Collared Doves were another species that inhabits the camp site and that will come and pick breadcrumbs from basically under your feet.
We’ve been neglecting the Daily Bird, which is a thing that cannot be.
So here’s a gorgeous Sardinian Warbler for you.
The funny thing about shooting with the 600mm lense is that I sometimes don’t even know what I’m shooting and only find out at home when I look at the pics on the computer screen.
As you may remember, our lovely bunny Pünktchen died some weeks ago, and of course, the first thing my dad did when he returned from their holiday was to take the little one to the breeder to get a new one. The guy breeds bunnies for shows, so those who don’t fit his breeding needs are sold as pets, which shows again that those things are stupid as the new bunny is the cutest.
So here’s the first pics of the new family member. Let’s start with Molli, being very hot and not suspecting that life would change again.
And here he is, Fleckchen.
Translating his name got me thinking again. Now, first of all, in German we make things small by adding -chen, which doesn’t always work in English. While you get a baby and a kitty, you don’t have a “cary”, meaning a little toy car. Now, the former bunny was “Pünktchen”. A “Punkt” can be a dot, but also a spot, which would be the more usual term for describing an animal’s coat. A “Fleck” is something like a larger dot. It can be a spill on your clothing, but also the colouring of an animal, so now I have two rabbits named for their coat and they could both be translated as the same word in English. So I went with “Patches” because his coat looks more like a patchwork blanket.
Here you can see the first contact between the two, with Fleckchen being in his temporary enclosure, from which he escaped the next day. Thankfully he#s still too young for making baby rabbits.
As I was walking around the sunflower yesterday evening, making some pictures before the sun sets, I noticed a strangely positioned bee. When I looked closer, I realized that it is strangely positioned because it is dead and being held by a bright yellow crab spider. You can see it in the yesterday picture, if you look close enough.
So of course I had to go for a macro lens (the one I have built) and make a few close-up pictures. I tried my hand even at filming the fellow and it did not turn out all that bad considering that I do not have monopod (but I should buy one).
I have no idea what those little flies are doing there. Maybe they are insect equivalents of vultures? That spider must be strong and have quick venom to subdue a bee twice its size quick enough to keep a hold on it.
The centre of Barcelona is the Plaza Catalunya. Lined on one side by the traditional Corte Inglés shopping centre and start of the Rambla, the main boulevard, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell you’ll miss it. Most tourist buses start and stop there (our shuttle bus from the camp site dropped us off there and picked us up, and so did most others), the hop on- hop off buses stop there, the metro lines do, the regional train station is under it.
Above it are the pigeons.
Last night I was sitting behind the house with some friends, when I heard a “plonk” where no plonk should be. I looked and found the biggest caterpillar I’d ever seen. It had crawled up a grass stalk but then gravity happened and it ended up on the terrace.
Turns out it’s the mature form of the Elephant Hawk Moth which are indeed about 8 cm (3″ and a bit) long. After taking the pictures I took the hapless traveller and put it some place with more green.
As I mentioned before, the camp site used to be a piece of farming land, and they still keep some animals that reflect the place’s history. It has a “public” meadow where visitors can see them and a “private” meadow where the animals can go if they want their privacy. We were lucky to be next to the private part. The management offers you to switch places if you don’t like the animal noises, but I quite enjoyed the chickens (no rooster, though), the sound of the goats and the occasional braying of the donkey.
Once a week the children can enter the meadow for an hour, but it is also ok to feed them appropriate snacks through the fence.
In case you’re wondering about the leather strips in front of his eyes, they keep the nasty flies away.