Thought of the Day- Motivation

Once again, I've gone through one of those phases where I go from blogging nearly 10 times a month, to not posting anything in 6 months. I'm really, really bad at keeping things consistent on here.

Usually what happens is that something comes up that distracts me from blogging for a few weeks, e.g. exams, holiday, coursework deadlines, etc. After these few weeks of distractions, I become so used to not having blogging as part of my schedule, that I lose the drive and motivation to get it back in my routine. 

I thought this through for a while today and started to think about motivation in general and how to keep an interest in something you enjoy. Having motivation for work or studies is totally different to maintaining motivation for a hobby such as a blog. With university work, and work in general, people are usually pretty motivated to get stuff done, because they know they have to get it done to get good marks/have a successful career. With something like a blog, there's nothing that forces me to keep up to date- it's completely down to me whether I keep up with it or not. 

Its a strange one, because I enjoy blogging a lot, but the idea of getting started on a post is sometimes a daunting one. Anyone that writes a blog will know that a post can take the best part of two hours, sometimes more. And with work, social activities, cooking and other stuff thrown into the mix, the amount of time available to fit in hobbies such as blogging is often limited. But I know for a fact that I've still been able to fit blogging into my schedule if I've really wanted to- I proved that earlier this year. 

One of the best things about blogging in my opinion is the sense of satisfaction when publishing a post, or taking the time to read other people's wildlife experiences from around the country. This applies to most things in life I think. The satisfaction after reading a book, watching a great film, going for a walk, etc. is all pretty similar in my opinion. It's just all about whether you have the determination to make the effort to do stuff like this often enough. 

I wonder if anyone reading this has any ideas on how to motivate yourself, or how to manage your time? I'd be interested to hear what works for different people- I've still yet to work out what works best.

Anyway, enough of the Philosophy for now, I'm going to start planning a blog post for either tomorrow or Friday, depending on what the topic is. It's not likely to be anything too lengthy, just something to post to get things up and running again.

I'll leave you with this quote which I found earlier today which seems to sum things up suitably: 

"When all is said and done, more is said than done"- Lou Holtz

Norfolk Summer Holiday 2013

Just another quick post to share some of the pictures I took whilst on holiday in Norfolk. This post has actually been written in April 2014, but has been published for August 2013, when the holiday actually was. 

The flower below, discovered on a roadside verge on a walk is Centranthus ruber (Red valerian). I think I have the ID right here, although this particular plant must have been a young one because most of the descriptions and pictures I can find online seem to suggest that these flowers grow larger, with more flower heads than the one we found. Must thank the always useful Collins Flower Guide for help on this one.

Common blue butterfly at Cley Marshes on the north Norfolk coast (sadly the location where that US air force helicopter crashed earlier this year, killing 4 people). 

And finally, a few pictures taken from the kitchen window of the cottage we were staying in. A small brown looking bird was foraging through the climbing plants on the trellis of the back garden. Wasn't convinced on the ID at first but eventually came to the conclusion that it was a juvenile whitethroat. Just strange to see one so close to the house we were staying. Probably the best view of a whitethroat I will ever get. Photos are just record shots really but you can clearly tell what the species is. 

Actually quite disappointed I don't have more photos from this holiday. Norfolk's such a fantastic part of the world, and somewhere I've always enjoyed going on holiday to. Thanks for reading. 

Skomer Island

The photos in this post were all taken on a day at Skomer Island, as part of a four day field trip to the South Pembrokeshire coast for my degree course. We were lucky enough to get a guided boat tour around the island to get a great view of the puffins, guillemots and grey seals. Here's a collection of the images I managed. Some of them were taken on the mainland before we headed out on the boat tour. 

I tried to use captions for the images on this blog post but never again will I attempt that; the formatting issues it creates are a nightmare, and virtually everything needs fixing in the HTML to fix it, so I'm just gonna describe photos in my usual unprofessional way instead; below is one of a huge area of foxgloves found on the mainland.

Lots of rock pipits were around, but they were usually at quite a distance, so the record shot below is the best I managed. 

Some grey seals chilling on the rocks. Picture taken from the tour boat.

Large colonies of guillemots on the cliff faces... 

And finally, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction to the island, puffins: 

Glad I finally managed to get this post up, had these photos hanging around for ages. Thanks for reading folks. 

Great Tit Chicks Still Going Well (17th-18th May)

It's been a few days since the chicks hatched in our camera nestbox on the 14th. The nest, which looked as though it had been attacked by something only contained two tiny chicks, the others which we presumed had died, or the eggs destroyed before they had hatched. The situation didn't look promising at all for the two remaining chicks, as the parents were struggling to feed the chicks hidden under the pile of messed up nesting material. The male especially, couldn't seem to feed the female, who wasn't particularly good at accepting the food which was being brought in to be passed onto the chicks. The amount of feeds from the parents was still quite high, and it seemed as though there was actually plenty of insect food to feed the chicks. 

Fast forward to now (the 18th), and amazingly, the two remaining chicks are still alive and both being fed by the parents. They are growing very slowly in size however. They are now 5 days old (including the day that they hatched), and they're still not an awful lot bigger than they were when they hatched. Maybe the attack on the nest caused the eggs to hatch slightly prematurely, and the chicks were smaller than they should have been. The video below shows a couple of feeds from the parents on the 17th. 

  

And the next video shows the situation of the nest on the 18th. As you can see, the video is in black and white, even though it was recorded in bright conditions in the late afternoon. So it seems as though the nesting material was covering the windows on either side of the nestbox again, stopping enough light getting into the box for colour images. Hopefully this won't last too long though, and things will be back to normal before too long.  



That's all for today's update. I just want to keep things ticking over here so that I don't have tons of stuff to get through. Thanks for reading and I'll probably be back with another video tomorrow, as things are at a pretty crucial stage right now. 

Camera Nestbox Disaster!

I left you with some relatively calm images from our camera nestbox a couple of days ago, where our female Great Tit was still incubating 5 eggs with the male Great Tit feeding her frequently. Well I think it's safe to say things have changed fairly significantly since then. And it's not been good change either...

So on the day of my last post (the 14th), our female Great Tit had been incubating the 5 eggs in our camera nestbox for about 12-13 days, so I was expecting the eggs to hatch soon. Not long after I posted that, I rang home to find out what the situation with the box was. And to my surprise, they told me that they could see at least two chicks in the nestbox. They also explained that there was something rather strange about how the nest looked. 

I asked them to send me a few photos and videos via Dropbox, and this is what I saw...



I know, what a complete mess, right! I have no idea whatsoever what happened between the photos and videos of the impeccably neat nest that we could see on the morning of the 14th, compared with the situation the nest was in later in the day. If you haven't seen what the nest looked like before, take a quick look at my last post in this camera nestbox diary. 

From what I can see here, the nest has been completely ruined by something. The nesting material was in a real state, with no distinguishable nest cup whatsoever. It looked as though a huge clump of material had been removed from the nest and placed on top. The height of the nest had increased greatly as well, and seemed to be covering up the windows on the sides of the box, meaning there wasn't enough light in the box to record in colour. The first pictures and videos I was receiving from the box at this stage were all in black and white (using the infrared function on the camera) even though they were all recorded during the daytime. The two chicks which had hatched could barely be seen under the large layer of messy nesting material which was covering them. 

My first thought was that the box may have fallen off the tree, so I asked Mum to pop outside and check that the box was still in place- which it was. So I wondered what could have possibly caused the nest to have been ruined in the way it has. My second theory was that possibly something like a Mapgie or a cat may have tried to attack the nestbox from the outside, whilst the female Great Tit was inside, and in an attempt to defend the nest she may have got quite agitated and messed up the nest by accident. I then decided that this probably wasn't the situation either. I doubt that the female Great Tit could have  caused this much damage to the nest, even if she was being very defensive. 

My final thought, and the one which I think possibly is the right one is that another small bird managed to get into the box and ruin the nest and attack the eggs. I searched online for any other records of this and found this video on youtube of a House Sparrow destroying 5 Blue Tit eggs in a camera nestbox, as well as this video of a House Sparrow killing some Blue Tit chicks in a nestbox. It didn't also mess up the nest in these situations, but it may have been that the messy nest in our camera nestbox has been caused by a fight between our female Great Tit trying to protect the nest, and any intruder that was attacking the nest. Other thoughts are that it could have been a rival Great Tit in the nest competing for the nest site or something, but I'm really not sure. Whatever it was seems to have destroyed the other 3 eggs/chicks that where in the nestbox, as I have still not seen more than 2 chicks in the nestbox. 

The Great Tit parents were still doing their best to feed the remaining two chicks and were coming in frequently to feed them. The female was still sitting on the chicks for quite a lot of the time as they were still quite small, and also popping out occasionally to get them some food too. However, although the male Great Tit was coming in often, he was really struggling to get the food to the chicks as they were hidden under that huge layer of nesting material. He just couldn't physically get to the chicks most of the time. And when the female was sat on top of the chicks, she was also very well hidden under the nesting material and pretty inaccessible to the male who was bringing in food for her and the chicks. 

Despite these difficulties, the two chicks survived the night and continued to be fed yesterday. The female has been constantly re-arranging the nesting material, and we do now have colour pictures again as the material seems to be clear of the side windows, but it still looks a complete mess. Because of this, the male was still struggling to get to the chicks to feed them, although apparently there were a few successful feeds from him, via the female. The video below shows a collection of the clips that were recorded yesterday:



Amazingly, the chicks survived the night again last night, and apparently feeding has continued throughout today as well. The male is still bringing food in which is great news. The real question is though, how long can this go on for? I'm not sure how many of the visits from the parents are actually resulting in successful feeds to the two chicks. I think the male Great Tit is pretty crucial at this stage. As the female is still sitting on the nest some of the time, and not bringing in food all the time, I'd say most of the food is coming from the male at the moment. If he were to give up on this situation now, I'd call it game over. If he sticks with it, and the chicks start to grow to a size where they can move around a bit and accept the food from the parents more readily, than this might not be a disaster just yet, it's really difficult to tell at this stage. The thing that went wrong for our Blue Tit family a couple of years ago was that the male bird disappeared and the female couldn't cope with feeding the chicks, sadly meaning the nest was a failure. I just hope the same thing doesn't happen here. 

Also, my family has been out for most of today and haven't been watching the camera too much, so I'm not sure what the full situation is. But the clip below gives you an idea of what the nest looks like today, and what stage the chicks are at right now. The nest structure has improved a little more, and the parents seem to be able to find the chicks better under that pile of nesting material. The other good thing is that there seems to be plenty of insect food around. The problem with this situation is not the frequency with which the parents are coming into the box with food- more that they can't seem to work out how to get the food to the chicks properly. The only other positive thing I can think of is that, with only two (I think) chicks in the nestbox, they may have a better chance of survival than if there were more left. But we really will just have to wait and see. The video below shows the male Great Tit coming in to feed the female, who then passes the food onto one of the chicks.



And these two images show the two tiny chicks in the nestbox under that layer of nesting material. As you can see, they are still really very small and vulnerable at this stage.

I will keep you posted as much as I can on what is going on with this nestbox, however exams are my priority right now and so I will really mostly be focussed on these over the nest few days. I will get round to replying to comments, and commenting on other people's blogs as soon as I can, but I just wanted to get this post out today before it turned into too much of a task to keep things updated. As it is this post is a lot longer than I expected it would be. 

Anyway, thank you so much for reading and if you've left a comment over the last few days thank you for those too- I have read them. I'll be back with more soon! 

Great Tit Still Incubating Eggs (May 11th-14th)

Just another quick update on the Great Tit nest. Things still seem to be going pretty well, with the female still incubating eggs and the male feeding her frequently. She's been incubating the eggs now since the 1st/2nd of May, so the eggs will hatch out anytime in the next day or two I reckon, as incubation usually lasts 12-14 days. In case you missed it, I added a post for the 10th May showing all the stuff that's been going on in the time between the 5th and the 10th. And this video basically shows what's been going on the last few days.

I compiled the video below with some of the clips I've been getting through Dropbox. Because of exams at the moment, everything is kind of getting thrown together at the moment, so none of these posts are particularly great, but I want to keep things as updated as possible. So yeah, here's the video I put together, watch in 480p if you can :D 



That's all for today's post really, just another quick update. Will be back with more soon :D

Nestbox Update (5th-10th May)

Just a quick update on the situation with the Great Tit nestbox at home. Been getting video files through Dropbox since my last post, but upcoming exams have stopped me from uploading them and posting on my blog. The video below shows a few of the things which have been going on over the last few days. Quite a bit of the footage is in black and white as it was recorded early in the morning or in the evening. 

Basically our Great Tit female is still incubating the 5 eggs in the box, and has been since around the 2nd of May. So it will only be a few days before the chicks begin to hatch. The male Great Tit has apparently been feeding her very frequently, and a couple of these feeds are in the video below. My family aren't watching the camera all the time, so the fact that they've recorded the male feed the female so many times really shows how often he visits. Hopefully this will bode well for when the eggs hatch and there are chicks to feed too. 



Since I made that video a couple of days ago, I've received a few more clips via Dropbox, so I'll sort those out and probably upload those later today. I didn't want to combine the two posts, as it's been quite a while since my last post and I thought it would be good to split up the footage over two posts. Because of this, I've posted this post for the 10th May when the video was put together, even though all the text was written on the 12th. Congratulations if you're still following what I'm saying here!

Anyway, back off to do some more work now, got exams coming up very soon so have limited time for blogging. Thanks for reading and catch you later :) 

Male feeds female Great Tit

Just a quick update on the camera nestbox today. Got a picture sent through on Dropbox yesterday showing the male Great Tit feeding the female whilst she was on the nest- remember I'm not actually at home to view all this action, my family are sending me videos and pictures from the nestbox via Dropbox to me here at uni which, so far is working very well. But it does mean that quite a bit of the time, no one is watching the camera to report on what's going on all the time. So although this was the first recorded time the male has fed the female, it could well be that it's happened a few times before this without being noticed. 

The picture below isn't very good but it clearly shows what's going on. I'm really not sure why the "take picture" option on the capture program produces such poor quality images but hopefully I'll be able to work that out sometime.

Since this happened, I've been told that the male has been into the box quite a few times to feed her, which is good news. I was pleased to get an (albeit short) video this morning showing the male Great Tit feeding the female again. This is the first time it's been recorded on video was really nice to see. Not sure what he feeds her but it looks like some kind of insect to me.  



I may well update this post as the day goes on with more videos/photos as I get them, but I just wanted to get this post done early-ish so I could get on with some work in the afternoon. 

Enjoy the rest of your bank holiday weekend :D

Still 5 Eggs

It seems the Great Tit clutch is finished at 5 eggs in our camera nestbox, as there wasn't another egg laid today. I think the female had already skipped a day at some point, so 5 looks like the final number. 

This seems unusually low to me, but a look online suggested that somewhere between 5 and 12 eggs are normal, so it seems we're just at the bottom end of this scale. I also know that nests in gardens or more urban areas in general tend to contain less eggs. Our Blue Tit nest in 2011 contained 7 eggs and this was a little lower than average too I think. I suppose it gives the parents a better chance of raising the chicks when they hatch, as there will be less mouths to feed. 

I was at home today briefly, as I needed to get a couple of things done back home, so I was able to watch the nest for much of the day. Our female Great Tit seems to be incubating the eggs properly now, and is on the nest around 70% of the time during the day, and then obviously all night when she is roosting. She seems to fidget around rather a lot, not looking comfortable for too long, just as our Blue Tit female did a couple of years ago. Watch in 480p if you can :)

Later on in the day I decided to try and record the Great Tit going into the nestbox from outside in the garden. So I left my capture program recording the inside of the nestbox while I set up my camera on a tripod outside and started recording on that. I hadn't actually got a proper view of the Great Tits going into the box before I recorded this video, and I hadn't quite realised how much of a squeeze it is for them to get through the hole. The metal protector on the front of the box has a 28mm hole, which is supposed to be suitable for Great Tits, but it seems a slightly larger hole might be better. 

Anyway, the video I managed is below. Watch in 720p if you can :) 



One thing I haven't seen yet is the male feeding the female whilst she's on the nest. As you can see in the video above, the female calls for him quite a bit, but he doesn't come in to feed her. He does however visit the garden quite a lot, and it might be that he has fed her outside the nest. 

I'm back at uni now this evening, so I'll be sent any photos/videos via dropbox over the next few days again. Anyway, thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend :) 

Nestbox Diary 2013 Update - 5 Eggs

For a few reasons, particularly work, I've been unable to post anything about what's going on in the camera nestbox over the last few days, but I've still been receiving images captured by the rest of the family back home via Dropbox and I'm happy to say the last few days seem to have gone pretty smoothly. 

There are now a total of 5 eggs in the nestbox, and the female Great Tit has started incubating the eggs. I don't think this is the end of the clutch yet but I could be wrong. I do know that garden birds have a tendency to lay fewer eggs, as there is a lower chance that the chicks will survive (our Blue Tits only laid 7 eggs when we followed them a couple of years ago). There were 2 or 3 eggs in the box on the 29th. So its possible that, if there were 2 eggs at this point, she has laid an egg a day since then or, if there were 3 eggs by this point, she has skipped out one day sometime between then and now. 

The only thing I've been receiving on Dropbox today has been images, as they are much quicker to upload and don't slow the internet down too much at home. The images below were all captured today at various points. 

And finally, a picture of the female asleep for the night: 

I may actually be back home on Saturday as I need to be home for a couple of things, so I should be able to give a more detailed update on what's going on when I get back. Until then, thanks for reading and have a nice evening :D 

Nest Final Touches & 2nd Egg

I woke up this morning to find that the female Great Tit in our nest box has laid the second egg. Unfortunately you'll have to take my word for it though! Great Tits seem remarkably good at hiding their eggs in the nest, and almost all day the nesting material was obstructing the view of both eggs. 

Other than this, much of the activity that's been going on has been the female making final adjustments to the nest. A few times she brought in a few extra bits of hair and wool to line the nest. It looks rather cosy in there now which is good news if last nights temperatures are repeated tonight. A couple of clips I recorded today can be seen in the video below.



Late this afternoon I headed back to uni which means I can no longer see what's going on in the box. However, I think I may have a solution sorted. I've been using a program called Dropbox for quite a while now- its a really useful bit of software that allows you to copy files into your "dropbox folder", which appears on all PCs that you have dropbox installed on. I use an old laptop at home for recording nestbox footage on, so I decided to tell my capture program to save any recorded files into my dropbox folder on this old laptop. The files, once saved in that folder are automatically uploaded to cloud storage. This takes quite a while as my home internet connection has a very slow upload speed. Once the file is uploaded, it's automatically downloaded onto any other PC's that are switched on, and connected to the internet which have dropbox installed and signed into my account. So as soon as the file is uploaded from my old home laptop, it automatically downloads onto my uni laptop. Still following? Well done if you are!

So basically I'm relying on someone at home recording a few clips on my old laptop. I did think for a while about working out a way for my capture software to automatically record short clips at set times of the day, but I don't think this is possible, and would have relied on the laptop being on all day which isn't particularly good from an environmental perspective. I think getting people to record clips should work okay though but we'll have to see, as it's not something I've done before. 

I did think about attempting to live stream the nest footage to the sidebar of my blog or something, but I don't currently have any live streaming software, and I have a feeling it would be such a pain to set up. 

Anyway, that should do it for today. Hopefully if all goes to plan I'd like to get a post up every day with the progress of the nest box. I think I'll have a little thing in the sidebar explaining the current situation, so that even if I don't have time to post, there'll be an update somewhere on the blog explaining where things are at. 

Camera Nestbox Diary 2013

It's been two years since we last had any activity in our camera nestbox and this year it seems we have been lucky again. Camera Nestbox Diary 2013 is go!

Last weekend whilst I was still home for my Easter break from uni, I happened to notice a Great Tit going into the nestbox with clumps of moss in its beak. This years spring has been pretty late, so seeing nest building start this late isn't a surprise at all. I had noticed Great Tits investigating the box prior to this, but this was the first time I had seen one bring in nesting material. 

The issue was that the camera wasn't in the box at the time- I had taken it out months ago due to the fact it had stopped working for some unknown reason. I hadn't been able to work out whether the issue was related to the camera itself, or the cable, so I decided to just bring it all inside to avoid further damage to the camera over the winter. I decided I would try my luck and connect up the camera again to see if it would work, and somehow it did- no idea why but I wasn't complaining. 

After connecting it all up, there wasn't too which activity for the rest of the weekend- I only saw the Great Tit enter the box twice more, and it was on the hole of the box a few times as well. It seemed as though the nest building process had slowed right down- although I'm aware that in many cases, nest building can include a couple of days here and there without much activity. So I wasn't too worried about the situation but I was hoping to see them a few more times over that weekend.

On the Sunday morning I went back to uni, meaning that if there was any more activity, I wouldn't be able to see it. The rest of the family had been occasionally watching the box early in the week but there was apparently limited activity. I popped home from uni this weekend as I went to the last match of the football season (I support Oldham as this is where my Dad is from), and made sure to check the nestbox camera as soon as I got home. I was surprised to find a fully completed nest. There had clearly been a fair amount of progress in the box as the week went on. 

At about 19:35, after watching the camera for about half an hour, the female Great Tit appeared at the box. She spent about 3 minutes pecking at the hole of the nestbox, which I found quite interesting, as this usually happens when the birds are checking the box out for the first time. She eventually came into the box, shuffled around for a bit, re-arranging the nest, and could be heard calling a few times as well. Then I noticed something that I really wasn't expecting. As she was moving material around, she revealed an egg in the cup of the nest. It had been covered up quite nicely by the nesting material prior to this hence why it couldn't be seen. These birds do seem remarkably good at hiding their eggs in the nest. 

After about 8 minutes, she finally started settling down for the night. This seemed quite early to me, as it was still easily dark at this time and lots of other birds were still active around the garden as well. The video I recorded is below. I decided to try and enhance the video in an editing program a little to make it look a little better. The colours aren't great on this camera, and the relatively low evening light didn't help either, but I was happy with what I recorded. The other issue with this camera is that its angle of view is quite narrow, meaning the nest takes up the entire screen and you can't see the walls of the box. This wasn't too bad when filming the Blue Tits nesting a couple of years ago, but the Great Tits, being larger birds take up a lot of the frame. I noticed that you can actually buy little wider angle lenses for the nest box camera, but I feel this may be a job for another year. Anyway, enough talking, here's the video I got:




So here we are, with another family to follow. Hopefully these Great Tits will have a better time of things than the Blue Tits of 2011, but we shall see. It's been interesting to note the difference in nesting times between these two families. Our Blue Tit female in 2011 finished building her nest and laid her first egg around the 20th of April. So this Great Tit female is over a week behind our previous Blue Tit family, but this was to be expected, as we've had such a late spring this year. 

So, tomorrow I go back to uni which really shall be difficult to do given all that is going on here. I have a couple of plans up my sleeve to try and still get videos uploaded whilst I'm away but I'm unsure of how exactly things will work out as of yet. Whatever happens with the recording side of things, I'm excited for what lies ahead for this Great Tit family. We'll just have to see how it goes. I'm guessing a second egg will have been laid tomorrow morning, and I'll probably post again before I head back to uni. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend and I'll be back soon! :D 

Spring Has Sprung

Been relatively quiet on the blog front lately, mostly due to work, but also because I've simply not had a lot to post about. So today I thought I would keep things ticking over with a little video I recorded in the garden a week or so ago of a Chaffinch feeding in the sun. 

Speaking of the sun, we've been seeing MUCH more of it recently which has been a welcome change. It seems we've now got temperatures in double figures now for a while which doesn't sound great but compared with what we had in March, it's just so much better. Anyway, here's the video. This particularly chap was very happy for me to get relatively close and film him :) 


  
Will get back to checking on other people's blogs again as soon as I can as I know there's a lot I've missed out on. I'm back to uni this Sunday as well so it should be interesting to catch up with things too. Thanks for reading and have a nice day :D 

Brightening Up

Earlier on today the sun threatened to appear a few times and it was generally a bit brighter outside than it has been. It was also a degree or so warmer than it has been, so it wasn't quite so bitterly cold outside. The bird activity in the garden hasn't been quite as busy as a result, but I did see a Goldcrest flitting through the apricot tree earlier which was good to see. 

Below are a few pictures I took whilst I was outside with my camera earlier. Two long-tailed tits have been seen visiting the garden frequently, and as they are quite tame, getting close to them to photograph them is quite easy. The fact that there's only two of them says to me that a few of them may have died over the winter. It's really quite unusual to only see two of them, and in previous years, seeing 10 in a group wasn't unusual.  Hopefully they have a successful breeding year this year to boost numbers back up again.

Chaffinch numbers seem to be particularly high in the garden at the moment, and this chap was happy to have his photo taken whilst I was outside...

That's all for now folks, thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day :) 

Back Home

The last couple of weeks of my university term have been very hectic to say the least, hence the lack of activity on this blog in this time. I've had 4 or 5 deadlines to meet, as well as a couple of other bits and pieces to do. I have to say that I'm more than relieved to finally be at home for the Easter break. I've been back for a couple of days now and I'm settled back into the ways of living at home where I'll be for the next month.

The weather since I've been back has been bitterly cold- particularly today. The garden has been covered with a layer of snow which hasn't disappeared in many places just because it hasn't been warm enough to thaw it all. Ever since I filled the feeders up yesterday, the garden bird activity has been pretty frantic. Since I've been back, a female Bullfinch and a Siskin have both been seen in the garden. The latter is a bird we've only seen once in the garden previously, and that was about 3 or 4 years ago, so seeing that was quite a surprise, especially as I was in the garden doing a few jobs when it visited. A Coal Tit pair have also been visiting the garden quite a bit over the last couple of days which has been good to see. 

Below are some of the dreadful photos I managed in the short time I spent outside with my camera before my hands were nearly frozen and I decided to head back inside again.

Obviously at uni, as I'm in halls, there's no garden to keep track of, so It's been good to catch up with the garden back home again. Hopefully should be getting back into the swing of things as far as blogging is concerned, and will get round to reading other blogs over the next day or two. Until next time though, wrap up warm and lets hope Spring arrives at all this year. 

Messing About In f/1.8

Last weekend was my 19th birthday, which is kinda scary really. I mean, 19, really?! It just sounds a lot older than 18 to me, but maybe that's just me being stupid. 

Anyway, moving on to avoid me rambling, one of the things I got for my birthday was a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, which is something I've wanted for a while now. To be honest, although I've used the 18-55mm kit lens on my 500D a lot, it's not the best in terms of quality and with it only going down to f/3.5, it's not the best in some circumstances. Of course the results you can get with it are much better than what can be managed with a digital compact camera, and if you stick with it, you can get some nice landscapes and macro shots with it. 

But I've been looking forward to making the most out of the f/1.8 aperture of the 50mm lens for taking portrait shots, but also for things like plant photos and landscapes. Many people say a 50mm lens is something which is a bit of a must-have for photographers and I have to say, I've had a lot of fun with it so far. Most of the time I've been using it with the aperture wide open and enjoying taking photos with a really nice blurry background. 

In between a lecture and a group meeting today I decided to have a quick walk around the Harris Garden with my camera and new lens. Some of the photos I took are below. The daffodils below are mostly in full flower now and brightening up the garden nicely... 

The snowdrops are still out but some of them are now on their last legs, and the short period where both the snowdrops and daffodils are in flower is nearly over. 

These crocuses could also be seen in the surrounding area... 

I have no idea what these flowers are but photographed them anyway..

There were some nice sunny spells for much of today and the temperature was verging on warm when the sun came out from behind the clouds. The photo below was taken as the sun briefly appeared:

So all in all it was good to get used to using my new lens, and I'm sure I'll use it much more in the future. 

I've been pretty busy with various bits of work recently, and so time for blogging has been limited. Sorry for not checking by everyone else's blogs as often as I usually do. I'll drop by over the next couple of days to catch up with what I've missed. 

Thanks for reading and have a nice evening :D