Update 4-26: Mrs. Ace
April 26, 2007
According to my calculations, Mrs. Ace the screech owl should be 26 days into an incubation that takes from 26 to 31 days, so I'll be doing a daily morning update from here on in.
The bottom line is: No news is good news.
She is still sitting on four eggs.
She still takes a break after dusk to "go to the bathroom" and cough up pellets.
And Mr. Ace seems to be feeding her regularly, although -- from her frequent calling -- probably not as much as she would like.
As I have watched the monitor, a few evenings a week I have seen Mr. Ace stick his head in and hand the Mrs. a moth or other morsel, but I have not been able to photograph the exchange yet.
I am sure there is a way that I could hook up the feeds from the camera to the VCR and tape long stretches at a time.
But I have fund that fiddling with the connections on the back of the TV has its limits.
I have been doing some audio recordings of Mrs. Ace for a research project, and last night after I had played with the TV monitor output connections,
I later activated the monitor and found that I had lost both sound and audio on the screech-cam -- not a happy feeling.
My worst fear is that last evening's steady rain had somehow shorted out the cam.
Fortunately, I thought to tweak the screech-cam connections on the back of the TV, and I was able to get the sound and picture back.
A friend likes to quote the old saying, "Don't mess with success."
So I am not going to mess around anymore with any of the wiring. :-)