friday at the Flicks - Supper for Mrs Great Tit

Mrs Great Tit had just settled on the nest for the night when Mr GT arrived with her supper.




This time it seemed that Vimeo was playing silly billies and uploading was taking an age so I switched back to YouTube which ran very smoothly.

I spent ages today trying to get some streaming video to work. The method I used last time doesn't want to play with the new router and one site I could get to work had too much advertising.

What a Whopper

As usual I added a pack of strawberries to my delivery from Asda. First lucky thing was the usual £1 pack I ordered was out of stock so a £2 pack was sent but only charged at £1.  They were quite a mix of sizes but by far the monster of the batch was this one photographed next to a 10p coin which measures 22mm across (just under an inch).



These strawberries came from Spain and were reasonably tasty.

Home From Home

Sort of - garden room anyway.....

iPhone4 with wide angle lens added

Needless to say the more expensive items are only out there when I am actually using the summerhouse.