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[sheddyian]

I have a largely pointless webcam in my garden shed, looking out onto the garden, where I've sown a load of wildflower seeds to make a little wildlife meadow.  It looks rather pretty once everything is flowering, and needs very little looking after.  Attracts loads of bees too.

http://sheddyian.hopto.org

Anyway, this wasn't a shameless plug for my cam, but what the cam caught in the garden tonight - foxcubs!

I've seen foxes in the garden over the past few weeks, so started putting a bit of dog food out for them on the lawn.  Then realised the opportunity if I put the food nearer the webcam, and set it to archive more of the snapshots so I could review them later.

I'll probably upload a photo gallery soon, but for now, here's the nicest one so far of my visitors :

http://sheddyian.hopto.org/fox/cam42.jpg

Ian

[burakkucat]

Thanks for sharing.    Thy link is book-marked.

[asbokid]

What excellent pictures!  Is that her indoors with the hat on?!  Very fetching!

As kids we used to get urban foxes in the 'garden',  to use the term loosely.  Compared to your floral nirvana, it was more an industrial wasteland than a garden!

Every Saturday i would spend my weekly pocket money (£1) buying five pounds of beef liver from the butcher. In one of those vast cooking pots from yesteryear I would boil it to within an inch of its life. The smell was vile but the foxes loved it.  They came to dine from far and wide. Think Maureen Lipman and the Bisto advert! The foxes would visit at night in increasing numbers! The old, the young, the infirm.

Sadly, in the end, the combination of complaints from the neighbours about "night-time visitors" and the pervasive smell of offal evident throughout the house meant that with great regret, the 'soup kitchen' was forced to close :-(

cheers, a

p.s. twas a strange thing to see our foul-tempered tomcat amicably dining alongside wild foxes. Contrary to popular myth, both species have a mutual respect for each other.

[kitz]

Ohhhhhh  how pretty that looks!!!!!!
Like how you have a daily pic - look at the rapid growth between 7-10th June!

Love the photo of the fox cubs
I see from your webcam 24hrs that you had a visitor at 9pm last night too

[roseway]

Great stuff! A couple of years ago I planned to do something similar with a camera nesting box, but the birds have studiously ignored it ever since. I got plenty of pictures of the empty box though.

[sheddyian]

I'm hoping to make an mpeg timelapse movie of the plants growing, and I'll also do one of the 25 minutes (in 30 second bursts) of the foxes scampering about last night.

I'd started the camera before I'd even completely cleared and dug the ground, but had hard disk crash in May (and not a full backup - I am stupid) so lost some of the archive.

Rather than boil up liver, I have been feeding them on Sainsburys Basics Chunks in gravy (with 4% chicken) and/or Sainsbury's Basics dry dog food (with pro-biotic).  The latter I'd hoped would be chunky enough to dissuade cats from eating it, but it's actually the size of dry cat food, and I've seen cats sniffing it, but not caught one eating it yet.

The scarecrow was added to give webcam viewers something to look at before the flowers came up, ditto the solar powered lights along the fence (for night time visitors or those from a different timezone!)

Ian

[tickmike]

The scarecrow was added to give webcam viewers something to look at before the flowers came up,

Ian

No it's to frighten the birds away  .
Get rid of that and hang some bird feeders from the tree and make a bird table.
Just an idea 
Nice fox cubs.

[sheddyian]

No it's to frighten the birds away  .
Get rid of that and hang some bird feeders from the tree and make a bird table.

I had wondered about putting bird feeders out there.  There are some in other bits of the garden that you can't see, but in the past year or so there have been far fewer birds coming to the garden, caused I suspect by the neighbours new cats!

I may well try some bird feeders in view of the camera though.

I'd tried setting it up so that it recordeed a snapshot when it detected movement, but there is so much plant growth there that waves around in the wind that it was triggering any time it was windy, and registering as a large amount of movement.

Ian

[kitz]

I love that scarecrow I think he's ace 

bird tables + cats != good idea 
Feeders from thin tree branches work though...   unless you are a ziggy_cat and think you can fly*   



* result = one smashed hip joint and femur = one large vet bill 

[asbokid]

From the Daily Telegraph photograph competition. (click to see more )



cheers, a

[sheddyian]

So... if I'm understanding that correctly, the website tool suggests the fox in that photo may have been photoshopped in?

Impressive!

I assure you all my foxes are 100% genuine  (I've used Picasa/Gimp to enhance or reduce the size of some of the static images though)

Ian

[kitz]

I'm still a novice at trying to interpret ELA, but to my eyes it looks to comprise of 3 parts.    The background, the fox - notice how the ELA data shows the fox legs.  Then there's the foreground bluebells, hard to spot but they are slightly more blocky indicating a more compression... Therefore possibly indicating an overlay using a previously saved image.

Finally the fox eyes have definitely been edited, whilst normally not a problem because quite often animals will show eye shine...  But that normally happens in artificial light or flash... The rest of the photo is certainly not something you'd expect a artificial light.. Therefore perhaps suggesting that the fox image was taken under different light conditions than the bluebells.

[burakkucat]

My eyes also tell me that there are three parts to the image shown.

I think you've got it spot-on, Kitz.

[sheddyian]

There are currently 4 foxes darting in front of the webcam RIGHT NOW! 

They seem to arrive around 9pm BST

Ian

Webcam : http://sheddyian.hopto.org

[burakkucat]

Thanks for the update. I managed to see one of them.