Category: wildlife

Critter of the Day: House Sparrow

Passer domesticus, a very common but also extremely endangered bird. We’ve never photographed one before.
March was more or less average on the sun, rain and temperature fronts, but it was frequently unpleasantly windy. In like a lion and out like a lion.
A2 is reading The State of the Art by Iain M Banks.

Critter of the Day: Tit

A little bird sitting on the weather station.
A1 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass. A2 is reading Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I don’t generally like reframings of well-known works of literature but Atwood’s reprise of The Tempest as an avant-garde production in a prison with the producer hell-bent on revenge was a joy and an education.

Fly Me to the Moon

Our last post was about dinner at the ivy and tonight a boy called Ivy joined us for our family dinner but nobody thought to take a picture. Instead here are a couple of shots from A1’s Dwarf Mini telescope: some iridescent starlings and the crescent moon.

The menu for tonight was spag bol followed by nectarine cake and the GSQ at which we scored 10.5.

Dwarf Mini first light

A new toy! The Dwarf Mini is an ultra-portable smart telescope designed for deep-sky astronomical imaging. Controlled from a smartphone (in our case a Pixel 6a), it can track objects, take multiple exposures and automatically stack them to increase the image quality.

This hasn’t been a good time for astronomy here — we’ve had unrelenting gloom, rain and cloud cover for the last couple of months. But today, Valentine’s Day, the sky finally cleared enough to try the device out. The picture above is the sun, showing three groups of small sunspots. It’s a stack of 20 shots each exposed for 1/200s. The tracking was spot-on, with no need for special mounts or alignment — the device was indoors looking through an open window. Here’s a screenshot from the phone before it was taken (note the very useful inset wide-field picture):

At about 1:30am this morning the sky started to clear with some gaps in the clouds. I took a test sequence of a random part of the sky, centred on the star HIP80364. The Dwarf Mini took 21 15-second shots , of which 16 were usable — the device detected occasional cloud cover and discarded them. Again the tracking was perfect, with no discernable trails or elongation of the stars (click for full size):

 That’s a rather boring image, but given clearer weather we can hopefully do better. Oh, and it’s also good for wildlife:
A2 is reading Signals of Distress by Jim Crace.

Critter of the Day: Goldcrest

Regulus regulus, so good they named it twice. We have never spotted this King of the Birds before but it’s easily overlooked, being barely bigger than a bumblebee.
A1 is rereading Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds. According to our records, I originally read this on 5 Sep 2021. But I have absolutely no memory of it at all — and I would have remembered it, as it’s a much-anticipated continuation of AR’s Revelation Space sequence, with many recurring characters. Excellent, though the ending is a bit of a cop-out.
A2 is reading HHhH by Laurent Binet, an absolutely brilliant non-fiction novel about the attempt to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, documenting the writer’s struggles with his subject and including many encomia to Prague, which A1 and A2 also love.

Pigeon Pie

Back in 2020 we had an unexpected visitor: a sparrowhawk feasting on its prey in our back garden. The picture in the linked post was a still from a rather poor video, which we’ve now improved somewhat:

We thought the prey was a magpie originally, due to the racket being made by a flock mischief of them which attracted our attention. But now it’s looking more like it was a pigeon.
Thanks to the very powerful software ffmpeg, the video has been stabilised, sharpened and colour balanced.
A1 is reading Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds — thanks A2! AR likes incorporating both noir and detective elements in his SF (cf the terrific Century Rain and the Prefect Dreyfus novels), and here we’ve got Yuri Gagarin — well, sort of — as a mean-streets PI on a generation starship. There are touches of humour, and some Dickian nods in this tale: the sorrowfully forgetful robot, and the excessively polite one as it chucks our hero overboard. It all hangs together though, and a return to form.
A2 is rereading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.

Blackbird

It’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend and our entry, if we submit it (which we didn’t because the website took us round and round in circles till the crows came home), is 2 pigeons, 3 blackbirds, 2 blue tits, a red kite and a million starlings.
A1 is rereading Reconstruction by Mick Herron. A2 is rereading The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood.

Cats’ Chorus

The castrato and contralto singing for their supper, spotlit by a sunbeam.
A1 is reading The Girl in Cell A by Vaseem Khan, a grim “psychological thriller” which, in the unerringly accurate words of A2, “vanishes up its own arse” (link is a sort of spoiler, so be warned). A disappointing and miserable read.
A2 is rereading Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd.

Cannibalism

Focus on the Pholcus: the cosmopolitan cellar spider. We have been tolerating these spindly spinners with their messy webs on the assumption that they will tackle the fruit flies, house flies and bluebottles hanging around our house but it turns out that their favourite food is other spiders, those that probably have more interest in flies.
In other news, our new weather forecast page is progressing.
A1 is reading The Sycamore Gap* by LJ Ross and A2 is reading Human Remains* by Jo Callaghan.

Critter of the Day: Cabbage White

A delicate butterfly sipping nectar through a bendy straw.
A1 is reading The Politician* by Tim Sullivan, which features yet another socially challenged detective (Asperger’s here) with family problems (absconded mother). At least he’s not an alcoholic. Readable and occasionally amusing, but you do sometimes yearn for a detective who isn’t loaded down with “issues”.
A2 is reading Red as Blood by Lilja Sigurdardottir. Arora is single with a missing sister and a healthy lifestyle. But she’s a tax adviser, not a detective.

Critter of the Day: Vapourer Larva at Bay

Orgyia antiqua. Its father is a dull brown moth and its mother is a flightless bag of eggs and pheromones, but their child is a spectacular creature which will sadly grow up to be one or the other of them. Look at its four shaving brushes in case it ever decides to tackle its selection of whiskers.
A2 is rereading Victim 2117* by Jussi Adler-Olsen.