NWR Silly little things that delight you

Quite a decent list for garden visitors Steven. I also get visits from coal tits, but they must check that the camera is not there first o_O
Also had starlings and tree/house sparrows, a wren and a pair of dunnocks and blackbirds. The other day a Jackdaw was ferociously hammering the suet balls and magpies have nested in a tree nearby. We're a bit too far north for the swallows and swifts to have arrived yet but hopefully we'll see them next month.
It has also been great to see my 6 year old grandson get into nature generally and birdwatching in particular and he'll be excited that his welcome pack from the RSPB arrived this morning.:D
 
I sit in front of our kitchen windows in the mornings sipping my tea looking a dribbling idiot just watching the birds (blue tits are making their net at the moment outside our kitchen door). I take whatever pleasure I can these days.

We also go to the back of the garden of the evening to watch the parent robin feed her baby (and drink wine)

I really do need to get out more.
 
Paul J a i n e s said:
I sit in front of our kitchen windows in the mornings sipping my tea looking a dribbling idiot just watching the birds (blue tits are making their net at the moment outside our kitchen door). I take whatever pleasure I can these days.

We also go to the back of the garden of the evening to watch the parent robin feed her baby (and drink wine)

I really do need to get out more.
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Actually it is one of the reasons I live where I do, simple pleasures and all that.
 
Jasper Morris said:
drosophiles - vinegar flies
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Fruit flies, really. Drosophila melanogaster, the black-bellied lover of dew.

They run through my life like wine through water. My grandfather, a fruit farmer, hated them. I spent time ineptly studying their genetics, at a cost in fly lives that would put Stalin to shame, and with an obdurate inability to keep fly genetics in my head that was scant reward for the kindness of my old tutor. Now the flies appear in the kitchen, where my wife wages war against them. I rather like them, except when they grow numerous. We have constructed various traps for them, and they should a distinct preference for spätlese. Despite our own wild harvest of the creatures, my son orders them in pots by post to feed to various of his invertebrates (I think mainly the mantids).
 
It's seven degrees up here in the Highlands. Icy wind is storming in from the rolling sea and needles of hail flash down in between gleams of sunlight so cold they touch you like marble in a crypt. I kept my mask on outdoors in an effort to prevent the racial pride of my nose being reduced by frostbite.

On a brisk walk through the town I saw several natives, in honour of the sunlight, wearing T-shirts and shorts.
 
Just re bird feeders etc, much pleasure here comes from remote camera, especially using video setting. We have a Campark wildlife camera with WiFi, usually pointed at the feeders or water pot.
 
Colin Bradley said:
I once read some research that concluded that fonts like that one, Times New Roman and, indeed, the current Times font, are by far the best for legibility and retention of information by the reader.
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I find that sans-serif fonts are less than ideal for large blocks of text, and I have found it tedious trying to read books or magazines that have been set using them, and would much rather see something like Times. Personally I actually feel that for a book something with a smaller x-height* than Times is even better - I quite like Garamond or Baskerville, though there are a huge number of other great fonts around.

*apologies - I'm a bit of a type geek, having spent many happy hours in our school printing room... The large x-height of Times New Roman means that more of the total height of the type is taken up by the central part of the letter and less by the ascenders and descenders, which is good for legibility if you're using a relatively small size to get lots of text in your newspaper, but is I think a bit less aesthetically pleasing than having slightly longer ascenders and descenders.
 
The posts above remind me of an experiment that we conducted on fruit flies in 3rd or 4th year biology at school. IIRC we were supposed to ensure that the flies were virgins. How we did that has faded from my memory.
 
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