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

  • Bird Box Entrance Reducer

    Wren-sized entrance reducer in place
    Wren-sized entrance reducer in place

    We put out bird boxes to encourage more House Wrens, but House Sparrows often take over the boxes. This year we kept the boxes down until the sparrows had already started their nests in the bushes, hoping that the wrens would get a head start on their nests. Two days after we put the boxes up, we had a nesting pair of wrens… and two days later a pair of sparrows had evicted them and were installing their own nest.

    Rechecking the box specs, it seems wrens prefer a hole somewhere between 7/8″ and 1-1/8″, but I’d drilled 1-1/2″ holes for bluebirds (a long time ago, before we knew bluebirds vastly preferred the edges of open fields). Making a hole larger is easy, making one smaller is more difficult.

    Cutting off the barb
    Cutting off the barb

    I thought of making a wood bushing, then came to my senses: a 3/4″ thick wood ring with 1/4″ walls just wasn’t going to work. Given that the wrens (or their ancestors or relatives) have already tried nesting in our gardening boots, bicycle helmets, and tool trays, I figured they wouldn’t be too fussy about the material around their entrance hole.

    To the Basement Laboratory Machine Shop Wing!

    The parts heap disgorged a box of huge hose barb fittings, one of which had a 1.1″ ID and a 1.4″ OD: close enough. I parted off 3/4″ from the end of the barb, using a bit not really suited for the purpose that gave a nearly perfect edge in the soft plastic. One swipe with a deburring tool and it’s done.

    Bushing ready to install
    Bushing ready to install

    A few wraps of duct tape provided a nice press fit and a springy retaining force without gluing the barb in place. This is pretty, mmmm, barbaric, but if it survives one nesting cycle I’ll do something much nicer.

    Time is definitely of the essence here, as we fear the wrens have been driven away: we haven’t heard them since their eviction. I did three boxes in about half an hour; we’ll see what transpires.

    The bottom pic shows the box from the front yard, where Downy Woodpeckers nested for a few years. They thought the hole needed a bit of renovation… and they have the tools for the job!

  • Radio-Equipped Turtle

    Radio-Equipped Turtle
    Radio-Equipped Turtle

    We met this lass while walking around the high school one evening.

    My first thought was that eliminating the Morse Code requirement has definitely broadened the amateur radio population, but it turns out she’s part of the Hudsonia Blanding’s Turtle study. Perhaps the new construction around the school has opened pathways for her to explore the world.

    She seemed to be looking for a way up-and-over the curb to return home. We figured she was big enough to figure this out on her own and old enough to have done so many times before, so we left her to her own devices. When last seen, she was chugging along the curb at a pretty good clip.

    Listen for tag 123122 (or 817) on 150.888 MHz… she’s running AM QRP with a bad antenna.

    Update: It’s hard to tell with turtles, but it’s a girl! When I reported the tag number to Hudsonia, they said “817 is one of our old-timers; we’ve been tracking her for at least 10 years now.”

    Go, turtle, go!

  • Wooly Bear Caterpillar

    This gizmo appeared in one of Mary’s garden containers and, as is their custom, curled up tight and stayed that way when she picked it up.

    Wooly Bears generally have a central brown band, but all-black isn’t unusual. I hadn’t known about the orange bands across the back between the body segments.

    Those spiny hairs are so stiff and it weighs so little that it skitters around on the desk at the slightest touch, all without moving a muscle…

    Find out more about Wooly Bears there or by searching on the obvious keywords.

    We put it back in the garden where it can turn into a moth and produce more Wooly Bears to delight children of all ages.

    Photography note: exposing a dead-black spiny thing against a woodgrain desktop is basically impossible. The desktop is grossly overexposed so the Wooly Bear details come out more-or-less visible. Ugly, but you get the idea.

  • Pileated Woodpecker

    This fellow has been helping to remove the stump in the front yard for a quite a while; today he let me peek around the edge of the door and take a few pictures…

    He’s about crow-sized with a much snappier paint job.

    Scary-sharp beak!

    Taken with a Sony DSC-H5 with their VCL-HGD1758 1.7x teleconverter lens at about 50 feet, then ruthlessly cropped. Not as good as an SLR with a real telephoto lens, but good enough for my simple needs. The teleconverter with a macro lens on the back provides some standoff distance for photos of tabletop widgetry.

  • Infra-red Photography: Roosting Turkeys

    The turkeys were discussing their activities yesterday evening while getting ready for bed in the trees out back. This isn’t unusual, but they seemed rather louder than usual.

    We walked out the driveway, me with the Sony DSC-F717 in IR Night Shot mode, and eavesdropped for a while. The two early birds in the trees may have been air bosses for the rest of the flock, as nobody else arrived while we were there.

    So I didn’t get any pictures, but it reminded me of some I took a few years ago when a hen with a gaggle of chicks roosted in a maple directly in front of the house.

    Three peeps are easy to see, but she had at least two others snuggled up on her left side!

  • Photo Tweakage: Mouse Tunnels in the Snow

    Mouse tunnels in the snow
    Mouse tunnels in the snow

    As the snow cover melts away in the spring, you discover how much activity has been going on.

    The mice make elaborate tunnels with spaces for seed stores, latrines, and numereous secret entrances near the bushes. For a few months, at least, they can scamper all over the yard without worrying about becoming snacks for owls and hawks.

    This kind of picture requires a bit of tweakage, because the default camera settings deliver an essentially gray picture with no contrast. The usual auto-exposure settings assume a more-or-less neutral background, so the camera adjusts the exposure to deliver a neutral result. Unfortunately, you really want most of the background to be white, so the default snow image will be grossly underexposed.

    Set the camera to overexpose the picture by 1 or 2 EV; if your camera has a histogram display, adjust the exposure to put that huge bump on the white end close to the right side of the histogram. It helps if you frame the picture before doing this, as the LCD monitor will be pretty much retina-burn white.

    Take the picture and get it into your PC.

    GIMP Level Adjustment Window
    GIMP Level Adjustment Window

    Now, in your favorite photo-editing software (The GIMP on our desktops), adjust the photo’s levels & contrast. This screen shot shows the logarithmic histogram; the linear one is basically just one peak 3/4 of the way to the right side with a little grass on the rest of the chart. The two little buttons in the upper-right choose linear or log.

    Drag the white point (the teeny white triangle on the right, just below the histogram) until it’s just a bit to the right of the abrupt dropoff’s foot. That sets the whitest part of the picture to real white, not half-a-stop-down light gray.

    You can do the same with the black point (the black triangle on the left), setting it to just left of the black dropoff. In this case, we have some genuinely dark areas, so leave it alone.

    Now, the key part: drag the middle triangle to adjust the gamma. Move it rightward to darken the overall image by decreasing the gamma and emphasize small differences on the bright end of the histogram. That makes the tunnels pop out of the image, although it also tends to make the snow look very contrasty.

    Don’t go overboard with this sort of thing, but a little adjustment can reveal details and bring pictures back to life. It’s not for Ansel Adams quality pix, that’s for sure.

    Here’s possibly more than you want to know about levels & gamma & contrast, but with much better illustrations and more descriptions: Unai Garro’s Blog. He has other useful tutorials, too.

  • They’re Getting Bolder!

    Turkey on the Patio
    Turkey on the Patio

    Got up this morning, looked out the kitchen window, and there stands a turkey on the patio!

    They’ve been edging closer and closer for the last week or so; we think the snow cover is making the seeds under the feeder look more attractive. As nearly as we can tell, though, they have yet to venture across the patio to the feeder: no tracks in the snow.

    What would be really impressive: a row of turkeys lined up on the patio railing, just like they do on our neighbor’s split-rail wooden fence.