Mostly photography, wildlife, birds, Chinese and all things Taiwan (and occasionally trying to make all of those come together at once). #taiwan#fedi22
Saw a fascinating phenomenon on my hike this morning. I stopped to watch an ants’ nest & noticed a worker carrying a pupa. I watched her as she wandered around in circles, backtracked several times, then started wandering off to the edges of the nest where the rubbish dumps are. At that point another worker grabbed the pupa and they engaged in an extended tug-of-war over it before the new worker carried it back into the heart of the nest & down an entrance hole. (1/2)
Are they selling them? Or are they starting their own colony and wanting to know if we have a spare queen we can give them? Or are they just looking for someone who wants to talk about ants?
I went to change the batteries and check the memory card on my camera-trap yesterday, and was dismayed to find significant condensation on the inside of the (supposedly waterproof, but home-made) housing for one of my speedlights. But it gets worse...
Lol--after 15 years I finally resurrected my 1978 Kawasaki KZ400 "Reloaded"! I put nearly 50 miles on it today but for some reason the battery wasn't charging so I had to park it and put it on charge. I wonder what's wrong with it? ;)
Posted this earlier and it appears not to have uploaded - so apologies if you see it twice…
I have spent the last two months heading out into the national park before dawn every Saturday to set-up in camouflage and sit there in the frosty pre-dawn trying to capture photos of foxes and deer. Mostly I have spent my time with cold, numb feet, occasionally seeing deer or foxes in the distance, but mostly wondering what possessed me to do something so stupid. Today it finally paid off. (1/n)
A curious phenomenon in Taiwan, I understand the founder of the Mortician Hair chain of salons did in fact start out by styling hair for the deceased. Apparently they were so good at it that they were able to make a successful transition across to living clients.
Still feels odd that this works from a marketing perspective. Would you want your hair done so well that you look like a really good-looking corpse?
Just glanced at the Taiwan Ministry for Transport & Communications standard contract for domestic tourism (because I’m fun), and I enjoyed the line on the definition of “domestic tourism”:
本契約所謂國內旅遊，指在臺灣、澎湖、金門、馬祖及其他自由地區之我國疆域範圍內之旅遊。
So “domestic” is Taiwan, Penghu, Jinmen, Matsu “and other free areas with the borders of Our Nation”.
I know it doesn’t outright use the expression, but I enjoyed the lingering reference to “Free China”.
The challenges of legal precision in a world of ambiguity.
Not a complaint, but an observation: when I try to like or boost a post using the iOS Mastodon app, it often seems not to work, or can take a long time (10, 20, 30+ seconds) to respond.
If I’ve become impatient and hit ‘like’ multiple times, I may see it finally register then being instantly reversed by a subsequent press.
Is the delay an issue with server capacity in either my instance or the instance hosting the account I am liking or boosting?
Just spent a wonderful 90 minutes browsing Taipei's Guanghwa Digital Plaza / 光華商場. The clientele and a few of the traders felt delightfully further along the spectrum than the general population.
This guy appeared to be specialising in cathode-ray-tube oscilloscopes, which feels more like a compulsion than a business. Does anyone make these anymore?
After a week working in New Zealand, I’ve arrived back in Sydney just in time to savour a 43-degree heatwave. Back home, I’ve been out on the verandah trying to catch a breeze, and a pair of rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus moluccanus) have been walking right up to me and trying to tell me something. For someone who works so hard to catch birds with a DSLR and long telephoto lens, it’s a bit disheartening to catch a bird this close on an iPad camera.
A scanned negative from around 1990, showing Roosevelt Road, Section 1 in Taipei.
@skinnylatte - this is an example. What was a bit of a “nothing” image at the time is actually now much more special for me, feeling like it captures a world that is now lost.
Had a wonderful morning with camera in hand wandering around the farmlands next to Beitou. It was actually a more interesting expedition than I've ever had at the nearby Guandu Nature Reserve. In the reserve, you can only get down into the marshes and paddies on open-days with a guide, while here I wandered freely through lots of different terrain.
I believe I saw some scaly-breasted munias, which would be a "lifer" for me.
@futurebird Interesting - I found an alate in our kitchen, so captured it in a tube in the hope that it was a queen, using cotton-wool to separate it from a reservoir of water.
When I came back a few days later I was initially surprised and dismayed to see that fungus had already formed - but then realised it was actually just cotton-wool. The ant had separated bits of cotton-wool from the main clump to surround itself. I like my chances of this being a fertilised queen.
A reasonably successful camera-trap shot of a brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii).
The camera-trap has been in this location targeting antechinus for about five weeks, and this is the best photo so far.
Antechinus are somewhat famous in popular culture because they “bonk themselves to death”. No male is older than about 11 months, because they go into such a sexual frenzy in breeding season that all males drop dead from stress & organ failure after breeding.
