birds in the landscape

 

The sun unexpectedly appeared again on the 11th Feb. I threw more seeds and bread in my backpack plus sports bars for lunch and headed out the door to Warriston. Snow and blue skies again - perfect! If a bit cold for hanging around graveyards.

dunnock - relatively rare around here

The birdfeeder brick towers were totally snowed under. I put loads of worms, seeds and some bread out. I meant to take note of which was most popular. I should have had one tower per food type though that wouldn't properly work as certain birds will only use the far end tower. Maybe next time. I had noticed previously at Cammo when putting out the same choice of foods that robins preferred live worms, nuthatches were often very fussy about inspecting and choosing just the right seeds or worm and scattering the rest with beak and wings. The smaller tits and finches preferring small seeds to bread and worms.

I think I noticed the iron bird bowl had been put to one side as it was full of ice and snow. Maybe that was the next trip. Anyway I did wonder (exactly a week later) did anyone ever use the bird bath. And just seconds later a robin flew down and washed its feet then hopped onto the rim and had a drink. Not the order I'd have done those 2 tasks but there you go. I'll post the video on facebook. Very cute!

bullfinch just looked on from a distance and didn't visit the tables

icicle

coal tit

So this is the "friendly" robin who hangs out near the East Gate. He will often appear when he sees visitors in his area. Partly curious and partly in search of a handout, he will hop to the nearest twig or monument and watch for me throwing bread. If he gets a piece he will disappear off to eat it.

So on this occasion I wondered what would happen if I didn't give him any food and just continued to take photos closer and closer. He eventually got a bit hounded and gave me a sorrowful look and hopped off. I felt very guilty like I had abused the little chap and waited till he was watching me, then put some bits of bread and worms atop a grave stone using exaggerated gestures. He flew over and I felt the apology was accepted. I went past later and put some more snacks on the gravestone and saw him going back for them.

a sorrowful look?

apology accepted!

wild tree limbs

still pals

holly with an icicle

I'd kept seeing on google maps that there was a "here lies" mosaic near the Tesco's end of Warriston Cemetery. I eventually found it on the wrong side of the cyclepath wall. Not amazing but nicely done and after examining the "random" nature of which tiles were chosen and how they were placed made me want to do a bit of mosaic work. And stained glass. And carpentry. Life is too short to fit it all in!

the Tescos pigeons always try for a interesting tableau

It is a short run across the top of Leith Walk to Abbeyhill and Holyrood. I had a notion to see those stonechats again and sure enough they were still messing about at the muddy puddle. I have been past since the snow melted and not seen them there so it might only have been while the snow was covering most other sources of food. The puddle in question is the one below Arthur's Seat in the photo above. It was great to see my wee pals again and they were no less tame than the day before. I gave the robin and a blackbird who was loitering in the background some worms so they may have even been more friendly. While I was there I was pleased to see Ken. It was Ken who told Mairi who told me about this stonechat venue so it was good to be able to say thanks. Then Ken suggested we have a look for reed buntings. I wasn't sure what they were so Ken explained they are kind of boring sparrow colour but climb up stalks of grass until they bend over and the bird can eat the seed heads. We wandered over to the start of Hunter's Bog about a hundred yards away and 2 or 3 reed buntings did exactly as Ken described. And were just within range of photos and video. They were more charming than I expected and I liked that. A bit like the stonechats they weren't that scared or flighty. In fact you could stand still and sooner of later they would do there grass climbing thing right next door. 

stonechat (m)

stonechat (f)

reed bunting

Ken, just where we saw the reed buntings

Since that went so well we had a wander down to St Margaret's Loch to see if there were any notables. There is a singular Little Grebe. I was not terribly impressed. They might be popular with birders for rarity cachet but this looked a little like a dowdy ugly duckling. Unda says I'm not allowed to call it dowdy. It spent most of the time I was there diving under the water. And out in the middle of the pond. Ken got a decent photo and it even looked like it was smiling. I wasn't very taken by it - mainly for the lack of photo fun. (And it is a bit brown and drab!) I was also looking for the goldeneye but couldn't see it. It has a habit of hiding among the tufties as it looks a bit like one. 

I think Ken lost his footing on the ice. 😂

Little Grebe.

Unusual to see the tufted ducks out the water
- they almost had a touch of penguin about them what with the ice!

pondside robin

We went back up to see what was going on in the bog but I ended up gravitating to Haggis Knowe as the stonechats and robin had moved over there. The last of the sun (before going down behind Salisbury Crags) was lighting the scene beautifully, and it was as if the birds were happy to model by posing on the most helpful prominences. They could hardly have been better behaved. It is stuff like this that totally sells me on birds. My problem with them normally is they just don't hold still or come close for a photo. So you need to carry a yard long lens which isn't feasible to heft along on a run. If they were all as obliging as these chaps I'd be way more interested in birding! I suspect a certain amount of it will stick and I'll become more aquainted with the less shy ones. Time will tell. It has certainly been a huge interest during Winter Lockdown with no butterflies to distract and our usual trips to Gullane etc. disallowed. I have a feeling restrictions will be lifted fairly soon (in time for butterflies mid-April would be good,) and I think there will be some East Lothian trips to catch up on what I've been missing. But this has kept me busy and spirits soaring meanwhile.

how helpful is that?!

take your time and put me above the snowline - more heroic that way!

Ken took this photo of me showing how close the stonechat was happy to sit

and this is the result!
Top day of birding delights! Just fantastic!

So stop here if you don't like bad words and strong, disgruntled opinions!

what's a km?

On a rather grumpy note the new map above is the bollox output compromise from Suunto. They decided in their infinite wisdom to cancel the previous website. Much like cancelling a celeb who says something controversial or offends some woke snowflakes, they just turned off the website that all my gps info was stored on. Yes they did give loads of warning (and I hopefully transferred several years of data to the app.) Instead they started an App largely to cater for the generation of smart phone zombies because only dinosaurs use a PC these days apparently. It occurs to me (but maybe not to them) that the Ambit 2, my Suunto Ambit 2 has not got wifi or bluetooth and the only method of uploading gps info is through a USB cable into a PC (unless there is a way of attaching a USB cable to an iPhone?) So they are effectively negging their own product and the non-optional user interface. Arseholes! They are probably only just holding back from telling me to buy a new product and throw away that old outmoded device. Thing is that old device still works fine and if we all throw out old stuff to buy new stuff then pretty soon the planet will be in the shitter. Oh hang on, it already is and precisely because we buy new, rather than recycle and mend. And young people on social media complain about it, are in virtual tears about it, not realising they are very much the problem and it will take more than virtue signalling on social media to fix it and rid the oceans of plastic.

So Suunto, why not try to extend the life of your kit rather than make it redundant. (Strangely! like every other commercial company they are more interested in selling more units for the short term gain. (Flagging up discounts on newer models.) Because nobody, except the poor, need stuff to last.) Interesting secondary fact. The poor are feeling the Covid Lockdown Squeeze much less than the wealthy. The wealthy are missing their holidays, their jetset lifestyle, the shopping, the restaurants, the haircuts, the citybreaks, the cafe culture, the important conferences, the routine travelling locally and abroad, the cinemas, the theatre, the football matches, the Edinburgh fucking Festival! Ha! Fuck them. The poor are dying more, but hell, they always have done. They are also not missing the ski-ing trips to the Alps. They are cutting their own hair! Anyway back to Suunto.

I cannot express properly how much this fucks me off. I am trying to bear in mind my dad learned one program in Windows 95 and struggled to do anything else meaningful on a computer. He shouted a lot at an absent and unhearing Bill Gates like he had specifically done all this fancy new stuff just to annoy my dad who did nothing to learn any new programs or teach himself how to do emails and internet stuff which he would have enjoyed. Anyway he was a bit of a dick about learning new stuff on computers and I'm trying not to be that dick too. (Mary raises her eyebrows in the background.)

So a while back I got an iPad to overcome the fact that the whole world is going smart-phone based and I could either get on board or be left behind. I got on board with an iPad because I find phones too small to type sentences on. Or even passwords. I think my fingers are too spatulate and my eyes too dim. I even got an attaching keyboard unit and it is like a mini-computer. Fantastic! Although I only use it once in a blue moon and its like trying to learn a totally new platform like Android when you're used to the other one. I can send my gps output map in messenger back to my PC and get a map I can screen shot for my blog. Hurray! The data is in Km not miles. Boo! And the data takes up half the page making the map in Portrait. Suunto say yeah you can't change that, use Strava. So a major device manufacturer does not have the support platform for a reasonable proportion of its customer base. (I am not the only one disenchanted with their recent tactics and busy reminding them that Garmin too, produce GPS watches.) 

So Suunto drop their PC website and decide the whole thing is going to be App based. Just to underline how absolutely phone based it is you cannot turn the iPad on its side and view the screen and all maps and info in landscape format the way you can with most intelligent functions on the iPad. (The lovely attached keyboard is now vertical (portrait if you will) and less usable). Of course young people don't use large screens (or intelligence) and spend their whole lives in portrait mode on an idiot-phone. So much so that soon TV screens will no doubt be coming out in portrait mode to match the chronic format they all shoot video in these days. So, you ask, is Landscape actually better than Portrait mode? Not absolutely, but generally yes. Since we have 2 eyes on a horizontal plane it makes more sense to have a longer wider viewing ratio than a tall one. If we had eyes one above the other like a fucking flounder, then portrait might make more sense. Anyway it won't be long before cinemas will have a tall narrow screen for the arseholes who have made their epic in portrait mode on a smart phone. My point is that Landscape format was here first and should be the primary mode of use, since television screens, cinemas and everything (except youTube videos made by fucktards) were made in landscape. Portrait mode is just the unthinking dickwad mode of preference for ignorant illiterate teens who live and die on their phones. 

And Suunto cater primarily for them. Expressly for them. Yeah, fuck the dinosaurs on PCs writing blogs who want a landscape map; they are so old hat. So last year. So I wrote to them on their facebook page by way of a public shaming. They responded that I should use one of their partner applications. ie go on strava. So far I have avoided strava as I have avoided twitter. Because the depth of shit on both those venues is properly off-putting. (Less so on strava but I hate it being non-optional.) So until I buy a Garmin, which looks to be ever sooner, I will have to go on strava. Also, a lot of info about what birds are hanging out in which parks, appears exclusively on Twitter. So I might have to snuggle up to that too. At least The Donald was bumped off Twitter so that is one less cunt on there. But still.

It is totally depressing to see the Portrait fucktards are winning the battle for popularity. Imagine losing a format to a flounder. And one that pays hundreds of pounds for a second rate camera. I mean that's the big advertising pull of the latest 5G phones. That they are mostly pretty much identical to the 4 or 3G phones but with a better camera. And yet not one serious camera manufacturer has brought out a high end slim line flat screen camera you can slip into your jeans back pocket. Not one. Go into a camera shop (what am I saying they don't exist, thanks to mobile phones), go online and have a browse at cameras. They don't look like phones. Why? Because only a fucking flounder would think you can fit the lens(es) and gubbins of a decent camera into that thin design. Camera and phone were never meant to be bedfellows. I have found the need to be able to make phone calls on my camera to be zero. I can often wait till later to send emails or go online on my iPad. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra costs over a grand and only does x10 zoom. Pitiful. Mary recently bought a bridge camera for about a third of that price and it will take MUCH better photos. And has a x24 zoom. 

"I use my new 5G camera in portrait mode"

So the idiots are taking over the world. And it is more trouble to walk away from it than to get on board and use workarounds. No wonder I go take pics of birds in the snow. It is a simple pleasure and miles away from the sad fact that these days the majority are calling the shots and the majority are thick as a fucking stump. Look at their food choices; their fat, weak bodies; their silly camera-phones; their celebrity worship; their eyebrows and face paints; their spelling and grammar; their idiot music on Saturday night TV; their shaved pubes and bleached holes; their clapping in the street; their baking and cookery telly instead of restraint and exercise; their tattoos and piercings; their Tory government; and their jeans bought with holes already in their knees. Fucking idiotic fucking flounders.