At irregular times during the last couple of days you may have noticed something odd happening to the feeds of the Web Viewer. There is now a fifth feed called Videoscope which shows Fantail's box from the outside in close up view.
This is the result of a collaboration with Huw Edwards, of
The images you see displayed are our first attempt at getting a picture. To get such quality from a distance of over 50 feet speaks volumes for the quality of the camera! Now we have to find a way of moving the video camera closer to the scope's eyepiece in order to avoid the vignetting that currently occurs and causes the corners of the image to look blacker than they should. (For those who are not into digiscoping, vignetting is the name given to the black halo around the image that can occur when taking photographs through a scope.)
Watch this space!
We're pretty sure that Fluffy now has six eggs! That's one each day since she started laying.
You can clearly see four eggs in this picture and there is part of a fifth egg showing which is partly hidden by her tail.
This is marked by an arrow!
In this picture, the sixth egg is completely covered by Fluffy's tail
This picture was taken only 5 seconds after the one above. Fluffy has moved a bit to the left, covering the eggs visible before, but exposing the fifth and sixth egg more clearly.
The sixth egg is indicated by the arrow.
The only movement she has made after the image above was taken is to turn her head to look over her right shoulder. She did nothing to the eggs between these shots!
In our books, definitely six eggs!
Just one more picture from the videoscope. It was captured as I was writing the above and saw Neptune bobbing about on the top of Fantail's box clearly looking for her.
She did not appear and eventually he flew away a disappointed bluetit.
Later! Fluffy has dropped her guard!
Definitely six eggs!