If your into Budgies and Lovebirds .... especially interested in breeding Budgies and Lovebirds ... a friend has got a hold of a breeding flock of each from another friend in his store.
A friend of mine got hold of this Common Snapper who then sold it to another friend of mine who put it in a one metre long tank. Same tank I have as a terrarium for my Fire Salamanders.
After a long, long wait and my Sony Cybershot being technically broken for about 6 months I have finally gotten around to replacing it!
My Sony has a 50x zoom, which I cannot use anything close to any longer and has now been relegated to being permanently attached to a tripod for filming in the house. As short range it can still manage to do.
After an arduous journey and battle with London's public transport, some stupid mistakes and several times where I had to stop and hand near my pocket to grab my phone and call for an ambulance, I managed to somehow struggle through it and find the camera!
Rather oddly I had left the address behind of the Camera World store I was aiming for and though I knew its rough location I was a bit worried about ending up in hospital so headed for faithful old Jessops!
Before even exiting the station at Russell Square on the way there I was slumped against a wall on a staircase!
Only when I got to where Jessops was the last time I was in there ... it was not there!
That is the other problem with Fibromyalgia ... memory problems! I had forgotten to take the address to Camera World with me and never thought of checking to see if Jessops was still at the location it was when I was last in the in New Oxford Street! Dumb-arse!
I do not know if the slumping against the wall ore the burning, tingling feelings I had for thirty minutes afterwards was anything to do with Fibromyalgia, lack of blood pressure pills or something else? Or just an unfit bastard? Was a bit rough though, which means a lot of i say that.
Walking up Oxford Street instead of heading back into Tottenham Court Road, where some loom directed me, I walked past some scaffolding and there was a PC World! I know, I know I have had a refurbished item from them and it could have happened again. But I just wandered in just to see if they had a display one. They did. It was huge!
I saw an older gentleman who looked Indian standing looking miserable. I got the impression he might not be happy as all the younger sales people probably intercepted any sales and I asked "Well you look like your not doing much?"
After initial shock someone asked him something and walking him tot he camera I asked if they had any in stock. They did. He got the box out, I checked for any seals over the lid of the box, dead give-away to refurbished items, and there were none.
Often there are these little seals that are clear but when pulled off say the word 'void' in gold that magically appear.
I had these on three Nikon cameras I bought a few years back from Argos. Nikon do not put any seals on their box and Argos swore blind they did not do it and stated it was Nikon. Wrong.
I also had an Olympus camera that went wrong in a line of consecutively received and amounting to four cameras from Argos.
I had one professional Corsair Vengeance Keyboard with a large dent in the aluminium base plate from PC World, just in case you were wondering. Oddly the Roccas Ryos keyboard I exhhanged that one for and around 8 months down the line started missing keystroke now and then and also adding one, or even bloody two extra keystrokes! So I guess we can safely take a stab in the dark about where that came from?
To be fair the Sony Cybershot came from PC World and that was new. It ias also the only thing that I have bought that has worked flawlessly for well over two years until it got dropped on its head and it still works to a degree!
It would appear that an opinion I had regarding the large form of Pyrenean Fire Salamanders from several years ago is wrong.
Several of the Salamandra genus give birth to fully formed baby salamanders (i.e. minus gills and terrestrial). But these are all smaller species of Salamandra atra, Salamandra atra aurorae, Salamandra bernardezi, Salamandra alfredschimdti, Salamandra lanzai and an undescribed one, as far as I know, from Northern Morroco, Ceuta, otherwise described as Salamandra algira.
I should point out that I am aware of at least four, seem to recall a fifth, different Fire Salamanders from North Africa from one small one with yellow like bernardezi like qualities, a very nice largely cherry red and yellow large form from the Atlas mountains of Morroco, an almost completely black one I have seen and a rather long and gangley one from near Algeria.
I had not known of a larger type of Salamandra salamandra to produce fully formed young ... until now with my Salamandra salamandra fastuosa. I should now point out that there are two very different forms of fastuosa. Both have continuous bands running from the head to the tails. One smaller with uniform bands and one much bigger and with yellow spots and markings breaking up the black bands. The yellow bands are normally wider than the smaller form too.
I have always noted that in these forms the yellow is always noticeably greater in width in the males than the females.
Well after checking my terrarium for more larvae something was spotted on my peripheral vision and I thought "well if I did not know better I would have sworn that was a young salamander!" only when I shifted and looked down ... it was! Lol.
So I managed to find five of them, though one was still-born, and exposed one pair of the adults with the female looking particularly bulbous!
Well I seem to be getting things done without actually focusing on them!
In my terrarium I noticed a male putting in a daytime showing, a little odd unless they are ... amorous, and then a females tail dangling over the edge of the pond area.
The ferns, particularly the Maidenhair Fern, was a little overgrown and I could only see a small part of the actual body of water. Still I looked through the small gap anyway and as I peered carefully I thought I could make out the outline of a very small head submerged in the water. As I was looking intently to see if this might be what I thought it was I noticed a banana like shape that had four structures at either and and thought 'they are legs! I am sure of it!' and due to the angle not belonging to the head shape I first spotted.
So I decided to go in and have a look but then thought about setting up the camera on a tripod, to get a video of me guessing and then pulling out any salamander larvae, or tadpoles.
Sure enough I was correct in my assumptions and the video got uploaded, now I am uploading other videos on me getting into vaping! Yes I went from cigarettes to vaping recently and am quite hooked on all the technology available, as you will se in the next two posts, lol.
Anyway here are just two videos of a male Pyrenean (or Lourdes) Fire Salamander and then the one of my netting out some babies with their feathery gills, think tiny Axolotls as that is in essence, waht they are .. well .. sort of, just different species, lol ..
Male making daylight appearance ...
Me fishing out salamander larvae I think I spotted the outlines of lol ...
