Pondcam Blog

Snakewatching

On Monday I received a call from a friend saying his cat had caught a grass snake and he did not know what to do with it. His cat kept on catching these snakes and could I help to release it somewhere safer. I brought it back to the garden and released it. It was about 18" long and about 1/2" in diameter. By the time we got back it was dark and I thought it would be best to release it straight away so I did not get a chance to examine it closely. Frankly, as it slipped off into the undergrowth I thought it would never be seen again.

Well today my wife sent me a text saying SNAKE! I knew exactly that she meant look at the pondcam immediately, so I did and there it was! I have put a print from the screen in the photo album, it's a bit pixellated but it is clear to me that it is the same grass snake.

Newt larva sighting and higher resolution images

I managed to spot a newt larva on Friday morning when I checked the page. I acted quickly and pressed ALT + Print Screen but then acted stupidly and copied something else before I had a chance to paste the picture, so no evidence, but I will try to root around in the recorded files on the pondcam pc to see if it is still there.

It would have been much easier to spot a newt larva had I seen it today because over the weekend Steen upped the image size to 640 x 480 pixels making it much clearer. Most of the activity seems to be pond snail related with a few tadpoles here and there but there are lots of other organisms in there including newt larvae, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs and water shrimps to name but a few. So it is well worth wasting a few minutes on...

Bagcam 2 Refinements

After some further discussions and experimentation the Bagcam version 2 was yanked out of the pond to see if the problem was caused by being in the bagcam (which it turns out it wasn't). It seems that the autofocus was required (at least it did when it was tested on dry land). So the manual was turned off, the bag was cleaned and then the whole thing was reassembled and then put back in a variety of locations. I settled on a fairly weedy but still light patch. The murk of the pond means that anything further than 10 cm away or so is impenetrably dark, while the weed cuts down on the light levels i the foreground so that it is not too dazzling for the camera to handle. There is the odd lump of vegetation in the way every now and then, but overall i would say that it is now working.