I’ve mentioned that most of the photos that have been sent to me reside on my Big Computer back in Chicago (the mowse is the size of a CAW!), so I’m largely confined to showing photos sent me while I’m here in Boston (I’ll be home on Thursday). Fortunately, some readers have continued to send snaps. Here are a few:
Reader Mal Morrison sent an interspecies kerfuffle from Plymouth, Devon:
I wandered out onto my balcony with a cup of tea this morning and noticed a group of 4 Eurasian Magpies (Pica pica) examining an old nest in a nearby tree. One of them alighted on a Georgian house 10 metres from the tree. The disused chimney in the house is being used by by Jackdaws (Corvus momendula) for nesting (they are using the slot that can be seen in the photo). The picture is of the outcome of the encounter.
Reader Pyers snapped some herons on a bibulous trip:
Just got back from the week on the canals and, apart from the ubiquitous mallards and moorhens, these are the best of the photos ( the weather was a bit grey):
We had just paused for water ( you must top up with drinking water on a regular basis – imagine running out ….. 😉 and I saw this gray heron (Ardea cinerea) opposite. Grabbed the camera and got these. They are in order – the bird landed just by a mooring ring ( which is visible by its feet in the last photo)
Location: just above Tardebigge Top Lock ( the start of the longest flight of canal locks in the UK – 30 locks in about 2 ½ miles !) , Worcestershire, UK. By the way, I would really recommend a trip like that as a getaway for a party of friends. Perfect way to see very rural England and various pubs!
And of course Stephen Barnard of Idaho always comes through in the lean times:
Yet another Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) and yet another Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). I’m pretty sure, from the way the eagles were behaving, that the eggs have hatched.
Great images, all!!
Love the heron
The pictures are lovely, as always, but I have to confess that statements of the form “My only copy of X resides on computer Y” send a chill up my spine.
May I respectfully suggest some sort of online backup or cloud storage service so that (a) your photos will be accessible from anywhere, and (b) if your Big Computer goes up in smoke, you won’t lose everything.
Like DNA, digital data achieves immortality through replication. Having just one copy risks extinction.
Indeed, scary. Surely your IT department can set you up with a “home” folder on one of their servers which replicates/ auto-updates with the corresponding folder on your laptop/ device du jour.
Yes, when travelling, this can be a pain in the proverbials, but you can generally turn off replication when you don’t have the bandwidth for it, or set the rsync (other tools are available) to use no more than 10% of the available bandwidth.
It sure beats doing data recovery on fried hard drives. Been there done that, got that tee-shirt, and it looks like the moths have been at it.
Oh, you’re retiring soon. You need to talk to a friend in the IT department and get something proper (and low maintenance !) set up. Bribery with noms is a popular coin, and I’m sure you can come up with a bribery programme.
Sorry. But “bribery” is such a dirty word. But appropriate.