Category Archives: Life@Home

We landed back in the UK from Spain on Saturday to our traditional welcome of varying forces of rain and wind with temperatures staggering up to the dizzying heights of 12C. Yuk!Bloody marvelous! Mind you, our trip down to Alicante airport to leave Spain was mostly covered by threatening clouds, though it was considerably warmer. First, we visited Singapore and Cambodia in late February and hoped to return to the beginnings of spring. Failed! Now we’ve been to Spain in late April hoping to return the beginnings of spring and apparently failed again.

Anyway, before Sunday’s rain began, I went to check my favourite local patch, Sandhouse Lane NR, and, after a worryingly quiet start, we spotted about 6 Large Red Damselflies (Pyrrhosoma nymphula), lurking about the main Odo pond. In these temperatures, they were trying not to be very active but they were also tricky little devils to pin down with pixels. We’re back to my favourite “one pair of eyes is not enough” syndrome. Keeping your eyes on your quarry whilst moving ones feet and monopod-mounted camera on a bramble-covered 45 grassy slope is decidedly tricky. Nonetheless, I managed it on a couple of occasions, at least well enough to capture a sample shot of both male and female.

Incidentally, whereas in early spring last year the main pond at Sandhouse Lane was as low as I’ve ever seen it, i.e. completely empty, this year is quite the opposite situation; it is now as full as I’ve ever seen it, a noticeably wider body of water. If the weather will perk up, it should be a nice little habitat again.

We continued into the industrial wasteland of the adjoining old tarmac plant (this was in use while the original section of the M1 motorway was being constructed) where there are several depressions that tend to fill with rain and provide more habitat. Though I was surprised at how little water there was here, we did find some with water and spotted another few Large Reds.

Whilst in Spain, I had received email notification that Bedfordshire’s first Large Red Damselflies this year had been spotted on 1st May. The individuals that we found, 18 in all including a few around neighbouring Jones Pit on a permissive path [clever of them to stick to the permissive path ], displayed mixed colour maturity, some looking pale and fresh whilst others, like those above, were fully coloured.

Our Spanish hosts, who had returned to England visiting family, told us that England should be in for a good summer “because the crows were nesting high in the trees”. I do hope they are right but, with the current situation, I must confess to misgivings.

As every Odonata watcher knows, the first to emerge at the start of a new season is most often the Large Red Damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula). One was sighted almost two weeks ago in Norfolk – an individual that I can only describe as aberrant. However, a reliable Hampshire-based contact submitted the first report of newly emerged Large Reds down on the south coast last weekend.

Given today’s very good, not to say better than advertised weather, and because it’s my last chance for a while, I went looking in one of our nearby nature reserves – one with a reputation for producing early Large Reds in Bedfordshire. Nada, nichts, nothing – save for one briefly glimpsed Comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album) and an even more briefly glimpsed Peacock butterfly (Inachis io) flying through without stopping to bask in the very welcome sun.

I left and, since I was more than half way there anyway, continued to Marston Moretaine Forest Centre. I walked all the way around the wetland reserve and saw … yes, you guessed it, pretty much nothing but a brief glimpse of a constantly flying Brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni). I did, however, jump out of my comfort zone and pause to snag what I regard as classic sign of spring, a Pussy Willow (or so my botanist informs me).

A third stop on the way home to my local patch, Sandhouse Lane NR, produced nothing more than a couple of Bee-flies (Bombylius major) who weren’t hanging around for pictures to be taken.

So, all in all something of an expected blank. It was desperation on my part, after all.

After a late lunch at home and with the sun still shining unexpectedly, I looked more closely at our own back garden. Given the date and the temperature today, there was much less activity than I would have expected but there were a couple of those Bee-flies zooming about and occasionally pausing long enough for a macro lens to be directed their way. Here’s a reasonable shot showing the entirely harmless, rapier like snout. Delightful, aren’t they?

The Large Reds cannot be far away now, surely. On a positive note, today I did see an increased amount of smaller flying critters than a few days ago so, if they do emerge now, there will at least be something for them to eat. Go guys!

One of my favourite on-line Odonata communities is UK Dragonflies. They seem a particularly friendly bunch of enthusiasts, so much so that I made a trip to meet some of them by the river Thames in search of the Common Clubtail/Club-tailed Dragonfly (Gomphus vulgatissimus) last year. [Yes, we did find one.] Naturally, the UK Dragonflies website goes a little quiet in the off-season but it doesn’t die completely, so I keep the occasional eye on it over winter.

Posting action on UK Dragonflies starts picking up in late March/early April as all us Odo-nutters eagerly await the first appearance of the new season’s specimens, normally the Large Red Damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula). The actual start of the season is weather-dependent, late March being reserved for good years. Last year, after a promising early start descended into the abyss weather-wise, Bedfordshire recorded its first Large Red on 21st April. Since this spring has thus far been in the abyss all along, everyone was expecting this to be a late start season. Given this context, I was stunned when one of the UK Dragonflies members relayed that a Large Red Damselfly had been reported (on a birding site, no less) as having emerged in Norfolk, three days ago on 14th April. Norfolk is further north and further east, from which our prevailing cold winds have been blowing. Normally the season would start first in the extreme south and work its way up the country.

Nonetheless, despite ones feelings of hopelessness, if there’s a Large Red somewhere in the country, one feels obliged to get out there and check. I went to my local Sandhouse Lane NR where I found almost nothing more than a lonely Pond Skater – not butterflies, not flies and certainly not dragonflies. With hardly any vegetation even, the place still felt more like winter than spring. Undeterred, I also tried Duck End NR which produced my first LRDs locally last year. Again nothing, more like winter than spring though the frogs were eagerly jumping on anything including what appeared to be a dead frog.

Today I stuck my nose in to King’s Wood, Heath and Reach, where I have seen LRDs in previous years. This was born more out of a desire for some fresh air than of hope. Sure enough, not an Odo in sight. I did, however, spot a Peacock (Inachis io) butterfly basking in the sporadic sunshine. I’m used to seeing these guys in spring after hibernating as adults. This one even appeared to be in good, clean condition after over-wintering.

I don’t know where my butterfly brain has been all these years but I was much more surprised to see a Comma (Polygonia c-album) also sunning itself. Clearly these characters over-winter as adults, too, which is not something I realized. Having submitted my Comma to iSpot, I now know that we have five hibernating butterfly species:

• Brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni)
• Peacock (Inachis io)
• Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta).
• Comma (Polygonia c-album)
• Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urtcae)

I knew about three of them hibernated but the last two were news. Live and learn.

Still no Large Red Damselflies, though. Mind you, given the weather and lack of very much in the way of dragonfly food around, I’d say that emerging now might not be a good idea. I fear for the longevity of that apparently single Norfolk individual.

As every decent IT professional knows, offsite backups of critical data are a good idea to protect against things like ones building burning down, being flooded in our increasingly wet climate or being landed on by a not-quite-passing Boeing Dreamliner. [Sorry, bad joke.] I have both belt (DVDs) and braces (external hard drive) security in place but now I wanted to fix my trousers to my shirt with Velcro, as well. Time to investigate The Cloud. Cloud storage is a bunch of remote servers out in cyberspace somewhere. It definitely qualifies as offsite.

I began investigating Cloud stuff and found myself drawing distinctions between:

1. sharing data with/transferring data to other machines, be they yours or other peoples;
2. synchronizing data between your own machines (i.e. desktop and laptop);
3. backing up data.

Dropbox is probably the best known for #1. It’s pretty good at #2 as well but there are two features that make me dislike it for that. Firstly, you have to move the relevant files into the Dropbox folder rather than operating from your own choice of folders. Secondly, the default action is a move rather than a copy unless you hit <Ctrl> as well. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve forgotten <Ctrl> and “lost” a file on one of my machines when I was trying to copy it to the other.

I discovered SugarSync for #2 which does not require that you move files into it; it will keep a laptop and desktop in sync from, say, that childishly named location, “My Documents”. I signed up for the free account and, in theory, I can now update my Odometers (dragonfly species spreadsheets) when travelling with my laptop and once back at home [boo hoo] my desktop will get the latest updated versions – assuming the desktop is still working, of course. SugarSync’s one annoying habit seems to be bothering me with “you’ve almost used all your storage” messages when it’s only ~60% used. I don’t call 60% nearly full.

#3 is about stuffing encrypted data onto remote servers and being able subsequently to reinstate it.

Both Dropbox and SugarSync offer a limited storage free account and put your chosen data into The Cloud as well. There are a bunch of other Cloud storage services that concentrate on one or more of those aspects mentioned above and generally they offer some level of free service. If you don’t have a huge amount of data, the following freebies, in some combination or other, may serve your purpose:

• 7Gb – Windows Live (Microsoft) SkyDrive
• 7Gb – mimedia
• 5Gb – Google Drive
• 5Gb – Amazon Cloud
• 5Gb – Comodo Backup
• 5Gb – SugarSync

That’s 34Gb without too much effort (apart from managing what’s where, of course). I’ve signed up for all of those along with Dropbox (which, like many others, gives 2Gb free) but we have 150Gb to deal with and it will grow considerably this year. For that, I needed a paying service and, after a decent-looking review, I signed up for a year’s contract with Crashplan, the Crashplan+ account of which which gives me unlimited storage for a single machine.

If you haven’t discovered the following as part of your reading, you very quickly discover it when you start using a Cloud service: getting large amounts of data into The Cloud in the first instance is a complete pain in the derri&egrave;re.

I am now fortunate enough to be on a fibre optic broadband service which gives me an upload speed of ~1Mb/sec. A “regular” broadband connection offers about one third of that speed. What I don’t have, as I fortunately remembered after day 1 of initiating the backup into The Cloud, is an unlimited usage contract. During day 1, I managed to upload ~5Gb of photos. My monthly usage limit is set to 40Gb of which we only normally use ~15Gb. Fortunately, running overnight between the hours of midnight and 8:00 AM, is “free” – it doesn’t count against my 40Gb limit. The Crashplan software allows you to set times between which backup will run. Well done! Actually, I find the Crashplan software pretty darn good. I switched it to run only during in my 8-hour free overnight window. Each night I manage to upload ~ 1.5Gb. Do the maths: running every night it will take me 100 days, getting on for 4 months, to upload all our existing photos. On a “regular” broadband connection, I’d be taking the entire year that I’ve signed up for. Of course, during that 4 months, our data will actually grow, probably by quite a chunk. I could wind up constantly chasing an ever-disappearing end point.

Actually, mimedia has what looks like a neat solution to this initial load problem. They will send you, free of charge, a so-called shuttle drive which  appears to be a limited usage external hard drive. You load it up and mail it back to them whereupon they load it up for you. It can be done in a few days. What a wonderfully elegant, effective solution. Here’s the catch … only if you live in America! (I didn’t find the mimedia software very friendly, either.)

It takes a potentially embarrassingly long time to sew that Velcro to the waistband of your trousers and shirt in order to give added security to the occasionally breaking belt and braces. Both my Dell machines failed in their first year and you could easily be still uploading your data into the offsite Cloud when they failed again. The amounts of data we are creating these days are huge. Unfortunately, the technological barriers to dealing with them effectively are also huge.

Worth a thought.

There is nothing like the frighteningly unwelcome appearance of a BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death] as ones computer crashes to enforce the backup lesson that one learned almost a year previously. As well as on less than 100% reliable DVDs, I now had our entire photo library on my Dell XPS desktop’s 1.5Tb hard drive but in mid November it threw me a BSOD and failed to reboot. If it could not have been resuscitated, I’d have a serious amount of egg on my face. Fortunately, a replacement memory board had me back up and running again.

When it comes to irreplaceable digital information, a belt and braces approach is definitely a good idea, just in case the belt breaks or the braces snap. My belt was our ever-growing collection of optical media (DVDs). Since that belt had already broken once, I was keen to buy a pair of braces, too. A USB-connected external hard drive would, in the embarrassing event of a catastrophic computer failure, enable me simply to plug said external hard drive into any replacement machine and once again be able to access our data. I started casting around on good ol’ Amazon and good ol’ John Lewis for candidate purchases.

Now, there are clearly a lot of total plonkers in the world and many of them appear to write product reviews on Amazon. After reading several ludicrous comments one begins to see the level at which some of Joe Public operates so it is well to take many of these reviews with a hefty pinch of salt. However, when it comes to external hard drives, a pattern definitely begins to emerge: external hard drives are clearly prone to more than infrequent failure. My Dell laptop suffered a catastrophic failure of its original hard drive and that’s the only hard drive crash I’ve ever experienced, mercifully. The external hard drives, though, for some reason sound as though they fail more readily than internal hard drives. I have no statistics to substantiate this but it’s a feeling I developed from the numerous reviews I read written by apparently sane examples of Joe Public. Nonetheless, with at least a number of positive reviews and at a mere £69.99 on Amazon, I was attracted to a Seagate STBV2000200 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 3.5 inch External Hard Drive. Let the fun commence!

Dear ol’ Amazon has a relatively new facility called Amazon Locker and was offering a reduced (£1.99) one-day delivery trial. Rather than waiting in at home on tenter-hooks awaiting a delivery, using Amazon Locker you can have your purchase delivered to a collection facility and pick it up at a time that suits you. In the UK, the collection facilities used are those run by Collect+. Here’s the theory: Amazon delivers to your chosen Collect+ depot, you then receive a Collect+ collection code and trot down to claim your parcel at your leisure. What a great idea. I’d previously used Collect+ to return an item to Craghoppers and that went well but was yet to use it for collection.

I placed my order on Friday 28th December, albeit with a little fuss ‘cos the Amazon website didn’t seem to want actually to use the trial delivery charge; a chat with customer services fixed that. Sure enough, on Saturday 29th December the courier’s tracking code showed me that my order was delivered to my nominated Collect+ depot at 9:45 AM. I eagerly awaited my collection code. At midday I was still eagerly awaiting my collection code. Late that afternoon I still continued eagerly to await my collection code and began the first of several further contacts with Amazon customer services.

“Give it 24-48 hours”, they said.

“That rather ruins the point of paying for next day delivery”, I replied, logically.

Amazon, bless them, refunded my delivery charge.

I actually trotted down to the Collect+ depot and explained the situation but, as I expected, without a collection code I could not pick up my parcel because it could not be released by “the system”. There are times when automated systems suck and this was one of them. I knew my package was sitting in the storeroom but I couldn’t have it.

48 hours later I was continuing eagerly to await any collection code and wqas now fearing the worst. After another couple of interactions with Amazon customer services over another couple of days, we learned that Collect+ wasn’t issuing a collection code because the package didn’t seem to have been entered into the system. Amazon (bless them) shipped me a replacement Seagate STBV2000200 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 3.5 inch External Hard Drive to be sent by guaranteed delivery to my door. It duly arrived successfully and I plugged it in, received the traditional “new hardware detected, driver being installed” malarkey, and was up and running almost immediately. Better!

Of course, just having a “spare” external hard drive installed does not do anything to ensure backups are taken any more than does possessing a spindle of DVDs – you still have to remember to make your backup. However, as a part of my investigations, I had found a couple of companies providing freeware that will monitor selected folders and maintain a duplicate/synchronized copy for you automagically. I installed and began to use Comodo Backup.

Using Comodo Backup, you can choose when synchronized copies of your specified directories are maintained. One option is “automatic” meaning that the software sits watching for changes to occur and replicates them. I duplicated our “Photo Library” on my new external hard drive and, lo and behold, as soon as I made a trial change to my “live” library, the duplicate was immediately synchronized and remained in step. Marvelous! I got carried away with this seemingly wonderful facility and repeated the exercise using “My Documents” and “My Pictures”. [I detest those childish phrases/names.]

Mistake! Our “Photo Library” is one thing; I put images in there after we’ve finished monkeying around with them – “Photo Library” is completed work. A couple of days ago I’d been snapping garden birds and went through my digital dark room work flow which begins by loading my RAW files into “My Pictures”. I decided to delete two v. poor images for good to try and protect my reputation. I selected the pictures in question and hit the <Del> key. Away went the pictures. Next time I looked, I was more than a tad surprised to see them still in the folder. Was I dreaming? Had I forgotten to hit <Del>? I selected them again and once more hit <Del>. This time I continued to watch my screen. Sure enough they disappeared but about a second later, bing! – the two pictures magically reappeared. Arghhh! The penny dropped: my smart new automated synchronization task was re-instating the deleted pictures from my duplicate copy. Laugh, I nearly cried!! Deletion was impossible from either place. Now that’s what I call secure. Best to use delayed synchronization on work in progress type folders/files such as “My Pictures” and “My Documents” … daily perhaps. Another lesson learned.

Interestingly and most frustratingly, I failed to find any way to redefine previously defined synchronization tasks in Comodo Backup. I found some instructions for doing so on a Comodo forum but those instructions did not match my software – they weren’t even close – so I fell at that hurdle. I uninstalled the software and deleted all its data. I’m hoping that reinstallation will allow me to define sensible sync schedules for my work in progress folders, though I have yet to try. Duh!

Anyway, belt and braces in place.

Recent silence has been due to a combination of two major factors, (bloody) Christmas and a serious amount of investigative work. The investigative work stemmed directly from my Dell-inquent Computers.

Having never before suffered from a computer failure, my two recently temperamental Dell machines made me a little more concerned about data backup. As a good little erstwhile IT professional, I have been in the habit of writing out backup CDs/DVDs … occasionally. However, it is amazing how a complete year can drift by before one realizes that one hasn’t actually done a new backup in any one of the past twelve months. Very useful! Being in a euphoric state of retirement, it’s not as if I keep much in the way of mission critical data on my machines but there is data that I’d rather not lose, including a financial control spreadsheet and photographs. The financial spreadsheet could be reconstituted, though to do so would be a pain in the backside, but the photographs are a different issue.

Before digital photography, photographs were less critical; I still have 15 35mm slide boxes each capable of holding 500 mounted slides – lose a digital version of a photo or two and they can be painstakingly scanned back in again. The slide boxes don’t constitute an off-site backup but they seem otherwise secure. Digital photographs are another issue; they exist only in the ethereal electronic world as ones and zeros and if lost are gone for ever. It was our digital photographs that were causing me the most concern.

Two years ago, before Dell, I had never had enough computer hard disk space to store all our digital images. As a result, I was a very good boy and frequently wrote out our photos to optical media, originally CDs and latterly DVDs. We currently have a combined collection of ~50 disks. Originally, I could fit several trips worth of scanned images, as bmp files, on a single 700Mb CD. With our first forays into digital photography, each RAW image, a so-called digital negative, was now some 12Mb and a CD could hold only a single trip (50-ish images), though frequently a DVD was necessary if we were not hard-hearted enough at the deletion of duds. Since both of us were now digitally snapping away, that is, of course, a disk each. Given our latest generation of DSLR cameras, each new image has grown to some 24Mb and we are beginning to have trouble fitting our more recent, typically longer, trips onto a 4.7Gb DVD.

Our optical disks, however, proved less than completely reliable. Having acquired my Dell desktop last January, complete with a 1.5Tb hard drive, I thought I’d use some of the space to make our photo collection readily available – “on-line”, as it were. I began reading in our disks and storing them on the enormous hard drive. One disk failed to read. [See Cyclic Redundancy Check Nightmares.] I tried on three other computers but it refused to play ball. I’d lost a disk’s worth of images. I did find some recovery software which was partially successful in regenerating a few images but the majority were gone for ever.

Not only are the DVDs not an offsite backup but one failed disk out of 50 represents a 2% failure rate. Clearly, I needed additional data protection. Of course, I’d learnt this lesson last year when the disk failed to read but somewhere along the line I’d omitted to do anything about it. The lesson bears repetition.

Almost two years ago, I acquired my first laptop computer, a Dell Inspiron 1545. Within just a couple of months of its purchase I began experiencing failures which I eventually tracked down to a faulty hard drive, as reported New Year, New Hard Disk (Jan 21st, 2012). My laptop has worked fine ever since replacing the hard drive [fingers very firmly crossed].

Undeterred by my faulty hard drive and never before having suffered any computer failure in my life, in New Year, New Computer (Jan 25th, 2012), I spoke about replacing my aging Sony Vaio desktop computer with a sleek new Dell XPS 8300 desktop. I became very comfortable and happy with it. Life continued, despite 2012 descending into the meteorological disaster with which we are now all too familiar.

Every now and then, we get unsolicited international phone calls. I normally completely ignore them, Carol tends to answer them and give the caller an undisguised piece of her mind. Early this week Carol answered an international call that, it turned out, was from Dell. I was unavoidably detained by culinary matters but it seemed they were interested in how my computer was; they’d call back. That’s very caring of them, I thought, whilst wondering which particular computer they were interested in, having two Dell machines?

Yesterday, whilst I was seated at my Dell XPS 8300 desktop, our phone rang. “International” flashed up on the screen. Remembering that it might be Dell, I uncharacteristically decided to answer it. Sure enough, it was a nice lady from Dell wondering how my XPS 8300 desktop was performing, having purchased it in January.

“It’s fine, thank you”, I replied politely.

“Thank you”, she said, “that’s all I need to know”, and hung up before I could mention the laptop and its faulty hard drive.

You are not going to believe this – I still don’t believe it myself. Quite literally 30 minutes after having taken that “out of the blue” Dell phone call yesterday, almost 11 months after purchasing their machine and using it, I got a BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death, to those unfamiliar with the term]. The screen mentioned something fatal-sounding along the lines of:

Page fault in non-paged area: Windows has detected a problem and is shutting down to prevent damaging your system

I read the page’s further diagnostic suggestions, only partially understanding them, wrinkled my brow and went for a restart. When in doubt, reboot, where Windows is concerned, at least.

The machine restarted but I swiftly turned my back on it as Carol returned home. Homecoming greetings over, I returned to the machine and that blasted BSOD had reappeared. This time the machine refused to restart. It also refused to start in Safe Mode. Yikes, it must be bad! I hit F12 during another restart sequence to find a Dell screen offering one interesting option called “System Test” (or some such). Bravely, I tried it. It ran through a series of diagnostics (the sonar check in The Hunt For Red October, sprang to mind – “running diagnostics now, captain”), all of which passed except three different tests against the RAM. I tried another restart but, no, I was dead in the water.

This morning I went through a protracted phone call with Dell support, during which I was guided to open the tower unit, remove all four RAM modules and systematically replace them one by one. There’s a total of 6Gb of RAM on four separate memory boards, two 2GB boards and two 1Gb boards. One of the 2Gb boards is faulty; without it the machine is fine but with it the machine fails. I am now back up and running on the healthy 4Gb RAM and Dell is shipping me a replacement 2Gb board.

I am still thoroughly gobsmacked at the timing of this failure. I just cannot believe it. I never do well with coincidences. It’s almost as though someone phoned me to see how things were, then pressed a button to make the system fail. The support guy did try to sell me an extended warranty package, after all, but that’s too much like a paranoid conspiracy theory.

My two previous desktops, Fuji and Sony, survived about six and eight years respectively, and they were both pensioned off rather than failing. By contrast, my Dell laptop lasted just a few months, my Dell desktop almost 11 months.

I have to say that I think Dell support is pretty good but then, at the rate their machines seem to fail in my experience, they’d need to be, wouldn’t they?

Have you ever taken much notice of the artwork on some packaged food items? We don’t generally buy a whole lot of processed food but those that come complete with so-called “serving suggestions” have frequently given me some entertainment.

A few weeks ago I popped into a local small co-op store because I needed some fresh bread. I wasn’t expecting much but, to my surprise, they had a perfectly reasonable-looking oatmeal loaf, albeit ready sliced. I grabbed one, paid for it and returned home for my lunch. Naturally there was artwork on the package but then, one expects that.

Wait a minute, that ham and lettuce sandwich apparently constitutes a “serving suggestion”. Am I to understand that co-operative customers need assistance when it comes to making use of a ready-sliced loaf of bread? I know educational levels have slipped a little but … strewth! I think that’s a tomato sneaking in on the right of frame. What I can’t quite determine is whether I am supposed to put tomatoes in with the ham and lettuce or just leave them sitting on the board. Should I have bought a different loaf if I’d wanted to make a cheese sandwich? [“Thick sliced” for thickos, presumably.]

Our little local co-op is also our little local post office. Today, after first applying for an extension to our mortgage, we went along again to buy some Christmas stamps. Regrettably, the post office window in our little local co-op was besieged by a less-than-little line of people, presumably comprised of many of those co-operative customers who need help with the correct usage of a ready-sliced loaf of bread. We extended the line still further.

As we waited, in addition to wondering whether we were actually going to get our stamps in time to make the last posting date before Christmas, I began looking at the food cabinets beside which we stood. There were some ready-made pizzas on special offer [short-dated] and a warm lunch seemed quite appealing given the outside temperature hovering around freezing. We bought one, together with our stamps, and returned for lunch. [There’s a theme, here.] Guess what?

The artwork on the pizza box allegedly constitutes yet another “serving suggestion”. It seems that our educationally challenged co-operative customers don’t know what to do with a boxed, ready-made pizza, either. Mon Dieu! Now, this one really isn’t completely obvious. The pizza is clearly not still in the box so I guess Charlie Customer is going to realize that he is supposed to extract it from the packaging before eating it. Now that, I have to admit, is a very handy suggestion. We don’t want people munching through the cardboard, cellophane and polystyrene after all, do we? However, to make completely successful use of his pizza, Charlie Customer is going to have to look a little more closely.

“Errr … that cheese in the photo doesn’t look quite as it does on my recently extracted pizza; it looks gooey, sort of melted. Those tomatoes look a bit wrinkled, too, sort of dried out. Wait a minute, I wonder if it’s been baked? I’m sure I’ve seen pizzas being served hot, somewhere. Yes, here we are, the box also comes complete with baking instructions.”

Well done Charlie!

Notice that the pizza is not cut into slices, though. Charlie is supposed to wolf it down whole, I imagine.

I hope the postage stamps came with instructions, too.

Having been treated to a feeding display by a flock of Waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus) in Woburn two weekends ago (Dec 2nd), I’ve been wondering where our usual band of visiting Redwings has been. It’s that time of year when we quite frequently peer out into our back garden and the woods beyond in the hope of seeing something less than common-or-garden but, so far this year, nothing. Until, that is, today. This morning, I was delighted when Carol, a.k.a. Hawk-eyes, declared that she thought she’d seen a Redwing (Turdus iliacus) raiding the berries near our kitchen window.

I dropped everything (!) and looked out of an upstairs window to see what I thought was a tell-tale russet flank disappearing back into the woods. It had probably been chased off by one of our larger Blackbirds – larger than the Redwings, that is – which tend jealously  to protect “their” berry supply. I’m certainly not surprised at that reaction this year; some of the natural food seems to be a little scarce after our appalling so-called summer. I grabbed camera and bar stool and settled down to wait, somewhat patently, for a Redwing to return. I think I spotted just two, neither of which posed particularly favourably, but I did managed to get a recognisable documentary shot for the sake of evidence. Shooting through a bedroom window doesn’t help but here it is.

One of the advantages of writing wildlife observations, such as this, down in a weblog is that it gives me the chance to look back and find out when things happened in previous years. Of course, we’re not exactly staring out of our windows all the time so the observations aren’t what you’d call scientifically rigorous but Hawk-eyes doesn’t miss a whole heck of a lot. I did a search for my Redwing posts over recent years and they really are remarkably consistent, considering:

• winter 2009/10 – December 17th
• winter 2010/11 – December 20th
• winter 2011/12 – January 14th (a month later – I wonder if we missed an earlier visit?) 
• winter 2012/13 – December 10th

We also had a small gathering of four Long-tailed Tits (Aegithalos caudatus) today for the first time this season, that we’ve seen. I’m glad because we’ve invested in a large supply of fat balls together with a squirrel-proof fat ball feeder mainly with those little charmers in mind. The last couple of days have also seen our hitherto solo Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) get joined by three more friends. They also have a feeder largely dedicated to them, a nyjer/niger seed feeder, though they continue apparently to prefer the sunflower seeds, just like everyone else.

There are precious few positive things associated with a northern European winter, especially for a self-confessed Odo-nutter [a.k.a. dragonfly enthusiast] such as myself. Given the right conditions, a few dragonflies can occasionally persist into December but largely, by mid-November, their season is over. Most butterflies are also but a distant memory. The only respite for my interest set is provided by the birds. In winter, not only are our resident species more readily attracted to feeders in the garden but the country gets invaded by a number of winter migrants in search of a better food supply than is available in their summer breeding ranges.

One such is the Waxwing, or Bohemian Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus). I saw my first ever Waxwing in Woburn two years ago. On December 2nd, 2010, I was on the operating table in hospital having my prostate ripped out. On December 12th, 2010, I was chasing Waxwings around the streets of Woburn, camera and monopod in hand. Attempting to tear about with a monopod-mounted camera, desperately trying to ignore the discomfort of the temporary catheter rattling against my thigh and … well, enough said … was quite a memorable experience. So, happily, were the Waxwings. These striking birds, about the size of a Starling, may be as common as muck in Scandinavia but their vivid plumage provides us with quite a winter spectacle when they flock across the North Sea to feast on our winter berries.

Woburn seems to be a regular Waxwing hot-spot. One of its roads is lined with Sorbus trees offering a ready supply of white berries, which the Waxwings seem to find irresistible. This weekend the ornithological jungle drums sounded again to announce their return so off I prepared to set for a reprise. Mercifully, this visit would be without the added excitement of a catheter causing discomfort. Much more relaxing!

Saturday was cold and overcast. However, whereas the sun makes the Waxwings’ colours shine, it also makes for some awkward lighting conditions so I thought I’d give the overcast conditions a try anyway. Once in roughly the right area, finding the Waxwings is a doddle; all you have to do is look for a collection of very large lenses attached to cameras and, frequently, tripods. Follow the lenses and you’ve found the Waxwings. Or, at least, you’ve probably found one of their feeding stations. They operate in a flock. At periodic intervals, from a resting/digesting perch, a gang of them takes to the air to descend upon a Sorbus tree and raid a few berries each before a metaphorical bell sounds announcing the end of round 3. There is then a coordinated flocking back to their resting perch to be refreshed. After about an hour trying to follow the action my trigger finger was numb and I could no longer feel what I was doing so I retired.

Sunday was sunny and cold. I returned for another try and found even more large lenses arrayed against our foreign invaders. I needed the lens clues because the Waxwings had moved about 100m further down the road. Waxwings have no sense of occasion and do not pose well, frequently placing themselves between you and the sun. On many occasions I found myself thinking a shot wasn’t worth bothering with while being surrounded by the machine gun rattle of belt-fed shutters going off. The advantageously lit side of the road was not exactly rich in Sorbus trees. However, in one back yard, an apple tree was attracting the Waxwings’ attention. The very accommodating owner invited a few of us lens-toting enthusiasts in to take advantage. What a nice man! I didn’t know Waxwings also fed on apples until today. A Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) turned up – now I do know they like apples – but received short shrift from the gang of Waxwings, regrettably.

Actually, some of the Waxwings were receiving short shrift from the Waxwings, too. Still, I suppose if you’ve flown across the North Sea to find some food, you’re damn well going to protect it.