Yesterday's Thunderstorms

As you may have read, yesterday we had some crazy weather here. Crazy is probably the right word...

 

For those who aren't aware:

Yesterday, we had a sudden thunderstorm front pass through, where the weather went from sunny and mild, to suddenly storm + overcast, with dark ominous clouds, which quickly turned into thunder + lighting + hail + heavy rain (with surface flooding). Most affected were all the folks who had headed out to the final day of the A&P show  (i.e. farm folk bring their animals to town, to let us city people see their critters + lifestyle) and/or the horse races (i.e. where ladies dress up in fancy dresses, and consume too much wine) - as both of these events are held outdoors, and in the areas where the most hail fell. Large hailstones I might add apparently... From the photos I've seen, it was such a hailstorm, that it looked like snow had fallen out that way - it was everywhere, and enough for folks to make little snowmen (oh... *ahem*  "hail people") out of that white stuff!

 

Unfortunately, it seems we missed most of the most fun/exciting parts!  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330356928

Silvereye Season - Rain Day

Yesterday's rain day provided a lot more interesting SIlvereye Photos than I had been bargaining on!

Looking through all the photos, I realised that most of the day, I basically had two visitors (and an occasional mystery third or forth one).

 

As you'll soon seen in the following posts, I ended up naming these two:
1) "Mohawk"
2) "Humperdink"

"Mohawk" was the main one I saw, but it turns out "Humperdink" showed up a bunch of times too. Also, I reckon that actually, both may have been juveniles (or at least Mohawk definitely was!)

Emirates "NBA" A380

Yay!  After missing its last few visits for various reasons (including being out of the country, a snowstorm, and being far away from the airport occupied with other activities), today I finally got to see the "NBA" livery A380 (A6-EOD) with my own eyes at last!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330215352/

Silvereye Season - Super Wednesday

Finally getting around to posting some of Wednesday's silvereye goodness today

Some highlights:
1) Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head

2) Check out this funky shadow cast on its head by the unopened (?) flowerheads

  

3) A different pair that happened to come at the same time but stayed apart. I love how this one looks like it's breaking the fourth wall

 

4) The juvenile - You can only tell from this photo from the slightly "fanned out" wings (i.e. whereas adults usually have those folds tightly packed, juveniles seemingly have some trouble with that, and often fan those out slightly and flutter them, along with their microtonally off-tune 3-note (f'' d#'' e'') repeating calls whenever their parents approach with food)

 

Loads MOAR pics here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330132688

Silvereye Season - Mr + Mrs Harakeke Heads

Well, this happened way earlier in the season than I had been expecting!

A BIG thank you to Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head for giving me the chance to take this shot during their lunch visit (having missed capturing them during their breakfast visit).

(Unfortunately, the image is not quite in focus - or at least not quite in the way that I really wanted, but will take this one for now, as it's better than nothing! Will try again when you next come :P)  

In case you don't know, the last few years, I've been trying to move from "single stationary birdy" into "multiple at once" and/or in motion. So being able to capture what looks like a mating pair (given how they arrived together, and happily feasted from the same flower in close proximity to each other is a relative rare thing)

Linux Migration 2nd Attempt - Part 2

In this update:

The saga continues. Turns out the distro I initially tried is quite badly configured for what I want in general, but the other two I will subsequently trial will also have their own set of issues too! 

Status: Still trying to figure out a good base setup via a VM.  (Actual hardware support when I finally finish up enough ongoing projects to justify rebooting will be another matter later - and will likely require another round of figuring out if the problems are worth self-diagnosing vs just trying something else)

 

Update 2025/11/12:  I've managed to get the audio problem on my Manjaro VM sorted by running the instructions from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Troubleshooting#stuttering-audio-in-virtual-machine, though I did have to restart the VM (as the systemctl command kept complaining about not being able to access other users / etc.) 

Silvereye Season - Early Birds

This year the Silvereye Season officially kicked off *way* earlier than usual, with the first flowers opening last Sunday on 26th October!  (Previously, this didn't happen until after 1st November)

The first bird sighting was the next day (though I didn't get any footage of that, given it was a fleeting visit behind net curtains, with no camera on hand, and a phone that couldn't focus in time).

In the days that followed, were the first photo of one (through the net curtains) on the morning of the 29th:

 

Fast forward to this morning, when I finally got my first "proper" shots - of a "Harakeke Head" no doubt: