Wednesday, 29 January 2014
A very good
friend gave me an iPad for Christmas, for which I am extremely grateful, but
which also means, much to the joy of the staff who have to deal with my emails
when I am away, that I can do them wherever I am in the world – oh great!!!
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| Cowan Red is back out on duty for the start of the year |
However to be
able to access them I have had to change from Windows Live, which replaced
Outlook Express, and was no-where near as good I have to say, to Outlook. I had
to get Outlook 2013 – DON’T but it whatever you do!!!! It is crap, and that is
putting it very mildly indeed. Apparently I can’t put emails into my calendar
without sending the bloody things to myself as well, I can’t send a group email
without far more clicks of the mouse. I can’t stop all email addresses that
arrive to me going automatically into my address book, I can’t add a signature
to emails that have been forwarded and there are a whole ton of other things
that I can’t do which I could with Outlook Express and Windows Live - I hate
it!!!
I guess the two
things that really annoy me is that software writers don’t seem to understand
that some things do not need changing and that in fact the upgrades, changes
and general overhauls of a programme almost always are a problem rather than an
improvement to the users.
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| Mark's Merlin is ready to show off |
The other things
that really pisses me off is that they have glitches and often don’t work. If I
bought a drill, or an iron or a car that had glitches and did not work I would
be able to throw it back at the maker with strong words about it. Can you do
that with software, apparently not. I would like to return Outlook 2013 and get
2010 which I am told is better. Mr Microsoft, please talk to your software
writers and tell them that they should not improve a programme without asking
the people who use it if they really want to have it improved!!! And if they do
improve it they need to put it out to people like me, who can then tell them
what is not good about it!! Get it sorted please!
Well the rain
continues, the ground is saturated, but we are at least much luckier than those
poor people living close to rivers. I always thought it would be wonderful,
like Ratty, to live on the river, but now I am glad I live three hundred feet
up. However the snowdrops are still coming up, the daffodils are showing green
and its very weird to hear spring bird song this early, but we have been
hearing it since Christmas.
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| The Verreaux's nest and egg |
We now have
camera’s on the nests in the Eagle Barn, and Adam has put them on Ustream, so
you can see what is happening. The Verreaux’s laid two days ago and the
Vultures are now sitting on a wooden egg and Holly has taken their egg for
hatching. We will return the chick at about two weeks old as they failed to
rear last year.
Jimmi is
starting to train the Black Changeable Hawk Eagle as we are unlikely to ever
get a mate for her and so we thought we would see how she did flying.
Benbecula, the new male Stellers Sea Eagle is flying wonderfully, as is
Rathlin, John’s Steppe Eagle. He is also training a Striated Caracara kindly
given to us by ZSL, called Hibre, he is wonderful and very smart. The falcons
are starting to fly well, all the owls are coming back on line after their Christmas
break, and we are ready to open.
Its odd that
come the end of November we are really looking forward to being closed and not
having to work our day round flying demonstrations, but by about mid January we
are all looking forward to being open again!
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| A touch of spring to get us there! |
I am very much
looking forward to the spring this year because with Rob joining us as gardener
he has already made a huge difference to how the gardens are looking and the
spring will really show the difference.
With the new
Hospital making a big difference to our lives, the gardens coming on, a great
team of staff, the workshop being moved, the cars under cover, and the place
looking good, all it has to do is stop raining and we will have a great year
ahead of us.
Thursday, 16 January 2014
I am sure that
at times our visitors and my friends think that I am anti humans, and generally
they are probably right. It just staggers me how stupid, basic and all round
unpleasant they can be. I have just been ploughing through EU paperwork and
legislation and that in itself is a guaranteed place to get very angry at how
stupid some of the laws are that are coming out, you would hope they might have
better things to do. After all who cares what shape a bloody banana is. I
suspect that at some point in the future when there are world-wide food
shortages, which is likely to happen, all
of us will just be pleased to get a banana and all that stupid
legislation (26000 words on selling cauliflowers!) will go by the board, and rightly
so.
And then there
are those people who want licenses to shoot Rhino’s, Hippo’s (where the hell is
the skill in that for God’s sake) Elephants, Polar Bears, or go to South
America and shoot 4000 doves in three days, or two puma’s. Why do these
complete morons want to do it, what vicarious gratification does it give them
to sit there with their expensive high powered rifle and a beautiful graceful,
superb animal that looked so much better alive than held up by these pathetic
idiots. Plus with almost all of these animals they don’t even have the
extremely minor excuse of wanting to kill to eat. You do have to wonder at how their minds
work, if indeed they have anything that could be called one.
On the
other-side there are stunning buildings, amazing artwork, generous and kind
acts, and genuinely lovely people who stand up for humanity and bring it to a
level where one could be proud to be human if it were not for all the others.
Sadly the
others, extremists in religion – what is it with people who set off suicide
bombs and kill hundreds of people who have no interest in their problems - are they really stupid enough to think that
it will have the desired effect – I guess they are and the only upside is that
there is one less of them around, and all the other idiots push aside the good
that so many do.
OK rant over. We
have redone the roof over the aviaries for the trained owls and the weighing
room, and found out where the leaks were and fixed them, which is a relief. We
are half way through the replacement roof on the tiny owls and Delectable. We
were gaily taking the old and extremely rotten one off (it had been on since
1995!) when I suddenly realised that the apex of the roof was in fact not over
the service passage, but over the aviaries of birds that we had not moved! So a
quick removal of birds occurred and the roof was finished on one side in the
pouring rain and dark enough that it was hard to see the damn nail to hit it!
Delectable is ensconced in the indoor Hawk Walk having a wonderful time. The
others are all either in spare aviaries or in the hospital in the nice
comfortable, clean spanking new boxes for the night.
Deneb looks stunning, a beautiful orange
pink breast colour and very smart on the back. We have also got out Oberon,
John’s Red tailed Buzzard, and Tiapan, the Barbary Falcon as well as Common and
Discovery – Lanners, with more to come out over the next week ready for opening
again in February. Benbecula is flying brilliantly as is Rathlin, and Mark is
going to get his young Grey Buzzard Eagle out soon as well, so we should have a
great team to start the year.
We have had two very sad losses over the
winter, Pioneer our first and beautiful Steller’s Sea Eagle was found dead in
her moulting aviary, we do not as yet know why, she was fat, in wonderful
condition, just changing to full adult plumage, but died below her perch. We
will miss her greatly. We also lost one of the older Black Kites, Milan, she was
12 years old, which is not a great age.
Otherwise the birds are doing well. We gave
up with the African Fish Eagles who have been trying to build their damn nest
on a perch, a rock in their aviary, even the food draw – in fact anywhere other
than their nest ledge. So we gave them a new one near their favourite perch and
they love it. We now have CCTV in all the Eagle Barn Aviaries and so we can
check on them 24 hours a day to see what they are doing, it is wonderful and thank
you Adam for fixing it up.
We did some filming with Suliska earlier this month, he had to show that a Great Grey Owl can find food without seeing it, so he was pouncing on a buzzer hidden in leaves. The Burrowing Owls may star later in a wildlife film and my sparrow hawk is wanted to film with as well, although I am less confident in him than the others.
Rob is making the garden look great, or as great as he can in the incessant rain which is beginning to get us all down.
The snowdrops are coming out, because it is so mild we are hearing spring bird song, so I guess it will probably freeze and snow once we open again!!
The India trip is postponed until mid
February, so I can do the two lectures that I have booked. Angela has painted
the café again, so we are getting ready for February 1st!!
Sunday, 5 January 2014
Well Christmas is over, the New Year is
over, which as usual I saw in in bed fast asleep! I think the last time I saw
in the New Year was the millennium with a good friend of mine Arthur Middleton
and I am still kicking myself that we did not think to go up May Hill, it would
have been tremendous, never mind – next time!
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| A ford near us! |
Christmas Day and Boxing Day were lovely,
sunny and dry, and I think that one other day was good too, otherwise it
rained, and rained, and New Year’s day was I think the wettest day I can
remember for a long time. I went through three sets of clothing and was so cold
and wet after feeding round that I had to stop and get warm again before going
out to finish the cleaning up and bail water from in front of the weighing
room, that gave me the second set of wet clothes and taking the dogs out for a
walk did the final set – though to the skin all three times!
It’s raining now, we had a respite on Thursday,
it was good to see the staff back in, although Mark is not well. The hawk walk birds
all had a day out on the lawn, a good bath and a good clean, before having to
go back under their compartments again as the weather got worse.
We have five pair of birds on eggs, but
three are probably not going to have hatched eggs, they have been somewhat sketchy
in their incubation, however those pairs will probably relay. The Griffon
Vultures are on an egg, which is good, we will take and hatch it and then
return the chick at about ten days old if all goes well. Adam organised CCTV
camera’s on all the nests in Barn One and it is great fun to watch the birds
playing with sticks, completely demolishing their beautifully made nests, or
sitting on their egg. Sadly we can’t put it live on our website as the Broad
band here is too slow. So much for rural areas being looked after!!
There are rooves to fix, gutters to mend,
the old Secretary Bird aviary to sort out and make safe and birds to get flying
again (if it ever stops raining) all before we open again on February 1st,
I just don’t know where the time goes.
We are going to be filming the Burrowing
Owl’s nest, we have been asked to work with some Harris Hawks on a project at
Oxford University and my sparrow hawk Deneb is in demand, I am getting him out
this week to start flying.
I also have to go to India sometime this
month as we are going to be working with some of the parents and chicks to see
if we can improve on our breeding successes. Not likely to get bored I think!
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