abcGIS

As Ian mentioned on his blog last Sunday we have now completed our first contract under our new company abcGIS. The deadline for the entire project was today, but as usual a certain person was out of the country for the last few weeks and so the written outputs of the project are going to be delayed until at least Monday. Thankfully we have finished our role - making a website to display the maps that were the outcomes of the study in addition to providing a quick summary of the aims and methods.

It's been a hectic few weeks and we've been programming in what are entirely new languages for me. Some big things worked surprisingly quickly and some little things took hours and hours.

As always there were a few things I wanted to do, but gave up on in the end. For example the banner of images on the left hand side will only fit the text when viewed on certain sized monitors. Otherwise either the text goes beyond the images or vice versa. I could of course repeat the images to fit the space (as with the banners at the top and bottom), but then that would result in only part of a photo at the bottom and in my opinion that would look even worse. Suggestions anyone on how to deal with this in the future?

Unfortunately the end of this project means that I have to spend some time revising one of my papers that I've submitted for publication. This will be the 4th time I've revised it since I first submitted it. Fingers crossed that it is 4th time lucky...

Kingfishers

Having driven all the way to the Forest of Dean we decided to return via the wildfowl and wetlands center at Slimbridge. I've been to WWT Martin Mere more times than I can count, but had never visited any of their other sites before.

The day was very hot and I confess I didn't really pay enough attention to the birds - preferring to dash from one patch of shade to the next. Something that did stand out were these scultures of a family of kingfishers outside (and inside) the kingfisher hide...

Soudley Ponds

Upon moving to Devon in 2005 (having lived in the North of England my entire life until then) I made a list of places I wanted to explore. Most of them we visited in the first couple of years - Dartmoor, Exmoor, Dorset and we've made it across the south of England to Hampshire and even Sussex a couple of times. What we hadn't managed until this week was to visit the Forest of Dean. The Forest of Dean is in Gloucestershire, about 2 hours drive from Exeter, and is somewhere I remember very well from holidays during my childhood.

Despite there being no signpost to the carpark we managed to park at the south end of Soudley Ponds - a series of 4? large interconnected ponds.





We were lucky enough to see several fish





both hawker and darter dragonflies (though as usual only the darters settled for a photograph)



and a little lizard.

Now all I have to do is to make it over to Cornwall sometime. Cornwall still seems so far away, even when you live in Devon!

The Lucombe Oak

Yesterday we visited Bicton Park, just a few miles from Exeter. Bicton is famous for its beautiful gardens and in particular for its arboretum. At Bicton there are several semi-evergreen Lucombe oaks (Quercus x hispanica 'Lucombeana'). These were discovered by William Lucombe, who ran a nursery in Exeter, when he found that one of his evergreen cork oaks (Quercus suber) had crossed with a deciduous Turkey oak (Q. cerris) in 1762. The Lucombe oak is unusual in that it keeps its leaves over winter.

- ? -

All in a row

These asian otters at the New Forest Otter, Owl and Wildlife Park were very comical waiting to be fed



This little guy was particularly keen to see where the keeper was

Baby melons

As you may have read last year Ian has a recently-discovered passion for growing melons.

He's currently growing this 'sweetheart' melon that he grew so successfully last year:



and for the first time a watermelon. It's about the size of a grape in this photograph: