The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Wildlife

Other creatures in our world

  • Camouflaged Katydid

    Katydid on matching umbrella
    Katydid on matching umbrella

    This gadget appeared on an umbrella we’d left outdoors to dry.

    We wonder if the green surface seemed like a leaf…

  • Bumblebees!

    The Butterfly Bush is attracting all manner of insects, including these bumblebees. It looks like one is gathering propolis, as the stuff on her back leg looks sticky rather than grainy.

    I’d never noticed their three ocelli before!

  • Harvestman Not-a-Spider

    Saw several of these critters on our tent while we were packing up in the morning; I’m in favor of anything that eats small insects, so Harvestmen get a pass. I don’t know if those frogs eat ’em, but that’s something they can work out without my attention.

    Then I found another Harvestman on a window when we got home. Not having seen the underside of one in quite a while, I was struck by the “alien face” pattern. I suppose the reddish dot under the alien’s nose is the Harvestman’s mouth, just like it looks.

    Eeeek!

    They’re actually pleasant to have around and tickle mightily when they crawl up your arm. We gently deport them from the house and generally manage to deposit them undamaged on a plant, where we presume they’ll be much happier.

  • Giant Swallowtail Butterfly

    Mary planted some Butterfly Bushes in front of the living room window and shazam we have butterflies. Highly recommended!

    This unusual butterfly came by yesterday. The invaluable Butterflies Through Binoculars identifies it as a Giant Swallowtail Butterfly and says:

    • Similar species: None
    • Range: North to around Philadelphia
    • Comments: Formerly found further north. A colony existed in the 1950s in Dutchess Co., NY.

    So either this chap’s range is expanding northward or that colony never quite died out.

  • Turkey Hen and Chicks

    Turkey hen with chicks
    Turkey hen with chicks

    It’s that time of the year again: a pair of hens and about a dozen chicks have been cruising through the yard. The chicks vary from softball- to football-sized, so we think the hens are tending a creche.

    The chicks are, of course, insufferably cute…

    We haven’t seen a hen with chicks roosting in the trees this year, but that just means they’re using trees near the creek rather than ones we can see from the house.

    Tom Turkey Closeup
    Tom Turkey Closeup

    That cute thing the chicks have going for them tapers off pretty quickly as they grow up.

    Wow, are those big toms ugly!

    But it works well enough for turkeys, so who are we to complain?

  • Tree Frog: The Video

    Frog walking on tent
    Frog walking on tent

    Watching the tree frogs crawl up the tent from inside let us see how they move: hand-over-hand up the fabric. A dozen of them crawling along was spooky…

    I took a movie with my pocket camera that turned into an 8 MB AVI, which I can’t upload here. Most of it isn’t all that interesting, anyway, an observation which hasn’t stopped YouTube dead in its tracks yet, but we can do better than that.

    A pair of Free Software programs extracts the interesting part and produces a (somewhat) smaller animated GIF that works with WordPress.

    First, shatter the AVI into separate JPG images:

    mkdir frames
ffmpeg -i cimg3781.avi -sameq frames/frame-%03d.jpg

    A bit of browsing showed that I wanted frames 227 through 265 and that the frog was pretty much in the upper-middle of the image. So, crop a 320×240 image around the frog from those 640×480 frames:

    cd frames
mkdir stills
for f in `seq 227 265` ; do convert frame-$f.jpg -crop 320x240+160+60 stills/still-$f.jpg ; done

    Then convert them into an animated GIF with a 500-ms frame rate (the -delay ticker is 10 ms):

    cd stills
convert -delay 50 still-2* frogwalk.gif

    It’s a 1.6 MB wad, but gets the message across: frogs keep three paws stuck to the floor.

    Remember, that little guy is moving at glacial speed in the GIF: those 40 frames of video last just over a second in real time.

    Memo to self: MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 only support video-style frame rates around 30 fps.

    Update: Regular reader Przemek Klosowski showed me how to generate those numeric sequences on the fly, without using a for loop:

    There's this neat Bash construct {1..10} that you can use directly after ffmpeg:
convert -delay 50 still-{227..430}* result.gif

You can even skip every nth frame:
convert -delay 50 still-{227..430..5}* result.gif

    Thanks!

  • Tree Frogs!

    Tree Frog - View Through Tent
    Tree Frog – View Through Tent

    We bicycled along the Pine Creek Gorge rail-trail in north-central Pennsylvania on a Rails-to-Trails Conservancy group ride, camping at schools and campgrounds along the trail. Quick summary: for four days we rode in the sun and slept in the rain.

    Tree Frog - Natural Light
    Tree Frog – Natural Light

    As we set up camp at Pettecote Junction, the wet ground was hopping with tiny tree frogs. It was impossible to avoid stepping on the critters. When we got the tent set up, they swarmed up the sides between the tent and the rain fly; perhaps they had an imperative to get above the flood?

    The lines in the tent fabric are about 3.7 mm apart, so the frogs are perhaps 10 mm from snout to butt. That size rules out everything in our RTP Eastern Reptiles & Amphibians book except the Little Grass Frog, which used to live only south of Virginia. The spot pattern doesn’t match, either, although they’re said to be highly variable. Who knows what’s going on in these degenerate days?

    cimg3787 - Tree Frog - Flash
    Tree Frog – Flash Illumination

    They didn’t like the mesh vent screens, favored the rougher tent fabric over the smoother seam binding, and didn’t seem to mind falling off the tent.

    Things are different when you’re small.

    Tomorrow: the video…