The game cam photos are great fun, and the weather station provides up-to-the-minute information on what's happening here, but some things happen over longer times.
For those kinds of things, time-lapse cameras are a lot of fun. I used to marvel at them in middle-school films, but time-lapse cameras are now pretty ordinary appliances. I set one up in December, and kept track of its progress through January. Somewhere in mid-January, though, it stopped taking pictures, and I only got it going again in mid-March with fresh batteries.
The quick version, of photos taken at 2:00pm on March 18th through May 21st, looks like:
A few rounds of snow pass, then you see puschkinia flower at the lower left and chionodoxa and daffodils at the upper right, before the daylilies and goutweed explode out of the ground.
I also did a version with all the photos, running from December 5th to May 21st (with that mid-January to mid-March gap), and the camera running from 4:00am to 10:00pm. It's very different, as well as being five and a half minutes long:
Including night changes things drastically. This shows snow falling and melting at a much slower rate, and the shifting light and traffic on Route 366 are much more important.
I'm moving the camera to a different location, as I think that one will be dull for the rest of the summer, but I'll post more videos when they're ready - probably a few months.
Posted by simon at May 24, 2011 6:59 AM in permaculture , photos