Four years since I last¹ mentioned hedgehogs² here. Time flies. As far as I can remember, I haven’t seen a hedgehog in the meantime. I was wondering – was that previous hedgehog lucky or unlucky? It’s hard to say. The same goes for this one.

I’d already heard strange noises in the yard first thing in the morning but not been able to find the source. It was only when I went to turn on the tap to refill the ducklings’ pond that I spotted the hedgehog stuck in the drain, treading water.

Mia fetched a pair of gloves for me and I hauled it out and put it on the floor, where it proceeded to stagger around in a circle, leaving a trail of stagnant water behind it. Then it stopped at sat there stinking and shivering.

It just so happened that in the porch we had a very large cage with a heat lamp suspended above it. With the three ducklings now out in the orchard, the only remaining occupant of the cage was The Friendliest Chicken In The World^TM who surely wouldn’t mind sharing. More about TFCITW another day, maybe. I put an open box in the cage under the heat lamp and left the hedgehog in it to recover. Once it had stopped shivering, it curled up and went to sleep.

An hour or so later, an almighty squawking came from the porch. It looked like the hedgehog, having recovered and eaten the peanuts I left for it, had climbed out of its box, whereupon TFCITW had tried to cuddle it and got the nastiest surprise of its life so far. It had the sense not to try it again though, and I set the hedgehog free in the garden after dark.

You might need a good connection to view that video. I tried to reduce the bitrate, but it came out too blocky and spoiled it when I went too far. The quality of the original video (96MiB of it at the original resolution of 1280×720) is amazing. It was recorded on a Panasonic DMC-ZS3, which I think is a superb almost-pocket-sized camera, the only downside being a shortage of manual controls. Unfortunately the cameraman wasn’t of the same quality, but you get the idea – after a few seconds of pondering its predicament, the baby starling can indeed swim.

Note to self: I converted the video using the following command:

ffmpeg -i /shares/pictures/2010/2010-05-29/P1010955.MOV -ar 22050 -s 400x226 -qscale 5 -f flv waterwings.flv

Next question – do they like swimming. I think the expression on its face says it all:

It let me get very close to take that picture. I suspect it sat on that rock for a long time, drying out and coming to its senses. Again, only the original uncompressed image at 3648×2746 really does the camera justice, but the version I’ve butchered for the web doesn’t look so bad either. Click it twice to get to the 1024×768 version. Any arguments that it’s not a starling will be happily accepted if you know better – I’m not 100% sure.
]]> http://ciarang.com/posts/water-wings/feed 0 http://ciarang.com/posts/jake-the-egg http://ciarang.com/posts/jake-the-egg#comments Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:47:45 +0000 CiaranG http://ciarang.com/?p=980 Jake has appointed himself chief egg collector:

A task he takes very seriously:

Every day:

Of course, all reasonable people are used to this backwards and forwards nonsense with every kind of food and drink under the sun and routinely laugh it off with a good dose of “all things in moderation” common sense. Only the media seem to suck it up like a sponge, with this latest egg story apparently being headline news everywhere.

I was blissfully unaware until it was given a prime slot on the BBC evening news, the highlight being the way they managed to wheel out the amusingly named Lucy Egerton from the British Egg Information Service without cracking so much as a childish grin.

The cynical side of me though, as always, responded with a weary “who paid for this ‘research’ then?” No surprises in the answer, or the fact that you have to dig a bit deeper than the news stories (a.k.a. press releases) to find out. It was of course the egg industry, which also seems to double up as the acronym industry, what with the BEIS (British Egg Information Service), the BEIC (British Egg Industry Council), BEPA (British Egg Products Association), the BEA (British Egg Association) and many more.

None of this though, should detract from the fact that you should eat eggs. Because they’re nice. Poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or omeletted – you can’t go wrong with an egg. Ok, you could – there is eggnog, for example. But in general, my advice, which I say is just as valuable as some ‘scientific’ research paid for by a vested interest, is to eat plenty of eggs. I wouldn’t advise eating eggs produced by an industry though – instead, eat eggs produced by a free* and happy chicken, preferably your own.

*As with free software, the “free” is as in freedom, although of course if they’re your own chickens you don’t pay for the eggs)

A couple of weeks ago I was out for the evening and when I got up the next morning and went out with the dog, Nibby was watching from the window while I let the chickens out, which seemed a bit odd. The reason became apparent when six new chicks came chirping out of the chicken house.

We haven’t hatched any eggs this year – these ones arrived (on the sly) at a few weeks old. The cool-looking white one in the picture is apparently a Barbu D’Uccle. The others are crosses between that and various other strange-sounding breeds.

Unfortunately, it was that same cool-looking white one that I saw flying across the orchard while I was mowing this morning. Not under its own steam, but in the jaws of the dog. After a long chase, I managed to retrieve it and apart from being covered with slobber it seemed to have survived the ordeal unscathed, so hopefully more pictures of this feathery footed beastie will follow over the coming months.

Saturday – a trip to Cheshire to visit our horse, Mouse, who is on an extended holiday there and apparently enjoying it very much. I was pleased to discover that she hadn’t forgotten me – something she demonstrated with a huge cuddle the like of which was in the past reserved only for special occasions such as the delivery of her dinner in the snow.

Kiko came along too, as did Mia, and of course Nibby whose horse it really is no matter how much I say ‘our’ horse. More specifically, it’s our horse where cuddles or pleasant summer field activities are involved, and her horse when the bills come in or when it rains.

Unfortunately riding was out of the question for Nibby, what with her being nearly seven months pregnant. I seem to remember her riding daily at this stage last time around, but this baby seems to be about twice the size of the last one.

While we were in the area we visited Lyme Park (pictured right) for a walk and The Rams Head in Disley for as half-decent a lunch as you can expect from a ‘chain pub’. All in all, an action packed day with no time to visit various nearby friends we really should have seen, so I hope they don’t read this.

Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.

Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.

Having said that, I did the processing in the garden with the sun on my dirty laptop screen, so it might well be hideous for all I know.

While we’re out here, some more garden-related stuff you’re not interested in. To the right, vegetable patches all planted up and surrounded by netting to keep out the cat (thinks it’s a litter tray), the puppy (learning to dig) and Mia (big clompy welly boots). Below, Mia feeding the chickens in the aforementioned boots.