Birdwatching in Madeira 17th-24th February 2022

This is my first ever blog post about birdwatching. I will be using these for my own records, and to help others on their trips.

The trip was my first in 2 years due to the pandemic. I wanted to do a small one on a budget to dip my toe back in the waters of travel.  Bird wise, it wasn't the ideal time of year for seeing the best of what Madeira has to offer, I just wanted to start travelling as soon as possible. 

So, let's get on with.

1 - We stayed in Sao Jorge. This wasn't based on anything to do with birdwatching, simply because it was the best property of those on offer. We had never been to Madeira so didn't know what the best place would be to base ourselves, so just went this way. From our window we could see diving buzzards, flying yellow legged gulls, and a regular flock of Atlantic canaries (a tick). Around the property I saw black caps, Madeira chaffinch (another tick), and the occasional wren & robin. A walk up and down the main road added kestrels.  The weather was almost constantly cloudy on north side. The very high cliffs seemed to attract the clouds.  The upside to this side of the island is it's very quiet with no traffic at all.

2 - Monte Palace Madeira. If you want to see Madeira's big 4 (Firecrest, Chaffinch, Trocaz Pigeon, Atlantic Canary) all in one easy place, come here. I had an amazing encounter in the cafe at the bottom. I noticed a couple of tame Madeira Chaffinch on the floor and tables looking for scraps, and thought I'd see if I could get one to eat out of my hand. I got a female one on the ground to do it, but the real success was having a male sit on my hand and happily eat his way through several seeds.

3 - Porto Moniz. This is supposed to be THE place for palegic bird watching. Unfortunately I didn't see any except yellow legged gulls. It was simply the wrong time of year. This is a board there displaying all the things you could see at the right time of year.

4 - Arco Da Calheta. We stopped here for a walk. The weather was a complete contrast to the northern part of the island. The skies were clear and it was sunny. I went from wearing a thick jumper to burning in a t-shirt. As I hadn't expected to need lotion, I put my umbrella up and got some real funny looks. Around the marina there were the usual yellow legged gulls, but I found a flock of turnstone that looked like they expected me to feed them. In the skies around the cliffs I saw swifts, buzzards, and a sparrowhawk. The nice surprise was a flock of Atlantic Canaries feeding on an area of grass. They were tame enough to get close for razor sharp shots.

5 - A short drive from our property to the edge of a forest was packed with black caps and several kestrels.

6 - Sao Vincente. A peppering of Atlantic Canaries, buzzards, but the only stand out was a Eurasian Whimbrel on the beach. 

7 - Parque Florestal Chao Dos Louros (picnic ground). If you want plenty of Chaffinch & Firecrest, this is the spot. The were dozens of Chaffinch feeding on the ground of the car park. I sprinkled some seeds on the wall, and positioned myself with my back to the sun for some perfectly lit shots. I heard and saw about a dozen firecrest moving through the trees, but it was a battle to get the right exposure as they went from shade to sunlit area. In the end I was blessed with a lone one right out front at eye level, which provided me with some incredible shots.

8 - The seafront of the capital was a bit of dull spot for birds besides lots of yellow legged gulls. It at least provided a great opportunity to get a shot of one filling the frame in good light. 

9 - Machico. We came here for a walk & meal before our flight home. A few Atlantic Canaries, and a dozen or so turnstone.

Some miscellaneous bits were grey wagtails dotted around rivers & roads, and hundreds of escaped/released domestic ducks. We even saw some had chicks. 

Taxistand/Usestand/Hack Stand

http://usestands.com/

"Hack Stand" is an app for Licensed London Black Taxi Cab drivers. It is the beta version that is available in app store (for iphone only at the moment until it gets full up and running). The app is currently waiting for final approval from Apple, in the meantime the developer is adding a few features. What I would like is for my fellow drivers & all London Black Taxi Cab users to download the app and sign up ready for the first release.

What is it? The app is a way for customers to "virtually hail" a London Taxi. The customer will open the app, the driver will see the customer as an icon on a map, then all the driver has to do is go and pick them up. It will be a very basic app to start with, but will grow and develop as it gets used, and the developer receives feedback from drivers & customers.

Drivers. the app will be totally free until it a price plan is worked out (and the app actually starts to bring many customers and taxis together). Don't worry that it will be as expensive as radio circuits, it will be nothing like that. There won't be building costs, equipment costs, large staff costs etc... to cover; just a small amount to make back development costs, future updates and developments, and of course the some wages. Drivers will of course be able to eventually suggest how the charges will work - either by job, subscription, or some other method.

As a driver you are not signing up to only be part of this and no other organisation or app, you are free to use any other method to get work, this will just be another method for you to find work. I myself have all the current taxi apps on my phone, am part of TLC, and am on a radio circuit - none of them restricts me from using any other method to find work.

It still won't be very clear until the app is out and I make a video for Youtube, but the video will show the app in action, and, a tutorial for bothe drivers and customers.


So please, for now, just download the app and register ready, and the rest will follow.

NoToMob Saville Row Sting

The bikers from the group NoToMob http://notomob.co.uk have succeeded in exposing the illegal signage at the junction of Saville Row and Conduit Street in the city of London. The signage was a blue arrow informing the driver that they can only turn left onto Conduit Street, and knowing full well many motorists were either choosing to ignore it, or were simply not seeing it, Westminster Council sent one of their CCTV cars. The CCTV car would sit near the junction, with their periscope style camera pointing toward the junction, and they would cash in on a massive scale. However, as part of the ongoing scheme by the NoToMob crew to assist Westminster Council in making sure drivers adhered to the highway code, they discovered that the signage was in fact illegal, as firstly it was partially obstructed by a shop sign, and secondly, was placed at a distance that gave proper warning before, or by the time, the driver arrived at the junction.

I have been to the junction myself about 3 times in the last month to have a go at assisting myself, but each time there was no car. This is because the NoToMob crew have exposed the poor signage, so Westminster is currently finding it unenforceable.

My first time $schunting CCTV cars

The first hot spot I drove past using the location finder on Google maps, I spotted one of the CCTV cars. It was the cleverly positioned one that watched for banned lefts from Wentworth St south into Commercial St, and banned right turns from the other side. At first I didn’t know what I should do, and started to panic when I saw cars approaching, and was worried that I’d miss a few; my conscious wouldn’t be able to take that. I found a spot to park, then headed to the corner to keep an eye, still not knowing how to warn drivers before it was too late. It soon became apparent that no drivers were turning south from the eastern section, I mean why would they, as they would have just driven around in a circle. I found this out the hard way by missing a driver coming from the western section, who didn’t indicate, he just turned. I sort of leapt into the road as a reflex, but he just sort of hesitated, then carried on, wondering what on earth I was doing. So far I had watched £60 being flushed down the drain. Within the next 15 minutes however, I saved 3 cars, all who indicated right, which obviously gave me warning to approach them. They all understandably looked at me as if I was a psychopath, but when I pointed to the car, clear as day in front of them, looking like a shuttle craft from Star Trek, the smile beamed from their faces. I took great delight in informing them “I just saved you £60”; this won’t be the last time I do this for sure. The first driver I told said he just saw the driver of the CCTV indicate for him to go south, so this had me questioning myself, and had to take a few steps back to make sure I was reading the restriction properly. I had, and I told the driver to reverse a few feet and check for himself; I got another little flash from him as he passed after doing a u-turn. That CCTV car driver was a cheeky blighter indeed, it was suppose to be prevention, but he was clearly wanting them to fall into his web. The second car didn’t put his window down at all, so I had to rely on my voice being loud enough for him to hear me, and to see the car I was pointing at. I made sure I had my camera and taxi badge around my neck, as I thought this might add to my authenticity of not being a nutter (much! haha). I had stupidly gone out without a hat and gloves, and I was also starving, but that corner of London provided everything I needed. Firstly there was a luggage shop, which also sold hats and gloves - £3 each!! And then I got a chicken wrap from the corner café. By this time the car had performed a 3 point turn and legged it – now I knew the immense satisfaction the NoToMob crew must feel on a daily basis.

My Canon 5D MKII on dropping frames, and now a hot pixel.

I bought a Canon 5D mkii late last year, and almost immediately I saw that there were dropped frames/freezing (only just noticeable) while filming in HD. At first I just thought it may just appear that way in camera, but once loaded up on the computer in Quicktime, they wouldn't be there. There were however similar issues once on the computer, but I took that as just being the size of the files, and that one day in the future all my HD stuff would play fine. It wasn't until a few months later that I finally noticed that the glitches were being seen at the exact same point while filming, on replay on the back of the camera, on my HD TV, and on my HD laptop. Before calling Canon or the shop and being told the usual "try turning it off for 5 minutes, then back on again" I decided to explore all the avenues I could to suss out if it was firmware, in camera settings, a lens issue, the image stabiliser, or that my CF cards weren't fast enough. So, I updated the firmware, turned off image the image stabiliser; these didn't fix it. Now my CF cards. I have 3 that I bought off eBay several years ago, that were cheap so obviously knock-offs, but I knew not to use these. Instead I used the 2 Compact Flash Cards that I won in competitions in photography magazines, so I knew they were legit. You could also feel the difference in speed. These were 2 and 4GB, so seeing how this camera chews up memory, I bought a 32GB Lexar CF. All of these cards produced the same results. I then looked back at the footage I had shot using a tele-zoom 100-400mm lens, and none of it had any of these dropped frames, so for the moment the 24-105mm looked like the culprit. I noticed that this 24-105mm needed some lens correction in Camera, which the camera did automatically if you chose to do so; I turned it off, everything seemed fine, but it did eventually happen again. I then remembered I took some macro footage of a spider about a week after buying the camera, with a Sigma 70mm EX lens - the second video clip contained the dropped frames, so it was now clear it wasn't the lenses. Now I had explored all the possible solutions, I called Canon and asked them what needed to be done. They were saying it needed to be sent in for repairs, which would mean 2 things - 1) I would be without my camera for anything up to 2 weeks, 2) It would almost certainly cost about £40-£50 in special delivery costs. I then called Jacob's photography in Canon St London where I bought it, and they told me to bring it in and they would exchange it once they saw the issue for themselves. I brought my laptop just in case they wanted to see all the examples, but it wasn't necessary, they were happy with the 2 clips stored in the camera. Before I left the shop with my new camera, I put the battery in and stood by the window to film the traffic outside as a test; there didn't appear to be a problem (as yet). Later that night I plugged it into my HD TV to do some tests, and everything seemed fine, but as I panned the camera I little white dot caught my eye. Now, I remember seeing 2 of these little white dots while doing close ups of some family members with my previous camera, but just assumed it was dust and needed cleaning. For this to appear immediately after the exchange was not good. I had a feeling that this might be a "hot pixel", so I did some looking about on line, and sure enough many others had been experiencing this with HD SLRs. I tried all the tips like sensor cleaning and sensor re-mapping, but the whitish pixel remained. The camera will have to go back yet again, as for me this is annoying, and if I am asked to do anything important with my camera, I don't want others complaining of this.

There are 2 examples of dropped frames here by another 5D user

http://www.landoimages.com/JefferyLando/drop_framesh264.mov
http://www.landoimages.com/JefferyLando/drop_frames2h264.mov

And here are a couple of examples of a hot pixel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2bl-CgMMM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kv-w1E6WX4

My suggestion to anyone going to buy an HD SLR, is if you take your laptop with you and a spare battery for it fully charged, then you can give it a test before leaving the shop, and avoid the inconvenience of repeated trips back. A spare battery shouldn't seen as being an added expense, as I assume anyone buying one of these is a seriously into photography, and will have more than one battery; so just buy it in advance. If you buy your camera on line then you will be asking for trouble. These cameras are as cheap in stores as they are on line, so don't buy on line or you'll be paying a fortune in postage costs if it has these problems

My appeal is upheld over an alleged box junction offence

Last year my wife received a penalty charge notice for stopping in, what was considered to be by the authorities, a legal box junction. I saw otherwise, so set about researching the details of box junctions, i.e. their required measurements, faded paint etc... I didn't care if this was going to take a lot of time and work to do, as I always see these as a challenge. There are all sorts of statistics out there, of which I don't know which are true, but apparently of those people that appeal, about 60-70% are won. This simply means that 60-70% of PCNs are illegally issued, but the councils have an ace up their sleeve - the upstanding citizen. Well that's not me (in this sense anyway). Here is the video evidence I produced -



I used this website to find out what was and wasn't legal with box junctions -

http://www.ticketfighter.co.uk/yellow.htm

Here is the letter received telling me of our win at the adjudicator. Disappointingly the fact that the box was faded in my opinion, wasn't what won it for me, it was the fact that the authorities didn't have the correct documentation for the box to be in the position it was. I wonder just how much money has been made from this box when

Replacing my iPhone 3GS screen myself

The iphone screen I had ordered finally arrived, so I wasted no time in getting to work replacing it. I made sure and watched a couple of Youtube videos all the way through to make sure I knew what to expect, and one of them was a guy filming himself to see what mistakes he would make. His main one was pulling the screen too hard, thus pulling all the connecting cables away instead of gently removing them; noted. The part that concerned me, and would ultimately lead to a lot more money being spent, was the fact that a hairdryer/heat gun needed to be used to remove the glass! So it wasn’t just a case of unscrewing stuff and replacing; there was some fiddly stuff to do. It wasn’t this part that screwed everything up however, it was removing the LCD screen. In the video the guy is seen taking out the screws then using a tool to slip under the LCD to remove it. Mine didn’t just slip out, and I spent a while jostling with it. In the end I put too much pressure on it and heard a light cracking noise; I turned it over to find I had damaged the LCD. This was what I was dreading the most, just making it worse and worse. I didn’t know at first how damaged it was, so I got on with sorting the glass section out before worrying too much. The glass was not what I was expecting, I though it would just separate with a little bit of heat, instead it deformed the frame and damaged all the rubber sealing. Okay, so it would be a little exposed to increased moisture, at least I will have saved on taking it to Apple; that’s what I was telling myself. When it came to sticking the glass to the midframe, it was as bad as I had imagined; a very uneven seal, and the rubber peeling away. I plugged it all back in anyway, just to see where I was at, and the LCD was in quite a bad way; only the top half was barely visible. When I tried to push it all back together it was a struggle as you can imagine, and once it eventually did go in (after cutting away most of the rubber seal) the screen was just a mess of colours. I quickly got on line to find an LCD screen, and although there were plenty about, and for a reasonable price, I couldn’t wait for several days for it to arrive. I eventually found a place in Bermondsey that stocked them, but unfortunately they were double the price of most on line stockists; I had no choice. When I arrived, I walked into their workshop, and asked for the LCD screen only; I did ask the price for the whole front unit, but £69.99 was a bit much. Now, as I was a little shaky due to my iPhone being completely stuffed, I had a little trouble putting screen together with all those minuscule screws. The two guys in there saw this and insisted they help me. I didn’t want them doing it for nothing, and already felt like an idiot because I had tried to fix it myself to save money. In the end they said they would be happy to do it for free, so they did, and pointed out that I was a second away from breaking the screen again by placing it over a part that should have gone above it! I took a £5 note out of my bag and told him to buy himself a drink, but he flatly refused. I persisted, pointing out that I would have cost myself even more if he hadn’t of stopped me; again he refused. When I told him the least I could do was tweet about the company and tell others, he said this was what he really wanted – word of mouth was the best thing for a company like his. Now, the question is would I do it again, and the answer is yes, because my phone worked, although I will buy a complete mid frame assembly to replace the deformed one. The problem with the LCD was that the frame needed to be separated in several places with a sharp object that could slot between them. The rest of it was a doddle, so I am buying a new mid frame assembly, and putting my iphone back into it’s previous cosmetic state. Funnily enough, when I got onto eBay to buy a complete mid frame assembly, the only company selling this, besides ones in Hong Kong with up to a month delivery, was this same company! In the end the total for parts was about £83, and all the running around. But, I didn’t have to send my phone away, it was cheaper than Apple, and for the future I will buy the cheap mid frame from Hong Kong in advance, so if I do break my screen again, it will be a fraction of the price.

http://www.parts4ipods.com/

They're great people, and much cheaper for parts and repair than Apple stores.