Tawny Owl

Tawny Owl, Sheerhatch Wood, 25th September 2011

The long wait is over!

After many months of badgering Richard (stop that sniggering at the back) my completely revamped website is finally live:

www.ajm-wildlife-art.co.uk

However, because nothing in life is ever simple, this has unfortunately coincided with Richard's server account being hacked by some piece of retarded lowlife shit in Malaysia. This caused spam links to appear on all the sites Richard is responsible for. Although my site is clean now, this means that all the sites have to be reinstalled and new accounts created, so it will probably disappear for a day or two, or possibly be replaced temporarily by the old one. So please have a look at it while it's there! If it's a blackish/dark grey design with a Short-eared Owl at the top, that's the new one. If it's white with a Ringed Plover on the home page, it's reverted to the crappy old one.

Either way, if anyone wants a pet portrait or anything else doing in time for Christmas, please let me know as soon as possible.

Ad break over.

I'm sure it's very nice, but...

...you'd think they might have done some market research on the name before launching this range of Indian foods in the UK (seen in Sainsbury's this evening):

Helloo

helloo

Timewaster

Not content with covering all of Unst on Google Streetview, checking weather forecasts every five minutes and revising the field characters of extremely rare birds that I almost certainly won’t find, I’ve discovered another excellent Shetland-related timewaster:

http://visit.shetland.org/shetland-webcams

The best one is the Sumburgh Head cam – I bet if you watched this long enough you’d see something mega rare. Although it would be frustrating, as the camera follows a set pattern of panning and zooming lasting about six minutes, so you’d have to hope it was still there when the camera returned to the same spot!

If you watch the sequence all the way through, at one stage it zooms in on Rob’s house, although at over two miles away you can’t identify anything in his garden to grip him off with unfortunately.

There’s another one looking back from Exnaboe towards Sumburgh Head, which is a nice view, but it’s static and only updates every two minutes. The Pallid Harrier the other week would probably have been visible on this if it had flown past at the exact time the cam went off!

Edit: Hmm - these all seem to be offline today - probably overloaded the servers with too many people looking at them!

Whinchat

This Whinchat was part of a chat flock on Biggleswade Common, 15th September 2011.  The flock consisted of two Whinchat and a colour-ringed male Stonechat.  I'm currently trying to find out where the Stonechat was ringed...



And the answer is....

As Peter Cook said on that sketch: no.

Or least not anywhere I've been in the last three days. The wind seemed to have dropped considerably this morning, so much so in fact that there were good numbers of Mipits, Chaffinches, hirundines and the odd Skylark and Yellow Wagtail heading south over Eyebrook this morning. So forget about seabirds - it's time to dust off the vismigging hat, gen up on passerine flight calls and get out and string stuff flying over instead!