Bird tracks

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Whether they’re slithering, hopping or walking, animals leave tracks wherever they walk in the sand or on the earth. Equally, you can follow birds this way while they’re on land, but as soon as they take off, their path becomes invisible. Well, until now January 2018 at least, when photographer Barcelona-based photographer Xavi Bou decided to make them appear, through the magic of technology.

…he chose to work with a video camera, from which he extracts high-resolution photographs. After he films the birds in motion, Bou selects a section of the footage and layers the individual frames into one image.

The results are pretty amazing:

A herring gull flies over flamingos in Spain.

 

Fulmars and Puffins around a sea stack in Iceland.

 

I love the way that on that second image, you can actually look at the shape of the track and see which bird it belongs to: the near-effortless, near-gliding of the Fulmars versus the frantic, almost desperate efforts of the puffins.

There are more images on that link above and you should go and see them.

They are remarkable, not just for the fluidity and grace of the movement, but also because it’s a completely different way of viewing something that we all see every day. Additionally for me, the juxtaposition of static objects and wildly mobile bird tracks in these two images is especially good.

 

Photo credits: Xavi Bou

Sting

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Another lovely day down at the Southern Tip. I moved some braai wood this morning to find this feisty little fellow:

I’ll update the image when I upload it to Flickr. [Note to self – update the image when you upload it to Flickr.] Yeah, yeah – I did this. [really cool Flickr link]

It’s a Opistophthalmus capensis. But of course you knew that already. Nasty, painful sting, (which he was more than ready to use) but not medically important.

So I was fairly safe while talking my photo.

Footnote: We also found a Parabuthus capensis the night before. [phone pic]

(I was a bit more careful with that one.)

Steel

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A busy day considering we’re supposed to be chilling at the cottage. Transporting 8m of galvanised steel tubing along 5km of dirt road without damaging the new car was a particular triumph, but the gale force wind meant that we couldn’t really do a lot with it once we got it here.

That wind has been dominating everything today. We got sandblasted on the beach, and lighting the braai later will probably require assistance from some fictional deity or other.

I’d love to share the forecast with you all, but the internet has gone all sketchy, meaning that my Windguru app is wholly unobtainable.

There might even be problems uploading this, although if you’re reading it, it would seem that all has gone well in that regard.

My god, that was close

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I’ve had a weirdly busy day. Weird because I visited a retirement home (don’t you dare!) and went to a supermarket in the midst of renovations.

No big wow, I know, but then the drive down to Agulhas, a few beers, a braai…

… and I almost forgot to blog.

My god, that was close.

Fortunately, I didn’t forget, and that’s the important thing. But now, those beers and that braai are calling once again.

Let’s meet here again tomorrow, ‘k?

Hidden message?

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I’ve been up and about for five hours today, during which time, I have made packed lunches, fed the beagle, done a decent 6.5km run, popped into the lab, picked up some keys from a block of apartments and answered four (yes, four) sales calls from three different companies, each offering me a funeral plan. Two of these companies were full on insurance companies, and this is part of their irritating bread and butter.

The other one was my cellphone provider.

I do recognise that times are hard and that businesses are having to branch out a bit, but Vodacom are notoriously unreliable on coverage and damn expensive on price, so why on earth would I use them to pay for my funeral?

But that’s the secondary issue here.

I don’t get offered funeral plans often. To get offered four in a single morning does suggest that someone knows something. Bit worrying.
Maybe they’d seen me after my run this morning. It is like a near death experience every time.

But then of course, for money to be made on funeral plans, it does rather rely on the insured individual living for as long as possible – or better still, not dying at all.

So maybe someone knows something else.

Glass half full, and all that.