Mme. Owl Spends the Day in the Next Box

Mme. Owl, in a move that I hope has nothing to do with impending eggs (it’d be about 10 weeks too early for eggs around here), spent the entire day of January 2nd, 2013, in the nest box, starting at 6:28 AM CST and ending at 6:01 PM CST. The movie below shows all of the portions that triggered automatic recording. (In future, I will allow movement in more of the nest box to trigger recording.)

January 2nd, 2013, 6:28 AM to 6:01 PM CST
706 MB MPEG-4 movie, of 47:47 duration.

If impending eggs aren’t the source of this daytime stay, it may be that one of the several construction sites up the block disturbed or destroyed her normal daytime roost, forcing her to seek alternate, but safe and familiar, accommodations.

The perch in the nest box continues to be a well-liked feature, as you can see, though I wonder if an adult screech owl would prefer that it was another half inch, or thereabouts, further from the far wall, to allow ample room for tail feathers, etc. With the floor of the box only measuring 8" x 10" (which is larger than the 8" x 8" usually recommended), I wanted to try the perch experiment, but keep it out of the way of normal owl business as much as I guessed was possible. However, the years have proved it is popular enough with adults and owlets alike that allotting it more space might be appropriate. And it's not merely a perch for the adults, or a climbing target for the owlets; both adults and owlets will hide beneath it when they feel threatened. It might provide very little protection, but it seems clear that any protection is immediately recognized as better than none.

May 3, 2012: A Most Unusual Food Delivery

What makes this food delivery unusual? First it happened during the day. Second, it was a whole mouse (wondered where my bold bird feeder mice went to). Third, Mme. Owl was spending daytime outside the nest due to the heat, but showed-up, called to her mate, and eventually he arrived with this mouse, still in daylight, a time when screech owls especially do not want to be seen. So this is one of the oddest food deliveries I can remember seeing.

Fortunately, the S2071 automatically recorded these events. Unfortunately, it was set to start recording six seconds before motion was detected in the entryway, and to stop sixty seconds afterward, so you don’t so much get a slice of owl life from this movie, as slices. When there's been a meaningful gap between consecutive recordings, you will notice breaks in the video (some very obvious, some less so). Those correspond to periods when there was no motion in the entryway to trigger recording. Nonetheless, take all the fragments for a 56 minute period, even though they capture only 18 minutes of it, run them together into a single movie, and the result is still of interest (IMHO). The sound was a problem however: my nightmare hum was present at the time all of this occurred. I've filtered it out, but the side-effects of doing so are over-emphasized high frequencies, and the addition, at times, of what sounds like an echo, which is definitely not a sonic characteristic of the nest box.

May 3, 2012, 7:24 to 8:21 PM CDT
266.7 MB MPEG-4 movie, of 17:56 duration.

As this movie begins, the eldest owlet was 9 days, 4 hours and 20 minutes old, ±16 minutes, while the youngest owlet was exactly 6 days, 3 hours and 31 minutes old. No idea how old the mouse was, or even its species.

December 29/30 Mme. Owl Visits Again

Mme. Owl visits the nest box once again, complete with egg depression work. Not sure what more to say, except that, if all of these visits start to look the same, the frequency of them is well worth observing and recording. Also, at some point, we should witness the male owl call to his mate from the nest site, as part of, what I believe to be, the start of the mating ritual (“See: I found you a good place to nest. Can we have sex now?”).

December 30, 2012, 6:09 AM CST
19.7 MB MPEG-4 movie.

December 28/29 Nest Site Preparation

Mme. Owl stopped by the nest box at 6:04 AM CST to do a little nest site prep. That consists, as usual, of kicking around the bedding material to make a depression for the eggs she’ll eventually lay. Another means to the same end, not seen here, is for the female to push the bedding material around using her breast like the blade of a bulldozer. That behavior, however, may be reserved for looser material than that currently present in the nest box.

December 29, 2012, 6:04 AM CST
40.6 MB MPEG-4 movie.

The material in the nest box, BTW, is what was left after last season's breeding. I haven't made any effort to replace it. One reason is laziness; egg laying shouldn't begin in these parts until March, and the last time I went looking to buy wood shavings (as used in hamster cages, for instance) all I could find was something resembling cat litter. The other reason is that I need to move the nest box to a living tree before nesting commences (a project I admit to putting off due to the fact that it's going to be a major pain in the ass), and leaving the old bedding material, rich with familiar owlet smells, in the box should help reassure the adult owls that this is the same nest they've trusted for who-knows-how-long, just miraculously relocated. I have no evidence that that will be considered significant by the owls, but it seems like a reasonable possibility with no downside.

December 27/28 Mouse Withdrawal

Whichever of the owls (I suspect Mme. Owl) deposited the mouse in the nest box last night (December 26/27) was back tonight to make the withdrawal. Think of it as getting dinner from the leftovers in the fridge.

December 28, 2012, 3:14 AM CST
29.6 MB MPEG-4 movie.

December 26/27 Owl Visits

There were two screech owl visits to the nest box last night, December 26/27, 2012.

In the first visit, at 1:54 AM CST, Mme. Owl gives herself away by briefly kicking around the bedding material, which is a classic female screech owl behavior: making a depression for her eggs (even though there shouldn’t be any until March).

December 27, 2012, 1:54 AM CST
29.6 MB MPEG-4 movie.

The second visit is more interesting, because it demonstrates the all-year utility of nest boxes to the owls: one of the owls stops by to deposit a dead mouse for safe keeping, i.e. later eating. This prey caching behavior is normal, and, while all manner of locations may be selected as caches, a secure cavity like the nest box would have to be somewhere around the top of the list. And that is one of the reasons I invariably tell people who ask “when should I put up my screech owl nest box” that the correct answer is always: “now.”

December 27, 2012, 6:07 AM CST
37.9 MB MPEG-4 movie.

In this particular case, the nest box will be functioning like a freezer, as the thermometer on the wall clearly shows a temperature in the mid-twenties, fahrenheit; significantly colder than predicted. I went out shortly after this visit finished, and rapidly made two observations: the first was a screech owl perched on a tree limb about ten feet from my back door (after looking away for a moment, it was gone), and the second was that the thermometer was correct.

Owls from the Archives: Being Pushed Around

Yesterday’s video showed the owlets, almost ready to leave the nest, competing for food deliveries. This video shows them a month earlier. A lot can change in a month.

April 23, 2012, 3:07 AM CDT
16.7 MB MPEG-4 video.

Mme. Owl is seen here engaging in one of her routine brooding duties: shuffling and rolling eggs. The former you can see, at least for two eggs. The latter is being done when Mme. Owl is vigorously moving around after the shuffling. Turn the volume up high enough, and you can even hear the eggs moving.

Owls from the Archives: How to Get Fed

Here's something from the video archives that accumulated during this year’s nesting season: owlet food begging, and two food deliveries. As one of the owlets has learned, and demonstrates with the second food delivery, the best way to make sure that you’re the one who gets fed is to be the owlet nearest the entryway.

May 23, 2012, 9:21 PM CDT
17.5 MB MPEG-4 video.

If you’re remembering that there were four owlets this year, and wondering why there are only three here, that’s because the eldest owlet had already left the nest at this point (three days ahead of the sibling who hatched on the same day, if memory serves).

December 20/21 Owl Visit

The owls (or at least one of them) continue to monitor the nest box. Since live owlets emerged from this nest site this year, it will be their first choice for a nest site this coming year. Therefore, they probably give it far more attention than any other cavity in their territory. It’s been a long time since I was able to gather data on the frequency of owl visits to their would-be nest site over time. I'm looking forward to collecting such information again, in the lead-up to this year's nesting.

Nothing about the behavior shown here is a clear indicator of the sex of the owl. My guess, at this time of year, is that it is the male, making sure that he'll have a nest site to offer his mate a few months from now. The pair are mated for life (although screech owl life expectancies in the wild are sufficiently short that it's hard to know how meaningful that is in practice), but it seems to be the male’s responsibility to secure a nest site as part of the yearly mating ritual (and to defend it while nesting is in progress), so he’ll be anxious to ensure that he can hold-up his end of that bargain.

December 21, 2012, 6:56 AM CST
23.4 MB MPEG-4 video.

I can’t say this video is exciting, but if you need your screech owl fix, or just want to see what these quick “status check” visits are like, have a look.

Owls Return After Nest Box Maintenance

Last Sunday, December 16, I brought the screech owl nest box down, removed the long-since unnecessary owlet rail in order to discourage squirrels, and gave the camera windows and compartment interiors a thorough cleaning, so the cameras could acquire clear pictures again. Also, as part of my eternal, and perpetually failing, quest to eliminate hum in the audio signal, I added some ferromagnetic cores (AKA chokes) around various internal wires I thought might be susceptible to picking up electrical noise and feeding it back into the system.

(At first the ferromagnetic cores seemed to have done the trick; now I know they haven't. So, the score stands at unwanted, intermittent audio noise: ≈10 years; Chris: zero. I'd scream if it would make me feel any better, but at this point I think sinking into deep depression is the way to go. That and ripping every piece of analog electronics out of the system and replacing it with digital gear; but that's still somewhat expensive, and public university salaries are somewhere between poor and disgraceful here in Texas, and, not being adjusted for inflation, they only get worse. Still, I'm better off than a lot of my fellow Americans, which is a sad commentary, right there.)

This nest box work was motivated by the acquisition of a new S2071 unit from SuperCircuits to replace the two previous units (one purchased, one generously loaned by SuperCircuits) that had bricked themselves during the nesting season. SuperCircuits has been great about replacing the gear with no hassles about my tardiness in returning the original equipment, but neither they nor I have any clue what the problem is/was, so whether the new unit will do any better than its predecessors, I have no idea, though things aren't encouraging thus far. The manufacturer, 3S Vision Systems has, of late, been unresponsive to elementary queries about obtaining the latest firmware. So, I haven't even had the chance to try to obtain contacts with their engineers about the bugs in their RTP implementation (specifically the RTCP sub-protocol). That's all a shame, because, if it were reliable, it'd be a very useful unit to those of us still using analog closed-circuit video gear.

Anyway, with the box cleaned, the owlet rail gone, and an S2071 to constantly monitor the video feeds (and automatically record movies when it detects motion), I set about waiting for my owls to put in an appearance. Their interest in nest sites is proportional to the nearness of the next nesting season (or predators, or weather from which they need shelter), so their interest at the moment isn't high, but they are periodically checking-out the would-be nest cavities in their territory to make sure they're still available.

On December 18th, the owls finally put in not one, but two, appearances, as may be seen below. (Click the images to see the movies.)

December 18, 2012, 1:14 AM CST
22.6 MB MPEG-4 video.

December 18, 2012, 6:40 AM CST
18.3 MB MPEG-4 video.

So, if you're wondering whether the nest box cam’ will be returning next year, I think we can safely assume that it will (hum, or no hum).

Geminid Meteor Shower 2010 Time-Lapse Movie

I’ve taken my 686 photos of the 2010 Geminid meteor shower on December 13/14 and transformed them into the following high-definition (1080p), time-lapse movie, which I hope you will enjoy. It spans 6¼ hours of time in two minutes, contains approximately 34 meteors, several airplanes, and a couple of satellites. Also, you get to watch the sky as it appears to rotate around the polestar, Polaris.

High-definition, time-lapse movie of the 2010 Geminid meteor shower.
87.1 MB, 1080p (1920 x 1080), MPEG-4 (H.264) video.
No sound.

Be aware that if you watch this video in your web browser, and your screen isn’t large enough to display the whole thing, Firefox and Chrome don’t seem to have any support for scaling down the video, but Safari does – just use the “Zoom Out” item in the “View” menu.

The original, 87.1 megabyte, 1080p movie linked-to above is hosted on the Internet Archive, where preservation of the original material matters. For user convenience and accessibility, the Internet Archive also makes it standard practice to offer scaled-down versions of movies, and versions transcoded into other common formats, but I recommend viewing only the original movie in this case – the scaled-down versions are much too small for most of the meteors to be seen.

(By the way, those 87.1 megabytes are real, original 2²⁰-byte megabytes, not NIST’s redefined, demented 10⁶-byte megabytes. So, if you download the movie and are told by your web browser or operating system that the movie is 91.3 megabytes, you’ll know that you are being shown politically correct, little megabytes, rather than real ones. Pet peeve. Excuse the digression.)

Creating the Movie

Creating this movie, and getting it properly hosted somewhere, took quite some doing. The original photos were all 18 megapixel raw images in “portrait” (vertical) orientation. They had to be scaled down to 0.78 megapixel images to fit in a “high-definition” (don’t make me laugh) video, then I had to write software to letterbox each frame (if that’s the still the appropriate term when adding vertical bars to the sides, rather than horizontal bars to the top and bottom) while reading each frame’s metadata, so that a correct timestamp could be drawn into each frame. Then those frames had to be combined into a movie, which is easily done with QuickTime Player 7, but all of my efforts to convert that movie directly to an MP4 (H.264) movie seemed to produce quantization errors within the vertical gradation of brightness in the sky. In any case, I wanted to add some explanation, so the QuickTime movie composed of the separate PNG files produced by my letterboxer was imported into iMovie, then a few hours of futzing with iMovie (mostly trying to remember how to use it) were required. After that, there were four or five 30 minute rounds of exporting the movie, viewing it, deciding something wasn’t quite right, adjusting the errant element, re-exporting the movie, and repeating.

Oddly, iMovie 8.0.6 (from the iLife ’09 package) doesn't directly support exporting movies at 1080p, so I had to use its QuickTime export mode, and manually select the relevant parameters. Which is ironic, because, as mentioned, I couldn’t get QuickTime to encode the original movie in H.264 without it adding quantization artifacts to the sky. So, why wasn’t that a problem when using the same QuickTime codec from iMovie? I’m not sure. One possibility is that after all that time, I became oblivious to the quantization artifacts. Another is that iMovie made some adjustments to the movie to bring it within a gamut that QuickTime’s H.264 codec could handle gracefully. (FWIW, I’ve since acquired iMovie 9.0 from the iLife ’11 package, and it does support direct 1080p export – not that that's relevant to the encoding issues, since it'll be using the same QuickTime codecs as its predecessor.)

Publishing the Movie

Creating the movie was only half the problem. The other was finding a site to host the movie. After determining that YouTube will support 1080p high-definition video, my first thought was to publish it there, because (1) everyone is used to looking for video media there, and (2) many Internet-connected high-definition televisions, and related devices like the various high-def TiVos (1080i only, unfortunately), can download video directly from YouTube, which is convenient. Unfortunately, YouTube transcoded the video. Video transcoding is standard practice with YouTube, presumably to make everything compatible with their Flash video player, but also, I suspect, to reduce movie sizes. For some videos the loss of quality isn’t too obvious, but this is not one of those videos. Not only did the transcoding badly blur the fine details in the night sky, thereby eliminating various small stars, faint meteors, etc., but it also corrupted the start of the movie. I had worried about the blurring, but hoped they’d do less of that to high-def videos (wrong). The video corruption, however, really took me by surprise.

One of the early frames corrupted by YouTube.
Compare to the image up top, which is how the frame actually appeared.

My experience publishing on YouTube is minimal, but the possibility that they could still have bugs like that in their video processing system after processing untold millions of videos over the years, hadn’t occurred to me. I reported the bug, but there’s been no follow-up, perhaps, in part, because their bug reporting system, which includes the good idea of allowing you to capture screen shots in order to illustrate the bug, won’t capture any portion of the video on a page (at least not when I tried it in current versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Mac OS X 10.6.5). Since the video was the subject of the bug report, their clever, but not clever enough, bug reporting system backfired quite effectively.

After acquiring iMovie 9.0, which has direct-to-YouTube 1080p video export built-in, I tried posting the movie again. This time it wasn’t corrupted, but the quality of the video is otherwise no better. If you want to compare-and-contrast with the Internet Archive video, you can see the YouTube video below. (Once it starts playing, be sure to go to the pop-up menu near the lower-right corner that’s labelled “240p” and pick the “1080p” option, instead, then expand the video to full-screen, by clicking the icon in the lower-right corner).

Unfortunately, the original, high-quality video available from the Internet Archive can’t be viewed on most (any?) high-definition televisions, not because of video format problems (the video is already in the MPEG-4 format used for high-definition television), but simply because the TVs don’t come with software for downloading video from the Internet Archive (or arbitrary URLs). However, if you care enough (and if your computer monitor is large enough, there’s no reason to care), you can view it indirectly by downloading the video to your computer, copying it to a USB flash drive, plugging that into most HDTVs (typically, there’s a USB port or two on the back), and watching it that way. Not exactly convenient, but it will work.