Enthusiastic Bathing Birdies

I checked our BirdCam to see if we'd been fortunate enough to snap a photo of the hawk capturing his lunch. No such luck, but we did get a series of pictures of enthusiastic bathers, which I winnowed down to a few. In summer the birds appreciate a good bath to rid themselves of pests and parasites, and in winter our birdbath, heated just enough to never freeze, exerts an intense attraction.

Here a female cardinal splashes daintily as a junco awaits her turn.

Among the prettiest visitors are the blue jays.

Sometimes the camera catches an avian citizen in flight.

Some species prefer to quickly fly by the bath first, inspecting it on the wing, and perch just beyond. Only when everything looks satisfactory will they land on the rim, and even then they are constantly scanning for danger (deservedly so!). Others, particularly the cardinals, prefer to sneak up on the birdbath by hopping through the honeysuckle vines that entwine the step railings, emerging only at the last moment. 

Robins are year-round, but the bath in winter is a special point of congregation.

Handsome winter-time pests are the starlings. Their peroxided feather-edges catch they eye, but they'll empty the birdbath just from splashing around, and then poop in it.

The petite tufted titmouse is the best. Whee!

Lunchtime for the Red-Tailed Hawk

Today Joan noticed the crows making lots of noise. Well, they usually do that, but this time it was loud and angry. She discovered that a red-tailed hawk was in the trees at the edge of the woods eating lunch. I grabbed my camera and gently opened the back door. The hawk gave me enough time for two pictures, one with better exposure, and then decided he didn't care for my looks, flying deeper into the woods to complete his repast.

If you click on the photo, you can see some meat in the hawk's beak, and that the victim is a bird with white underparts and pink legs and feet. I can't identify it, though.

PlantCam Timelapse with Clivia and Snowfall

In addition to a couple of books, at Christmas time I received a PlantCam, a time-lapse camera from the same outfit that makes the motion-sensitive BirdCam that we've used for the last couple of years. You've seen some pictures from that unit, including this post. With this blog entry I will subject you to my first time-lapse "compositions." No doubt there will be a learning curve.

Note: the YouTube clips default to a 360p setting, at least for me, but the original material is 480 pixels high. The clips will look much crisper if you go to the 360p that shows up on the right side of the YouTube playback controls and click to change it to 480p. Unfortunately, the clickable 360p shows up only after playback begins! If I ever find a way around this ugliness, I will update this post.

My first subject was a large, nay, huge clivia that grows near our first-floor bay window. In late December Clivia (that's her proper name) starting pushing up a stalk, and I set the PlantCam to take a frame once every 5 minutes, with this clip recording from December 31st to January 17th.

As you can see, the camera position with regard to the sun was poor, causing washout and flaring. (I threw out the worst of the glare-burned frames.)  But it did reveal that Clivia does a lot of growing at night, of which there is a surplus at year's end, with the first frame of each new day showing a jump in the stalk.

The next clip is of the snowfall -- well, the first part of it -- of January 20th. The camera was positioned on a tripod in a protected corner of the front porch, and set to grab one frame per minute. After a while the snow starts to accumulate on the street, and then the snow on the bushes in the immediate foreground piles up. You will notice that I changed the PlantCam setting so that it no longer smacked an intrusive imprint  across the bottom of the frame; instead I wrote a script using ImageMagick, an open-source tool, to create a watermark in the lower left corner with the date and time.

Technical note: the date and time were extracted from each frame of the clip, specifically, from the EXIF data that every modern digital camera includes in a JPEG file. I don't use the PlantCam's ability to create the movie within the camera; first, I would rather have the opportunity to process each frame, as with the watermark, and second, the PlantCam's automatic movie generation cannot handle a large number of frames. I again used an open-source tool, ffmpeg, to generate a movie from the many still images.

The final and best clip is of the very sunny day after the snowfall. The light and shadows make this clip, recorded at one frame every 30 seconds, great fun to watch. Yours truly is one of the early shovelers.

I'll continue to experiment with the PlantCam, and come spring and summer, there will be plenty of daylight.