Test and preparations

Just tried something out yesterday, the result of which is this little Alpine marmot. There is nothing exciting about the picture itself but I wanted to see if a certain technique would work (it did).

Also, since I plan to go on a hiking trip in Austria this summer, I am currently trying to complement my outdoor gear (nothing fancy, just the basics, i.e. shoes, jacket). As it turned out, doing so is much more complicated than I initially assumed - not because of the sometimes questionable colour selection but because of the widespread use of chemicals such as PFCs in the production process. And since I would rather like to avoid such products, there is a lot of reading to do (like, what are silver salts and what are they doing in a trouser?).

Bye-bye birdie!

After three weeks in one of our flower boxes the little wood pigeon flew away yesterday. What surprised me somewhat was the fact that wood pigeon chicklets usually stay in their nest until they are about 28 to 29 days old, which means that 'our' pigeon left its nest roughly one week earlier than it was supposed to do. My guess is that it may gave grown faster due to the fact that it did not have to share its food with a sibling (there were two eggs but only one hatchling, so something must have happened to the other egg - no idea what though).

Unfortunately, I was not able to take that many pictures of the little fellow despite it having been so close. It was simply too wary and got always puffed up as soon as the curtain was moved just a little bit. Once I took a low angle shot for which I did not have to lift the curtain but even then I got noticed. Thus, trying to take more pictures would only have stressed the chicklet unnecessaryly and I certainly did not want to be responsible if it had panicked and fallen out of the flower box to its death.

Well, yesterday and the day before the little one did not get fed particularly much and the adult birds were absent most of the time. It seems likely that they did so intentionally in order to motivate it to leave the nest. And so it did: in the early evening hours (around half past seven) it stood on the small fence that supported the nest, its back turned to the window and suddenly it flapped away. It was a short first flight though, just a few metres to nearby tree. There it sat and one of the adult birds perched on another branch of the same tree.

Whether the young pigeon stayed there for the rest of night I cannot say, but this morning it was gone. An adult pigeon stopped by at the nest for a few moments during the day but aside from this it remained empty.