Friday, October 5th

This morning was clear and cold, with an intense blue sky. At Sea Walls I could just see a couple of Redshank, far down river, on the estuary mud - curious how they are always on this (Downs) side of the mud, there tend to be more gulls on this side as well. At the Peregrine Watch I had a very brief glimpse of a falcon sweeping in towards the cliffs slightly to the left, then nothing. A quiet morning. I also searched the mud on the opposite side of the river for tracks, there are lots of gull footprints, but no deer, though, yesterday, I did see some tracks looking like those of a small deer, but they only led down to the water, no sign of a return journey.

Thursday 5th October & the CONE-SF Project

The fog was burned off early this morning, so that when I reached Sea Walls at around 9.30am there was a warm watery blue sky. The men repairing the iron fence around Sea Walls are progressing well, let's hope they finish the job this time. There were Black Headed and other gulls on the mud, together with a Heron, a number of Mallard, and some Redshank. At the Peregrine watch I saw my first Peregrine for a week or so, it came from the cliff beneath me, and arched back under the cliff further up the Gorge, later I spotted it (or another), fly over Leigh Woods and make its way down river, it made a brief, but prey less swoop just opposite, then disappeared over the trees in the quarry to the right. I did not see any more of it. The Ravens were flying around in the opposite quarry, and numerous pairs of Jackdaws were diving around just above the cliffs. As the tide came in the estuary gulls were moving up stream, and towards the docks. One very beautiful morning!

An Avon Gorge CONE? Perhaps? Sowing An Idea!

Back in April New Scientist ran a brief article about the Cone Sutro Forest online bird watching game. I joined in and started watching the birds over in California, it was addictive like all online games, but with this I learned to recognise birds that I could never see in the Avon Gorge! To quote from their "About" page:

CONE Sutro Forest allows players to earn points by taking live photos and classifying wild birds. CONE Sutro Forest (CONE-SF) combines a remotely controllable robotic pan-tilt-zoom video camera with live streaming video, image database, and point system.

Conceived by Ken Goldberg, artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and Dez Song, professor of computer science at Texas A&M, and funded by the National Science Foundation, CONE-SF automatically computes the optimal camera viewpoint that satisfies dozens or hundreds of simultaneous players, including both experts and amateurs. Managing large communities is the specialty of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who will host the camera from his San Francisco residence overlooking the Sutro Forest.

CONE-SF is free and open to the public. To play, visit: http://cone.berkeley.edu.

This is an inspirational project which now has some thousands of watchers. Try it! Not only can you see new Californian birds, but more sparrows and pigeons (rock doves), and gray squirrels.

I would mount one of these Panasonic cameras on top of one of the lamp posts down on the Portway, providing it with a radio link to some suitable gateway onto the internet. Down there it would enable visitors to see our all our estuary birds, not only the Peregrines and the Ravens. It would also not be so intrusive as the camera (which had its cable cut), which was mounted close to the Peregrine nest.

Wednesday October 3rd

The Gorge was shrouded in fog when I passed it for the first time on my morning ride, next time around it had cleared, but there were still some Will-O-The-Wisp bits of cloud on the trees of Leigh Woods. Not good weather for seeing any birds! I met up with Roger and Chris and we put the world to rights, the main subject being the Council's meeting on Monday (which I missed as I was in Sheffield) concerning setting up of a Downs Friends Group. Fine so long as it has some control over what actually happens to the Bristol Downs (unlikely), and can control some of the more mad excesses of some folks (possible but still unlikely, see). The paper on use of the Downs displays a lot of prejudices about cyclists! See. As a cyclist, teacher of school cycling proficiency (and holder of the Mayors Commendation for this), I object! Any Downs Group of this type should also include the Gorge in its ambit, the two regions are inseparably interdependent.