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daytime bat Friday, March 13 2015
Susan (of Susan & David) came over this morning without her dogs to go walking with Gretchen and our dogs in the corn fields of the Esopus Valley. When she arrived, she was very hesitant about walking on the ice-covered path to our door, and I realized I would have to do something about that situation before tomorrow, when we'd be hosting a party. So I got out the ice chisel (which has a long straight handle like a hoe but ends with a little eight-inch-wide blade pointing straight down) and proceeded to break up the ice. Eventually I was able to make a path nearly all the way to the door that was clear all the way down to the flagstones. There was still a three-foot-wide mass of ice directly in front of the door that proved as tough as aluminum, so I settled for carving grooves into it to give it a non-slip surface.
It ended up being another cool sunny day, with temperatures in the low 40s. Gretchen spent much of her time down in the greenhouse, and I periodically would confirm that she and Ramona were still down there by looking out through either the east dining room window or the window in the upstairs bedroom. While looking out the latter in the mid afternoon, I saw something I'd never seen before: a bat flying around in the daylight. It's strange to see a bat at this time of year, when there are almost no airborn insects, and it's even stranger to see them in the full light of day. I did some quick web research and soon learned that the bat I'd seen is almost certainly doomed. Bats don't come out this early in the spring unless they have insufficient stores of fat and are driven from hibernation by existential hunger. And, similarly, bats don't fly around in the daylight unless compelled by extreme circumstances. In this case, the circumstance is that there is no chance of catching insects at night, when temperatures are below freezing. But by flying around in the daylight, bats are unusually vulnerable to predatory birds, which can easily outfly and out-maneuver them. As for why a bat would exhaust fat stores so early in the spring, one cause could be disease. But another could be unusually-brutal conditions, something this winter has definitely provided. Hibernacula that had served well in past winters might have proved insufficiently protective during this one.
I've had mixed lucked with remote temperature sensors, the kind that broadcast their readings in the radio spectrum to be displayed by digital receivers. Generally such devices work poorly at best; I've been very bad luck with Meade and Oregon Scientific; even when they work, the batteries don't last more than a year, and I don't want to have to replace batteries in remote sensors that often. The only good brand I've found so far has been Ambient Weather; their sensors have no trouble transmitting data reliably in and around this house and as far away as the greenhouse, and the sensors seem to be able to transmit for at least three years on one set of batteries. Until recently, the only problem with Ambient Weather was that their weather stations only offered one channel for monitoring a remote temperature. My needs require that I monitor multiple temperatures. I've tried using the Meade weather station (which could, in theory, monitor four different temperature sensors) but the range with either the sensors or the base stations is too terrible to use. (The sensors cannot broadcast reliably through a single clapboard wall and ten feet of air.) But recently Ambient Weather added a new product to their remote-temperature product line. Today I took delivery of a Ambient Weather WS-08-X4 console with four temperature sensors. After setting it up in the living room, I was able to easily monitor temperatures in the greenhouse and in the woodshed, displaying them in big numbers where I could easily see them. This is an important functionality; I'd like to be able to know when the greenhouse becomes warm enough for Gretchen to use. (In the past, I've been able to just barely get such readings using a Meade base station having a line-of-sight connection to a sensor through two windows.)
Ideally, I'd be able to decode the signals being sent by the sensors so that I can display them with an Arduino-driven display or log them on a computer. I've done plenty of research and experimentation with Meade sensors, but all I've ever been able to do was detect a transmitted data pulse. I've never been able to extract its content. But today I learned that there is a thriving hacker scene related to Ambient Weather sensors and all the heavy lifting of capturing their signals out of the air with an Arduino has already been done. It's very exciting; I think I have all the equipment on hand to build my own open-source temperature-display console.
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