This afternoon the birdsnest outside my office window has been plundered by a crow or raven. Even though the parent-birds got reinforcement by two other fieldfares they never had a chance.
The small birds only had a few days of life but they somehow enriched my days.
Because there was a problem with the Raspberry Pi again today, I took the opportunity to film my fieldfares live for a short while. In this slow-motion video you can see how first the female arrives at the nest with a fresh worm. A short while later also the male arrives with a beak full of worms for the small ones:
Ten days Mrs Fieldfare has been sitting in her nest – today was the big day: until late afternoon three eggs had hatched. Now also Mr Fieldfare has to show some effort who has not been much around the nest lately.
This is the first day in the life of the young fieldfares in time lapse:
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It took four attempts to finally get a suitable webcam to observe the bird's nest outside my office window. Most cheap webcams, even those which show off with true 720p…
I had some problems with fswebcam to set the automatic exposure. The exact way how to enter certain parameters is not clear from the lacking documentation, but it works fine…
Nils Paakkonen was probably right, my new neighbors outside the office window is a pair of Fieldfares.
This morning the whole family was at the nest:
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Last Friday I heard some strange noises outside my office window. To my big surprise I then noticed that there was a bird’s nest growing on the window sill. It did not take long until I even saw the new tenant moving in:
So far I have identified the birds as Song thrushs and the nest was steadily growing until about lunch time. After lunch no bird returned and I was almost afraid that something might have scared them off. However, I still planned to install a webcam to watch the nest during the coming weeks.
In the evening I set up a left-over Raspberry Pi Model A and an simple USB webcam. It’s running Raspbian Jessie and fswebcam and curl using a cron-ed script file. The camera itself is duct-taped to the inside of my office window.
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There is a geocaching challenge in Uppsala: to visit all 8 municipalities in the county of Uppsala within 24 hours. When I first saw this challenge, I wondered if it…
Today was the Swedish midsummer eve - and I used the free day for a bicycle ride. Hunting geo-caches also brought me in contact with nature. Paris quadrifolia is quite…
Today the art festival “all lights on Uppsala” ended and Christmas season officially started with the 23rd annual fireworks by the local newspaper UNT.
During the festival, the artists and the city officials wanted to emphasize why LEDs will be the light source of the future. At one of the installations the efficiency of the humble incandescent light bulb was compared to the LED. There everyone passing by could read that the incandescent light bulb “converts 75% of the energy into heat and only 25% into light”.
I tried to reach the responsible people already in the first week of the festival, but only got a reply after 2 1/2 weeks. At that time it was considered too late to correct it to the correct number: an incandescent light bulb is much better than pointed out. Not only 75% of the electric energy is converted into heat, but rather 97.5%. Only about 2.5% of the electric power is converted into light!
But in the believe of their 25% efficient incandescent light bulbs it is probably understandable that the city of Uppsala even this year continues to use incandescent lights in their Christmas illumination – while Stockholm has abandoned the use of incandescents for this purpose two years ago.
I myself continue to use LEDs in my Christmas decorations. Last year the LED conversion bulbs for the 7-lighted window decorations were only sold in packs of 4 – kind of stupid, unless you had enough of these decorations or wanted to take apart some of the bulbs. This year at least Biltema is selling packs of 7 in two different versions: one with two 3mm LEDs inside the bulb, and one with a single diffuse 5mm LED inside. Both of them appear to be even better than last year’s versions – both in light color and manufacturing quality.
