Mostly photography, wildlife, birds, Chinese and all things Taiwan (and occasionally trying to make all of those come together at once). #taiwan#fedi22
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...
When I opened the housing I found not only moisture, but... a colony of ants that had decided my speedlight-case was a good place to store their eggs. Eggs and ants everywhere. This (and the fact that I didn't have a single credible image on the camera) was the tipping-point in me deciding I needed to take the whole set-up home for some rework.
Here's an image of the speedlight housing in situ - so the ants had laboriously carried all their unborn siblings up the stake and through a tiny gap in the epoxy cement where I installed the front transparent panel for the flash.
I initially thought I'd wait until I got home before I tried to clean up the ants and eggs, but once the housing started to warm up out in the sun I found myself with angry ants everywhere - not a good idea to take that into the car. I sat down in the dirt to try to get as many of the ants and eggs out as I could.
Sorry Sister Ants for misleading you and being the cause of so much of your work being wasted!
And this is the final clean-up back home - a speedlight and wireless controller buried in a tub of rice for a few days in the hope of drying everything out inside...
@cetan It makes you wonder how their instincts and communication work in connection with things as complex as “Hey there, I think I’ve found a really suitable place to stash the colony’s eggs!”
Presumably one worker has found its way through the one tiny hole on my speedlight housing, identified the apparent suitability of the inside of the housing for keeping eggs, then communicated that to thousands of her sisters, who have then collaborated to accomplish the task. @futurebird
Beetle (Pimelia Punctata) investigates the inside of the shell of a myriapod to see if there is anything edible left. Although they are common in my garden (Alicante province, Spain) I have only found out that they are also distributed in Italy, France, Austria and Belgium, and that the species of the genus Pimelia are threatened mainly by habitat loss.
iPhone 13 mini + homemade macro lens
My other macros in: https://www.instagram.com/mymacrominitips/
Escarabajo (Pimelia Punctata) investiga el interior del caparazón de un miriápodo para ver si queda algo comestible. Aunque son habituales en mi jardín (provincia de Alicante) sólo he averiguado que también se distribuye por Italia, Francia, Austria y Bélgica, y que las especies del género Pimelia se encuentran amenazadas principalmente por la pérdida de hábitat.
Käfer (Pimelia Punctata) untersucht das Innere der Schale eines Myriapoden, um zu sehen, ob noch etwas Essbares vorhanden ist. Obwohl sie in meinem Garten (Provinz Alicante, Spanien) häufig vorkommen, habe ich erst jetzt herausgefunden, dass sie auch in Italien, Frankreich, Österreich und Belgien verbreitet sind und dass die Arten der Gattung Pimelia vor allem durch den Verlust ihres Lebensraums bedroht sind.
Had to come into the city tonight for an event at Sydney Opera House, and was absolutely delighted to see a fur seal resting on the steps beside Sydney Harbour. The quality of the water has improved so much in the last couple of decades.
This seal is clearly living its best life, not letting anything stress 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)
When the animals move so silently, one of the biggest challenges is seeing them before they see you, and being ready to capture photos with a minimum of movement. I’ve had foxes walk within around 10 metres of me when I’m in camouflage and stop to try to figure out what I am, but if you only notice them once they’ve already noticed you, the second you start to move they take off.
With this one this morning, I’d spotted it hunting in the scrub about 200m away and then lost sight of it…. (2/n)
The fox then emerged from the long grass and started hunting around directly in front of me. It’s always nerve-wracking when you gamble on whether to start taking photos the first opportunity you get, or wait for a better view and risk getting nothing. The camera was set to silent, but silent for a camera is not the same thing as silent for a fox - so I was massively relieved that the fox didn’t even look up at the sound of the camera. (3/n).
I managed to get five or six shots of the fox going about its business before I moved slightly to get a better angle, and it either heard or saw the movement, and took-off into the scrub in a flash. I’d been struggling to breathe while the fox was there - somewhere between overwhelmed at the criticality of the moment and terrified it would hear me breathing & ruin the moment. When I stood up after the fox had gone, my hands were actually shaking. THIS is why we do wildlife photography. (4/n)
It is funny that I’ve spent a lot of the last two month contemplating the futility of what I’ve been doing - wondering why I keep going out into the national park in the dark and sitting there in the cold for 2-3 hours, just to pack up and go home without having taken a single usable photo. After capturing the photos of the fox, it suddenly seemed like an eminently sensible investment of time - why doesn’t every do this?
Red fox (Vulpes vulpes), Scheyville National Park out to Sydney’s west.
I’m going to post a couple of photos tonight that wouldn’t normally make the cut.
The first is this Eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus) in Scheyville National Park. I see so many kangaroos in the national park, and most of the time they just aren’t interesting, but I thought the light and the setting worked in this shot.
Because the kangaroos are spread all around the national park, and flee whenever you get too close, I assume they act as an intruder alert for other species.
Admittedly I'm doing the most chaotic kind of "research" into symbols of power and dress... I can't seem to work out why the "High Constables of Perth" march around in top hats with these fancy sticks.
Are they just fancy clubs since constables are kind of like cops? Are they magic baddy boppers? A tube with a fancy paper inside?
If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.
When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.
@futurebird@stib@dalias Here in Australia you get fined a crisp, stiff hunna dolla bill (and then some) if you don’t vote. It’s mandatory to vote in national, state and even local government elections.
Once you’re inside the polling station, you can obviously write whatever you want.
It can be a nuisance to have to go and vote when you have no interest in a particular election, but it’s good that everyone shares responsibility for the outcomes.
That this question is even asked shows the vast dangers of the premature deployment of these generative AI technologies, and the utter lack of meaningful education of the public about their risks. Disclaimers on the user interfaces are routinely ignored. This is all a disaster waiting to happen.
Yes - the wording used in this lawyer’s explanation of why his filings included fictitious citations is full of a sense of betrayal that the magic genie he’d found to do his job for him was actually not trustworthy:
“… your affiant has never used ChatGPT… prior to this occurrence and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”
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?
