This guy is becoming less skittish and will even pose a bit.

No, this isn’t another book review. Just another visit from the Fox family. This little guy was barely bigger than a chihuahua. He liked the peanuts, though. Although the squirrels weren’t too happy about his visit.

I didn’t know foxes ate peanuts. I guess they’re omnivores, like raccoons. Last week we had a raccoon and fox nose to nose. The raccoon won. Today the fox had the whole place to himself.

So today I was stuck in a class from 8:30AM to 5:30PM. Sarah dropped me an email late this morning to tell me some animal was caught in the vent for the stove hood. She said it was making a real racket. Our stove hood vent apparently does not have a screen or flapper valve at the top to keep animals out. Somehow an animal had fallen down the vent and was struggling at the bottom to get out. At first we didn’t know if it was a bird or a squirrel, and judging from the amount of noise, Sarah thought it might be a squirrel. So all day while I was in class, I was thinking about how we’d get the squirrel out of our vent. I even called a local plumber who suggested we let it die and then remove it. Being big fans of animals, that was not a good option in our house. Our cats were, of course, mesmerized by the prospect of a small critter so close. Kitty excitement reigned.

So after I got home, I set about trying to see into the vent. It didn’t look like it would be easy from the stove end, so I crawled up into the attic to try from that end. Our attic is not an easy place to walk, though. It’s criss-crossed with support beams and has a few feet of blown-in insulation on the floor. One misstep and we’d have a new hole in the ceiling. It took me a while to work my way over to the vent pipe, but I still couldn’t get into a position to look down inside it. Time for Plan B.

I removed the screen over the hood vent fan and could see up inside enough to realize that it wasn’t open directly to the vent pipe. There was a flapper gate in a mail-size slot at the stove end. When the fan turned on, the flapper gate opened enough to vent out the air. I pushed the flapper open a bit and could see feathers and a bird leg. One mystery solved. It was actually better that it was a bird as it’s easier to deal with a bird in the house than a scared squirrel. Time to disassemble the stove hood.

Now it needs to be said here that I am no handyman. In fact, my nickname at a former employer was Handy, but it wasn’t a compliment. I’m a disaster with a screw gun or a hammer. Nonetheless, I dismantled the hood. (Taking things apart has never been a problem for me. Putting them together again is a different story.) So I finally got the hood apart and was able to remove the flapper vent. It wasn’t out 2 seconds when the bird flew out and the chase around the house was underway. The bird, of course, flew past the windows we had opened and finally lodged itself in the most difficult place to reach; behind our biggest CD rack. I had to move a smaller rack and bunch of loose CDs and then move the large rack. Once I had moved the rack, the bird finally flew to a spot where I could grab it and set it free out the window. Chalk up one for the good guys. Hope the birdbrain learned a lesson. 🙂

My reward was a good pepperoni pizza, some very good Merlot, and getting to sit and watch The Italian Job, which is a favorite of mine. Animal rescue has its rewards.

This is one happy little guy. His hole is right next to the wall where I feed the birds. He scurries back and forth filling his cheeks with seeds and carrying them back to his den. He must have quite the stash in there by now.

As I wrote a few posts ago, I bought myself a new camera. I toyed with the idea of a full Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera, but they’re pricey and I felt I’d be better served starting with a lower priced model so I can learn more about digital photography before jumping into the high end of the field. So after some research, I settled on the 8MP Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. This is a single lens reflex camera and it is digital, so it qualifies as a DSLR, but it’s still restricted to the single, permanently mounted lens (although you can add adapters and multipliers). The lens has an amazing range of 28-504mm, although at the extreme zoom end, the pics are not as sharp as higher end DSLR/lens combos produce. That’s fine. I can live with that. It also has a bit of an issue with digital noise at ISO levels above 200, but again, I can work around that. I knew all this before purchasing it. But I figure it’s only fair that I won’t get $2000-quality images from a $300 camera.

So here are a few pics, resized for this blog. Click on the images for a larger view. I’ll point out some of the pros and cons with each image. All these shots, btw, are taken on the iA (Intelligent Auto) mode. In other words, the camera did all the work. All I did was point and shoot. These are also processed as JPGs by the camera. The camera gives you the option of storing pictures as RAW files and processing them yourself. I will definitely get into that down the road once I’m comfortable with the camera. 

Here are a few pics of some birds feeding in my back yard. Note the very fine detail visible on the back of this female cardinal. This shot was nearly at full zoom with extreme cropping to frame the bird. It was also shot through a window with some glare and dirt on the outside of the glass.

Now here’s a shot of a woodpecker taken at about the same time. Note how it’s slightly less sharp. There were some differences in my shooting location. This shot was taken from a little further away and from a different window, and this particular window has some ivy hanging in front of it, all of which combined to mess with the auto-focus.

Here’s another cardinal sitting on a branch straight out from the window. Note how the auto-focus really focused on the tree trunk and not the bird.

Now here are some doves sitting along one branch. I could not get the camera to focus on the doves. Maybe it was because they were the same color as the surrounding trees, I don’t know. Note that the branches to the left and past the doves are in focus.

Now for some positives. Here are a few pics of the garden under my window. I love the color balance of this camera. This is very, very accurate to what I saw. My previous camera had a problem rendering greens properly. Not so with this Lumix. The focus here is also pretty sharp, but that is due to the generally flat field (nothing in the foreground or background to confuse things).

Finally, here’s a picture of my impossibly cute cat, Callie, sitting on top of my wife’s dresser amongst some stuffed animals. This was shot in fairly low light, so the ISO was above 200. Note the noise in the background, especially on the wall behind her. Again, the trade-off is that this camera is very quick to fire up and get the shot and it captures images like this which would be seriously underexposed by a typical point-and-shoot camera.

I’ll keep posting images as I learn. Hopefully they’ll get better and better and one day I’ll look back at this post and laugh at the rookie quality of these images. We’re heading off to Florida tomorrow, so I’ll have some sunny images to post soon. We’ll be staying in St. Augustine for a few days. St. Augustine is known for its winter lights festival, so I’ll get to try some night shots.

Update: Here are the pics from Florida. The night shots came out pretty well.

We’re getting our first significant snow today and the birds were out stocking up. I had a virtual baseball game in my back yard. Cardinals vs Bluejays.