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.