Chris’ Eastern Screech Owl Nest Box Cam’

May 15 – Wing exercises are on the rise, and that first set of feathers is becoming more and more evident on the owlets, but climbing attempts seem to have remained constant at one per day. Inevitably, the owlets are working-up to leaving. For the moment, they don’t seem to be hurrying toward that goal, but that’ll change, and change quickly when it does.

My best estimate is that the first owlet leaves the nest on the 24th. So, this cam’ has a while to go before it shuts-down for the year, but there’s little danger of getting all of the improvements I’d wanted in place before it does shut-down, and rapidly diminishing returns for any improvements made in the meantime. Dang.

Returning to the owls, there were thunderstorms much of the day, and more during the night, so if the adults look a bit odd at times, its only because they’re soaking wet (or, rather, as wet as any healthy screech owl ever gets).

BTW, there may be a flow a new content even after the owlets leave, time permitting. I’ve built-up a large collection of automatically recorded videos of nest box activity associated with motion in the entryway, so that probably means a lot of food delivery movies. Regrettably, whatever good movies are in that collection need some meaningful post-processing to make them suitable for general viewing (rotating them, minimizing the hum in the audio, etc.), and that’s where making them available comes to involve a lot time and repetitive manual labor, which is just the sort of thing you want to do after several months of non-stop activity (and after most of the site’s audience has left). That said, I don’t want those movies to go to waste, either.

May 15, 9:40 PM – Another futile effort to solve the hum problem is concluded. Perhaps outright replacement of the RG-6 cables that run from house to box is called-for, but my tests this evening for a short in either cable yielded negative (or, in some cases, ambiguous and difficult to interpret) results. Alternately, perhaps hypnotism, or surgical removal of various brain centers, could convince me that I like that infernal, tortuous hum, and I could finally relax.

Thoughts from people with electrical or medical backgrounds would be welcome.

May 15, 8:40 PM – Testing cable integrity, in my endless quest to find the source of audio hum in the system. Expect the loss of video, and changes in nest box lighting, during this time.

May 15, Early – A new version of the daily image archive slide show software was deployed this morning. The fast forward (now “Play Forward”), and rewind (now “Play Reverse”, which I suddenly think ought to be changed to “Play Backward”), buttons have much better operational logic behind them: click one up to four times and the slide show starts, then doubles in speed with each click. Click a fifth time, and the show stops. If, instead, you were to click the other button (“Play Backward”, if you’re currently going forward), the slide show continues going forward, but slows down by half with each click, until the slide show stops. Keep on clicking the same button and the slide show shifts into reverse, and goes progressively faster. It feels very natural, IMHO.

Clicking “Next” or “Prior” halts any slide show that was underway, and lets you manually move one-at-a-time through the images. (Using the keyboard equivalents—see below—that can be done very quickly.) There’s also much better visual feedback - when the slide show is active (as opposed to the one-at-a-time manual viewing mode), the forward or backward button (whichever reflects the current viewing direction) “lights up” and the its name changes to one or more directionally appropriate arrows, the number of arrows (up to four) reflects the current speed of the show. When you pause a slide show, or hit the end of it, the “Pause” button lights up and its name changes to “Resume.” (Yes, toggle switches in computer interfaces are rich with potential confusion - for one thing, there’s no convention for indicating to people that a button is a toggle, and, worse, you never know whether their labels reflect what’s currently happening, or what will happen if the button is clicked. In this case, it’s the latter. I’d’ve avoided toggle behavior, but for the usual reason: it saves space, and combines buttons that can’t be used at the same time into a single button, reducing the number of user interface elements, and hiding options while they are irrelevant. All good things, but despite using them myself, I still think they cause too much confusion and should be abandoned.)

Key equivalents: up arrow = “Play Forward”, down arrow = “Play Reverse”, left arrow = “Prior”, right arrow = “Next”, space = “Pause”/“Resume”. And, for anyone lacking arrow keys, or convenient access to them, the “w”, “a”, “s” and “d” keys have been pressed into service as substitutes.

It’s not the slide show facility I originally envisioned—features have been cut to save time, or avoid cluttering the interface—but I’m satisfied with it. (It’s at least as good as the slide show application I’d been using when I reviewed a day’s images.) Nonetheless, your feedback is welcome – send me email.

(Yes, I realize that I haven’t told my tale of woe from the morning of the 14th. This other stuff seems more important. But readers waiting for their woe will get it. Eventually.)

May 14 – The beginning of the conclusion of nesting came today when an owlet made the first climbing attempt, watched intently by at least one sibling. If memory serves, it’ll take about a week for the climber to master the skill, then the outside world will beckon irresistibility from the entry hole.

May 14, 7:34 AM – Running late with the daily gallery for the 13th, because … nevermind … I’ll tell you later. No worries about the owls, though; they’re all fine. Still no climbing attempts from the owlets, to the best of my knowledge.