Wildlife spotting 2 - tickety-boo

[Vodkafone]

I've been using this bird ID app recently https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/  and it's great to watch it pick up and list all the birds chirruping and squawking in the garden. In the space of about a minute yesterday morning it identified the songs of blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits, blackbirds, wrens, robins, crows, magpies and nuthatches. If you can see the bird as it sings, you can watch as the app recognises and identifies it in real time.

Yeah it's great, it helped my identify common mergansers on the river the other day. On this morning's walk I saw a tree creeper and a greater spotted woodpecker. I'd always assumed that your standard black and white woodpecker was the lesser spotted, but Merlin says the lesser spotted is tiny - sparrow sized. Hat fucked.

[BlodwynPig]

Yeah it's great, it helped my identify common mergansers on the river the other day. On this morning's walk I saw a tree creeper and a greater spotted woodpecker. I'd always assumed that your standard black and white woodpecker was the lesser spotted, but Merlin says the lesser spotted is tiny - sparrow sized. Hat fucked.

[Vodkafone]

^ how lovely. Is that you hand feeding the little un?

[Brian Freeze]

Trailcam question - do any of you Camheads^TM run yours on an external power supply? I am resurrecting mine and had forgotten it takes 8xAAs. It's going in the woods where I am feeding up an area so will be left to its own devices for 3-4 days at a time and I'd rather not have to cash in my pension to buy endless batteries (plus the stress of then binning them). I seem to remember that the battery life was pretty good but even so....

Knowing almost nothing about electrical engineering (I gave myself a mild shock twice putting up winger lights) I thought it would be simple to buy a power pack as with mobile phones etc but it seems not.

Well Des, I'm going to step into the vaccuum and try and answer your questions and teach you to suck eggs until a real expert turns up.

First thing - have you considered rechargeable batteries?

Second thing - does your camera display the battery life status? Ours does, don't know if that is a common feature. Very useful though.

If yes to both then you could set up a control experiment before placing it for real and see which of the different  settings give you the best battery life set against what you want to record.

[bgmnts]

^ how lovely. Is that you hand feeding the little un?

Makes his pecker look bigger.

[AzureSky]

BlodwynPig - I can't believe it, is that a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker IN THE UK? I have been looking for these recently, in a place where I know they are, but still haven't ever seen one, they are incredibly rare in the UK now.

I had a great week in Norfolk 2 weeks ago, loads of 'lifers': Green-winged Teal, Long-tailed Duck, Shorelarks, male Hen Harrier, Golden Plovers, Glossy Ibis, possible Twites... I love Norfolk and it's even better with a bird app that gives you locations and sightings of rare birds.

[BlodwynPig]

^ how lovely. Is that you hand feeding the little un?

Yes, magical. They would fly alongside me as i walked too

[Vodkafone]

Yes, magical. They would fly alongside me as i walked too

In Canada right?

[BlodwynPig]

BlodwynPig - I can't believe it, is that a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker IN THE UK? I have been looking for these recently, in a place where I know they are, but still haven't ever seen one, they are incredibly rare in the UK now.

I had a great week in Norfolk 2 weeks ago, loads of 'lifers': Green-winged Teal, Long-tailed Duck, Shorelarks, male Hen Harrier, Golden Plovers, Glossy Ibis, possible Twites... I love Norfolk and it's even better with a bird app that gives you locations and sightings of rare birds.

Hamilton, Canada -sorry.

[BlodwynPig]

I think the small one is a downy woodpecker

[Vodkafone]

That blue one looks a bit judgey, ngl

[BlodwynPig]

That blue one looks a bit judgey, ngl

Fucks don't hand feed, just stare and wait

[lauraxsynthesis]

Beautiful birdies. AWAB All Woodpeckers Are Beautiful.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

Lovely walk in the woods, yesterday, with the sun beams pouring through the mist. Youse'll have to take my word for it, as I didn't take any photos. Lovely view of a redwing, its eyestripe picked out by those same sunbeams.

As I walked down the track past the church into the woods proper, I caught sight of an interesting bird: long, sleek wings with a distinct long taper at the, I dunno, elbow? And a distinctive set of very short fluttery wing beats, like it was really holding back. I last saw the same shape and action from a peregrine falcon at York Minster.

I saw two of these birds this morning. Could it be we have a pair looking for a territory here? I don't want to be too precise about location. I'm roughly 8 miles out from a big city centre, near a patch of green belt. One of the city universities has a breeding programme, which adds a certain circumstantial evidence to my hypothesis.

So, am I deluded? What are some other clues to help me identify these birds? (I have Merlin on my phone, but on both occasions there wasn't so much as a peep out of them.) Also, am I being overly excitable? I've been out of the UK for much of the last decade - are peregrines like sparrows, these days?

[Des Wigwam]

@Brian Freeze - thanks and yes am considering rechargeable batteries if I start putting it out regularly. I read on a forum that the problem with them is they are lower voltage - just below the threshold the camera needs - but that could have been some shill for Energiser. I did put it out on a disappointing test run the other week and it coped pretty well on some slightly old batteries so will see how it goes.

@Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead - could it have been a sparrowhawk?

[bgmnts]

Lovely stuff! Birds have the most fantastic confrontational to judgemental faces. A peregrine falcon would be a top sighting. I am very sure I saw a peregrine a several years ago in South Wales, near the M4. Hard to tell when they're well up in the air.

Without descending into piss poor pastoral poetry, I have fallen in love with the high flying finches* flittering in the tree opposite my bedroom window. It's like a really jittery cirque du soleil trapeze exhibition.

I've also found myself feeling really gutted for the pigeon who, after ages of silent shuffling towards a potential mate, and the subsequent display of feathers, the recipient fucks off to another branch or tree and leaves the poor bastard to reflect on his failure. Commiserations with a fucking pigeon!




*could still be baby tits, as they still look slightly blue and yellow to me.

[Des Wigwam]

Would be too early for babbies to have fledged so probably just adults and there will be a lot of activity what with looking for affordable housing and a shag.

Garden is really coming alive at the moment.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

@Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead - could it have been a sparrowhawk?

We do get sparrowhawks around here, but this seemed considerably bigger - when I first caught sight of the pair, I initially assumed they were red kites, which are like bluebottles here - and the wing shape and flying style both seemed different to a sparrowhawk.

[AzureSky]

I finally found the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker on Sunday and it was incredible! I tried on 3 separate occasions, leaving the house at 6am and driving an hour to the location to try and see it.

Last Sunday I heard it at 7:30 and 7:40, but didn't see it. Then nothing for 2 hours and I got chatting to another birder. I gave up and left for home only to hear it drumming again, so headed back and there it was, drumming away on a dead branch. Best birding experience I've had so far, a mission that was created in January finally paid off. I feel very lucky to have seen it in the UK.

When I work out how to upload a photo I will try. Someone said imgur, but doesn't seem to work on my phone.

[bgmnts]

I finally found the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker on Sunday and it was incredible! I tried on 3 separate occasions, leaving the house at 6am and driving an hour to the location to try and see it.

Last Sunday I heard it at 7:30 and 7:40, but didn't see it. Then nothing for 2 hours and I got chatting to another birder. I gave up and left for home only to hear it drumming again, so headed back and there it was, drumming away on a dead branch. Best birding experience I've had so far, a mission that was created in January finally paid off. I feel very lucky to have seen it in the UK.

When I work out how to upload a photo I will try. Someone said imgur, but doesn't seem to work on my phone.

I've found imgbb to be the easiest to use for uploading and posting here.

[AzureSky]

Thank you.

Here are the links:

https://ibb.co/mGj2wHn
https://ibb.co/3SfC2Ky

First one is what I took on my crappy camera, 2nd one is a picture of it on someone else's good camera.

Not sure how to get to them show automatically, embedded, though? I'm sure someone has told me before also..

[Dex Sawash]

Not sure how to get to them show automatically, embedded, though? I'm sure someone has told me before also..

May have to hit REPLY button, QUICK REPLY box may not show all tools in every browser. Once the post making box comes up, at top, next to youtube button is a button that looks like a tv, hit that button. A popup appears, put your image link in where it says URL and hit INSERT.  You can usually ignore the width and height fields.

[AzureSky]

My crap picture of the LSW


A picture of good picture of the LSW by someone else:

[AzureSky]

That didn't work then.

I clicked on the TV icon, pasted the in the links and clicked Insert and it generated a link like this one below, but no picture is embedded (I've spaced the link out below to prevent it trying to do something with it):

[ i m g ] https://ibb.co/fGfy7sN [ / i m g ]

[bgmnts]

With imgbb you have to select a certain link type to paste into the TV symbol to embed the image.

I think selecting the 'direct link' under the image on imgbb (the link should end with .jpg).

[Brian Freeze]

Four clumps of frogspawn in our little pond. A 100% increase on last year, which was the first year they graced us with the blessing of tadpoles. Love the little buggers.

[Brian Freeze]

Saw some wild goats doing wild goat things in Wales today, very cool customers, totally cigs arsed about scrambling up and down daft cliffs and all that.

The day before we saw a seagull drown and start eating a pigeon. We missed the takedown and Mrs F wasn't keen on watching the meal but it was as fucking horrible as you might imagine.

[Endicott]

I saw a herring gull demolish a crab last summer, basically dashing it's shell to pieces on a concrete path. It was very efficient.

Also I was walking on the sea wall grass embankment by a local estuary last weekend where periodically there were tons of oyster shells left by birds at places where there was stone or concrete handy for bashing them on.

[Buelligan]

Les house martins sont arrivées !!!  Saw first poppies yesterday and ate first homegrown strawberry.  Nice.

[bgmnts]

Tidy!

I witnessed a proper squirrel vs magpie fight in the smooth-barked tree opposite.

Not even joking, they jumped after each other and the magpie stopped, looked directly at me, then flew away, leaving the squirrel victorious. Squirrel then ate some generic twiggy chow with its tail well high above its head. It then proceeded to engage in some celebratory acrobatics, which is always an absolute joy to watch, even at my ripe old age.

I'm still unsure what the look was for, if it was "oh shit I've been spotted" or "can you see what I have to deal with?".