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  2. Ridiculous amounts of hamster activity at the moment. I must have seen nearly 100 of them in an hour. I also heard them vocalise for the first time, a sort of guttural hissing sound.

    A wild hamster sitting in grass

    A wild hamster perching on its back legs, eating food held in its front paws

  3. Had some fun looking at soil with a cheap USB microscope today. At maximum magnification, its depth of field is smaller than the height of one of these tiny soil mites (maybe 0.3mm at the most)

  5. After many unsuccessful attempts to propagate shrub cuttings, this sage seems to be cooperating! Making a tape grid over a plastic tub of water is a nice low-tech solution for holding many cuttings upright.

  6. Day 4 of the was very successful after the storm-related inactivity of day 3, with 106 observations from the Lobau and Prater. Highlights include:

    My first sighting of wild european pond turtles

    My first black woodpeckers

    Many great spotted woodpeckers

    A greater bee fly which held still long enough for me to photograph it

    Some newts

    This interesting spider

    These enormous beetle larvae

    This cool looking moth

    And many, many oil beetles

    That makes a total of 213 observations over the long weekend. It’ll take some time for them to be identifed down to species level, but it looks like at least 130 individual species.

  7. Day 2 of the : I finally made it to the Lainzer Tiergarten and made 73 observations, the highlights of which included:

    Some enormous woodlice

    Some sort of Polydesmus, curled up on a little wall it had built to protect its eggs

    Plenty of Glomeris and pill woodlice

    A red squirrel

    A nuthatch — not a great photo, but they’re one of my favourite woodland birds

    One of the furriest moths I’ve ever seen — I think it’s a chimney sweep moth? If so, it’s an appropriate name.

    And finally, this enormous severed stag beetle head.

  8. Made 34 observations on the first day of the Wien. Nothing particularly remarkable, except for the biggest frog I’ve ever seen, and lots of hamster activity, including some fights and parents with young, which I’ve not seen before.

  13. Today I realised I had never taken any good photos of this mountain dulcimer I built in 2016 as a warm-up project after moving to a new workshop.

    An hourglass-shaped mountain dulcimer with four strings, made from walnut, cedar and ebony, with mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays, against a folded blue fabric background

  14. The 70s got me covered if I end up getting quarantined due to coronavirus. Unopened and in mint condition, I can rely on McDougall to see me through these hard times

    A huge, tin of “McDougals Instant Mashed Potato” sitting on a shelf

  17. Absolutely no-one:
    This capacitor manufacturer:

    “22nf? …ah, you must mean a Twenty Two Thousand Micro Micro Farad capacitor”

    Seriously, if you’re able to print µµF and three extra zeros, then just printing “22nF” is well within your manufacturing capabilities.