Numbers game

The Safari has at last been able to secure the services of a real expert to winkle out the info stored in the defunct dinosaur driven pc. When he saw what he was up against he nearly fell about laughing and said something like 'last time he saw one like it Noah was throwing it overboard cos they were no good!' Noah shoulda known better and taken it to be recycled rather than adding to the huge amount of marine litter!!!  

Anyway we have been able to update our lists:-

2011 - Still stuck on 199, one short of our target for this year

Patch 1 = 71

Patch 2 = 72

Garden =  44

and at the Nature Reserve we've now seen 91 species this year...don't think we'll get the opportunity to reach the 100 mark.

Base Camp this morning on a short vis mig session gave us only a Cormorant going NW, a female Sparrowhawk cruising low southwards over the gardens, a local bird perhaps, and one of the Peregrines was enjoying the early morning sunshine.
A bit of feeder watching gave us some unexpected observations. We noted that the Great Tits and Blue Tits take an individual seed away for 'processing - on a very rough average the Great Tits hare back in half the time as the Blue Tits. This would make sense as they have bigger beaks enabling them to eat the seeds faster and in being bigger have a higher energy requirement but can eat more seeds in a given time, so far all fairly logical...but the female Chaffinch that has figured out how to use the feeder doesn't use the same method of sitting there and stuffing her face like her cogeners the Greenfinches and Goldfinches, no she takes one seed away at a time for 'processing' under cover...But her return time is quite a bit longer than the Great Tits so how does that fit in with her energy budget - she's probably bit heavier than the Great Tits - interesting stuff; more research needed...and a stop watch!

The session was cut short due to a visit to the docs who has signed us off for at least another month.

Where to next? Might get out armed with the camera for a short while with Wifey and Frank over the weekend.

In the meantime let us know what's enjoying the sunshine in your outback

Never did find yesterday's missing pics, so here they are today.