Burt Lancaster lives! Further notes from an isolation diary.

Yes, I'm rapidly turning into the bird man of Alcatraz, keeping myself sane in lock down by garden bird watching. I've just sent in my weekly figures for Garden Bird Watch which runs all year on the website of the British Trust for Ornithology  Normally you have to be a paid subscriber, but during the Covid outbreak it is free. As well as birds, you can also report other wildlife.  This week we got 9 species of bird (robin, blackbird, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, long tailed tit, dunnock, magpie and wood pigeon) , 3 types of butterfly, two species of bumblebee and a squirrel.  Sadly you are not allowed to count birds that fly over without landing, otherwise I could have nabbed our local red kite to be a bit more exotic.  Other species we get occasionally but not this week include nuthatches, woodpeckers and jays.  Neither has our local fox made an appearance, but that could well be because I'm sitting in the garden.

Getting photos of birds on the feeders is easy if you have a tripod or some kind of stand camera that can be triggered remotely, which many can. Here's ours.

That gubbins on top of the camera is a little wireless receiver which triggers the shutter when I press a button on a remote control stick.  The wireless range is very good I can trigger the camera in the garden from inside the house, even upstairs. It's made by a company called Viltrox and people like amazon sell them for under £20 for the whole kit and caboodle.  You can get them for Canon and Nikon models - I don't know about other makes. It does time lapse too.  Kath's little Sony compact camera can be triggered from a mobile phone app.

Lots of photos end up on the cutting room floor of course but you're bound to get a good one now and then.  Here's another of one of our Robins which came out well

The one bird that evades me because it feeds always on the ground is the dunnock.  It creeps about under the hedge and then hops out to pick at insects in the grass for a minute or so, then heads back under cover.  Every time I position the camera at where it might come out, it chooses a different spot.  It's becoming an obsession now to get the little blighter.  Kath got this one of him (or her) perched in the bushes by grabbing my camera tripod and all and approaching it on foot.  I've had to enlarge it many times to show it this close

and using the tripod /remote setup I got this rather sub standard (and also much enlarged) one of it poking about under the hedge.

We still need a better one.

Anyhow, it's all very therapeutic.  Why not give it a go while you're a prisoner in your own home.  If you can't tell a great northern diver from a house sparrow, now's the time to learn, the internet makes it easy to look things up.  I might have a go at seeing how many types of bee I can get.  When you look at bumble bees you soon see there are a few different types.  Chris Packham would be proud of me.

In other news, my back is still suffering from when I fell off the wall.  I'm having to lie flat in bed all night, because it hurts to adopt my usual comfy foetal position and I'm waking up with a very stiff back.   Earlier in the week I refurbished our wooden garden furniture, light repairs, sanding down and re-staining and that did my back no good at all so now I'm forbidden by Kath to undertake any heavy duties.  Every cloud has a silver lining.

While I've been idling on an old sofa in the garden, Kath has been busy sewing scrub bags for our local hospital.  Apparently, the intensive care nurses etc get their scrubs washed by the hospital but other healthcare workers in the hospital,  - therapists, radiographers and so on - don't.  They have to take them home to wash, so what they want is a simple cotton drawstring bag to stuff their scrubs into which they then take home and bung in the washing machine still inside the bag.  Kath handed over her contribution to a grateful neighbour who works at the hospital.

Harrumph! As I write, that pesky dunnock has appeared in the very spot where I was going to point the camera before changed my mind. Missed him again. Typical.

Our cultural life continues to flourish, courtesy of arts organisations putting out free showings on YouTube.  This week we've watched Jane Eyre from the National Theatre (we scored it 9/10), Hamlet from the Globe Theatre (7/10) and Cosi Fan Tutte from the Royal Opera House (8/10 for performance, 5/10 for the actual opera). After now having seen quite a few operas, I'm beginning to realise that they are definitely not written for sophisticated audiences.  I suppose they were the hit musicals of the day. As far as the plot goes most of them would make a Father Ted episode look highbrow.  Of the ones I have seen I've really enjoyed about half of them. As for the music, well it's all good and the singers are amazing, but with the notable exception of Carmen, I don't find myself humming any of the tunes afterwards.  I shall persevere.

As the weather is not supposed to be so good this week I shall return indoors to my guitar looper pedal, where I have the ambition to create a multi track version of a John Mayall/ Eric Clapton song off the famous Beano album.  I've been slowly transcribing it note for note - a painstaking and non trivial task. Having studied it carefully, I'm beginning to think that Eric Clapton might be a somewhat better guitarist than me. Well there's no harm in setting your ambitions high.  I am after all a legend in my own mind.

And so the weeks in isolation drift on reasonably comfortably.  I see that CRT's latest guidance forbids even brief visits to, or short trips on, your boat.

I hope you are as comfy and well fed as we are, and that whatever you choose to occupy your time gives you pleasure.  Stay safe folks.