Skip to main content

Autumn is Coming

Autumn is definitely arriving here in St Albans, with the leaves starting to fall and the squirrels collecting acorns.

Autumn Berries

This greedy fellow was running around our garden with two acorns in his mouth at the same time:

Not one acorn but two!


The farmers have ploughed all the fields round about and there are plenty of Birds of Prey to be seen soaring high over the freshly ploughed fields looking for food.

Unfortunately I couldn't get close to them and the following shots are the best I could do armed with my Nikon D300s, 70-200 f/2.8G VR II and TC-1.4E II converter (420mm focal length equivalent). I think you would need a 600mm and to get a lot closer to get decent shots.

Buzzard


SparrowHawk (female)

SparrowHawk (female)


Kestrel (female)

Also saw a group of 3 partridges picking over the fields, in the same place as the Birds of Prey above - I wonder how long they will last before becoming food themselves?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Merging Git Repositories

No project of significant size that I've ever seen has retained its initial structure. Restructuring projects is a fact of life, but unfortunately Git doesn't make it easy. Fundamentally this stems from the way Git works, treating changes as a succession of snapshots and not storing any other metadata. Of course this is part of what makes Git fast and efficient, but at the expense of making some common operations more difficult for users. Git really is a perfect 21st century illustration of the classic  "Worse Is Better"  paradigm of successful software 😀 Previously I discussed how to split a Git project apart into separate repositories . Now I'm going to discuss how to do the opposite and merge separate repositories into one. On the face of it, this would seem a simpler task as Git has powerful support for merging... Let's take the opposite example to my splitting apart article - say you have a main Git repo (ProjA) and a second repo (ProjB) in...
Post a Comment
Read more

East Devon Continued

Some iPhone pictures: Seaton Bay from Beer Hill at Sunset Gulls on Beer Beach We also had a pair of Pheasants in the garden, which was a bit of a surprise. There are always plenty of rabbits and wild birds, but this is the first time I've seen game birds. Here is the male, sitting on the garden wall, wondering what I'm up to: Male Pheasant I also spotted these attractive white Cyclamen in the garden: Cyclamen
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Environment Variables and the PATH on MacOS

Time Was setting environment variables and the PATH on a Mac running OSX was just like any other *IX.  However with successive OS releases Apple have changed how this works (more than once) and generally made it more difficult 😢  This article discusses how I go about setting environment variables on Mojave and Catalina. Why does this matter? MacOS doesn't add  /usr/local/bin to the PATH by default, which is unfortunate as most *IX-style programs you build yourself will be installed in there. If you only ever launch stuff from Terminal, all you have to do is set environment variables and the path from Shell startup files in the time immemorial fashion. However, this doesn't help with native Mac Apps like Emacs, which aren't launched from a shell and where you may still want to access custom environment variables and programs in /usr/local/bin . Setting the PATH In the past you could add to the path via /etc/paths (or paths.d ), however this no longer works...
Post a Comment
Read more