Tag: bird

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.

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.

The One That Got Away

The cat made its annual attempt at catching a baby starling but A2 managed to usher it out of the house before it became a fluffy cat snack. Here it is catching its breath in the bushes before it flew away.
Sad news: our weather station has stopped working. We were expecting it to rain in the near future but now we’ll never know. Unless we look out of the window.
A1 is reading Hollow Grave* by Kate Webb. A2 is reading Buying Time* by EM Brown.

Robin Hiding

Here’s a glimpse of the elusive bird that has been tormenting us with its vanishing tricks. One day we’ll catch it in the open.
We had macaroni cheese, vegetable and fruit salads and a sad-looking but tasty brick-like air-fried courgette cake for our family dinner and scored 12.5 on the GSQ; thx everybody and happy birthday eve Bob.
A1 is rereading Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre. A2 is rereading Machines like Me by Ian McEwan.

Crowing

A crow in a tree.
A1 is reading Trapped* by Camilla Lackberg and Hendrik Fexeus. A1 was less impressed with this, getting very bored with one protagonist’s obsession with cleanliness and sanitising everything, and the other’s with counting everything. Take all that out and it’d be half the length. The plot was daft, too.
A2 is rereading The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe.

Another Beak in the Wall

Troglodytes troglodytes (so good…) aka a wren. We have never photographed one before, or even knowingly seen one. It was bouncing around like a little brown ball, occasionally stopping to search for critters in cracks. And here’s a nice song:

…well, not so nice for the poor old wren.
A1 is rereading A Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre. A2 is rereading The Unlucky Lottery by Hakkan Nesser.

The Goldfinch

Carduelis carduelis; so good they named it twice. Haven’t photographed one for years but A2 spotted this one in a distant tree far, far away.
A1 is rereading A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre, in which we learn its psychopathic terrorist loathes The Smiths. As does A1 🙂
A2 is rereading Borkmann’s Point by Hakan Nesser.

Critter of the Day: Turdus merula

Not a very pretty name for this handsome blackbird.
We had pasta, parkin and delicious Ethiopian coffee for our family lunch and scored 11.5 for the last quiz of the year, bringing our average to 10.2268518518519, a step down from last year’s 10.2756346153846.
A1 is reading Nobody’s Hero by MW Craven, another violent and thrilling outing for Ben Koenig; thanks, A2! — who is reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey (thx A1); 24 hours on the International Space Station watching the drama of the cosmorama, incorporating 16 days of the sun burnishing the oceans and 16 nights of lights fringing the coastlines while the astro/cosmonauts on board divulge a bit of backstory and have high-flown thoughts about the geography and meteorology of their home planet and a typhoon winds up over the Philippines. A short but engaging read.