Ring-necked parakeets in the wild - in Surrey, UK!

We've known these parakeets have been living wild for years in London and further afield, but this is the first time we got a video of them! They're in an apple tree in a garden in a housing estate:

Of course, our cockatiels demanded to have a new video for themselves too...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Kick the Frenchman's Head

No, really, this is the name of a game played in Winchelsea every Boxing Day! Three teams try to get the 'head' into a single goal, and there are no rules. Players and spectators are there at their own risk (and we did see some minor injuries). This year we cycled over there to watch it, here's the video:

Tracy took some good stills as well:

More pictures on Flickr...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Greater spotted woodpecker video

"The best size camera is the one you use most". Well, this was certainly true yesterday, when Tracy used her pocket-sized Canon SX220 to capture our best video yet of a Greater Spotted Woodpecker:

I did actually do some software image stabilisation to get rid of the camera shake that's unavoidable at 14x zoom, using the excellent Deshaker plugin for VirtualDub. If you want to see how how the video looked before stabilisation, check this out:

Here's a still picture:

We did get a bit of work done too... There's a ride that still needs opening up, to link the work we did in 2008/9 to the area that was coppiced last winter:

I got to work with the chainsaw on the slightly larger trees at the end...

...while Tracy worked on some Hazel. She was saving bits like this:

to make bits like this:

They will eventually be coat hooks, once the upright bit is split - we'll do a video at some point...

I produced a nice pile of logs for a few hours work too:

Back up there again soon...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Building a firewood store: part 3

A while ago I posted pictures of the construction of our firewood store (part 1 and part 2), but we've made one more small addition to it.

We found that although rain dripping off the lower edge of the roof was well clear of the wood stored inside, the splashes when the drips landed were making the wood wet. So, we've added a gutter, suspended from the roof slats by short lengths of paracord:

We may add something to collect the rainwater from it later, but at present we're getting more than enough from the house roof.

We then went up to the wood to do the same to the shelter that EWB had built for us back in March, but this time we definitely wanted to harvest the rainwater so we can use it for the fruit trees in the summer. So, we got hold of a couple of old dustbins from Freecycle, and cut a hole in the lid:

and then fitted in the downpipe. We wanted a lid on to prevent wildlife falling in and drowning.

While we were up there, we also stripped off the plastic from roof of our old firewood shelter, as it was degrading from UV exposure, and replaced it with a tarpaulin and some old corrugated plastic we had spare. We'll do something more permanent with roof felt later I think, but this is an improvement for now:

and finally, we went for a bike ride (in the drizzle) this morning to try and video some herons down near Military Road. We didn't see any herons, but we did get a nice video of some swans feeding:

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Cockatiel videos

Tracy's been having great fun with hew new camera (a Canon SX220), here's some videos of our pet cockatiels up to their daily mischief...

She's looking forward to using it in the woods soon!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.