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Wildlife Camera (Part 10)

July 29, 2015

It’s been a while, but once again it’s time for some snaps from our backyard wildlife camera! I dusted it off a couple of weeks ago and put it out on the back patio facing away from the house on an angle. Here’s the first shot on it:

If you think that’s me carefully placing a feeder in shot to attract animals… well I’m guilty as charged!

There were about 90 shots on the camera, about 45% of which were like this…

…and another 45% like this…

Yes that’s me mowing!

The other 10% were very interesting though. Let’s get the squirrel shots out of the way first:

We saw chipmunks (and birds) eating from the feeder as well, but apparently they are too small or fact to trigger the shutter so there were no photos of them.

However it seems the feeder wasn’t just popular with the squirrels and chipmunks. Here’s the night photos (click on them to enlarge):

Strangely I don’t think this is the cat we usually see in our yard. I bet Yossie and Emi know all about this visitor 🙂

That’s a deer, hiding behind the first bowl (which is full of dead branches yes I know and I will clean it up soon!)

That one is a real mystery. It’s small and sleek and probably dark-furred. Could it be a rat? I think it’s too big for a mole (which we have seen in our backyard before). Any ideas?

A possum! And the first clear shot I’ve got of one on our camera! I wonder where he lives?

Another first: a skunk! A little one as well, probably a baby. This is not surprising to us, since we’ve seen skunks in our yard before (even a mother and two babies a couple of years ago), but this is the first time I’ve caught one on the feeder.

These night shots surprised me because of the variety and because in every case there was only one of each animal. There were however a few shots with no visible animal and I wonder if there were things lurking in the dark beyond the range of the sensor that had triggered it. I fiddled with contrast on some of them to explore with no luck. Perhaps it was just the wind?

I love using this camera and the excitement of looking at the photos. I’ll be putting it out again this time for a month or so 🙂

Blast From The Past

June 30, 2015

A few weeks ago, I visited Notre Dame in Paris. It was a spectacular place, and I remember it fondly.

On that trip I purchased the following papercraft kit of this very same cathedral:

This was originally intended as a gift for my brother, but as these things tend to happen, I decided it would be mine! Here’s the contents once opened:

The fact all the pieces are pre-cut and pre-scored is a big plus, since craft kits of this type that require you to cut the pieces out of a book are massive pains in the butt (which I know from personal experience). Even so, the kit was a bit tricky to put together, mostly because of the complexity of the curved surfaces (especially the steeple). Here it is completed:

Impressive isn’t it! It’s about 20 cm long and stands about 15 cm high, and is quite sturdy and a decent recreation of the original building. For a model made of paper, I was quite impressed.

But I thought I could improve on the kit with a little modification of my own…

…such as by making a few additions:

That’s five fireworks, 4 small guys and one ‘Mini Californian Rocket Fountain’ (from which I had snapped the stick to raise it from the ground). I put my considerable pyromantic skills to work and filled the empty space inside the Notre Dame model with these five bundles of fun:

If all went well, this would faithfully reproduce the great fire (that never actually happened) that caused irreparable damage to Notre Dame in 17XX (that never actually happened). A quick trip outside, and here’s the completed modified kit sitting peacefully on our ‘fireworks launching log’ waiting for the flame…

Three fuses. Five fireworks. Could I light them all and get to safety in time? What would actually happen? Would it fizzle out? Burn? Be spectacular? There was only one way to find out:

OMG! Just… omg! Here’s the aftermath:

My Notre Dame papercraft model: it lived fast, died young, and went out in a blaze of glory. What more could it have wanted?

Cracker Night

June 17, 2015

When I was a kid, there was a legendary day that occurred every year with at least the importance of Christmas or a birthday. That was ‘cracker night’! Celebrated in early June (to coincide the with The Queen’s Birthday) this was an Australian tradition dating back to the 1800s that can trace it’s origins all the way back to Guy Fawkes’ failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

But of course as kids we didn’t know that! All we knew was that it was the only time of the year we could buy and fire off our own fireworks!

Roman Candles, Catherine Wheels, Throwdowns, Morning Stars, Crazy Jacks, Double Bungers – all these names (and more!) were the music of my youth. We’d save our pennies avidly and buy them individually or in sets at our local shops, amassing a vast collection before the long-awaited day when they would all be fired off. As we got older we got creative, and I can remember many hours spent carefully dismantling crazy jacks to extract the gunpowder inside so it could be used to craft out own bigger (but inevitably not better) ‘crackers’.

One never-to-be-forgotten memory was how Bernard and I spent hours – days – carefully assembling one of those cardboard medieval villages (from a book) and then rigging the entire thing with gunpowder and fuses extracted from extra fireworks so we could ‘blow it up’ in spectacular style. Of course it just fizzled and burned, but I’m sure we thought it glorious in those days!

I used to get so excited on cracker night I was probably gibbering. It was magical. And then, on June 7 1986, came the last ever cracker night.

Safety was the reason. Too many fires; too many injuries. I myself burned my hand badly one time when a crazy jack fired out the back end while I was holding it as a makeshift light saber. It’s miraculous I didn’t hurt myself more, since I vividly recall my cousin Troy and I used to fire Roman Candles at each other and try and block the exploding projectiles with garbage lids. Those were the days.

At any rate too many children were injured; too many fires were started, and too many adults had presumably become irritated by the noise. So most of Australia banned home fireworks and cracker night sunk into legend.

It had always been this way in NY State here in the US, and KLS had never had the joy of annual home fireworks. In my years here I have bought the occasional firework while in other states, but even sparklers have been mysteriously unavailable for almost the entire time I’ve lived here. I just assumed that I’d never again know the joy of lighting my own fireworks. And then, last weekend, we found this in a local grocery store:

What? What?? Fireworks for sale right in the grocery store? What bizarro world had we fallen into?

A quick internet search revealed that about six months ago our state passed a law that made it possible for select counties to sell fireworks for only one month of the year (leading up to July 4), and even then the specific types available were restricted to fountains. No launchers, no ‘bangers’, nothing that flies. But fireworks are legal here now?

Needless to say, we bought some:

And the last few nights we’ve been setting them off:

Now as I said these are just fountains, and photos hardly do them justice, but the thrill is real!

We’ve almost shot them all now, but we’ve saved the biggest (‘Pyro Fan’!!!) for last. But we’ll certainly be heading back to the store to buy more!

Amusingly the county we live in hasn’t legalized these, and it was pure coincidence that we took a drive up north to a different county where we found them. Given that they can only be sold for a couple more weeks, maybe it’s time to stock up 🙂

It may not be quite the experience of cracker night I remember from my youth, but I have to admit the excitement of backyard fireworks – especially after such a long time – is still there!

Robot Claw