Brent's World Forums

My wife has diagnosed me a biophile. It doesn't seem to matter what shape or form life takes, nor do I care how many legs a thing has - I tend to love all living creatures. For years I have put out bird seed for the sparrows, and lately I've taken to putting out larger nuts and seeds of various kinds for the crows and magpies in our area, to the extent that some of these larger Corvidae now seem to follow me around when I am out in the yard or watering the field. I found this blue dog bowl in the trash at work one day, so I grabbed it and brought it home because it had a feature I had been long looking for: It was heated.

I ended up using the bowl all summer and to my joy and delight, not only dogs would come to drink from the fresh water I'd set out daily in it, but birds of many sorts and even the occasional squirrel would come and frolic in the water. Then, the inevitable came: Winter. More like freezing weather, since we haven't actually had much snow until last night, and that will be melted in a few hours. Even so, I quickly discovered why this particular heated bowl had been discarded; one morning I went out to discover a block of ice where the water should have been.

Not one to concede quickly on a matter technical in nature, I popped the cover off the bowl's beneath and found but two components: Heater wire wrapped in sticky foil and a simple, sealed, mechanical thermostat. (Without removing the heater wire from the foil sandwich, I'm assuming there must also within be found a thermal fuse, for it would be inconceivable to me to produce a product affixing an electric heater to a plastic bowl without some kind of "if all else fails..." protection.) Some quick divide-and-conquer diagnostics revealed to me that the heater was fine while the thermostat was not. Even after chilling out in my freezer at eighteen below the Celsius mark, its contacts did not make close. So I threw it out and put an automotive fuse in its place, and set up my own temperature monitoring and controlling system.

Those details are not within the scope of this post, but the black wire you see in the bowl attaches a Dallas DS18B20 digital temperature sensor to Venturii, an integration platform I created which now measures and monitors the temperature of the water inside the bowl and switches the heater on and off accordingly in order to maintain the water in a liquid state of matter. The result? Happy birds abound! As part of my monitoring and testing process I set up a surveillance camera - also rescued from the trash - to help me see when the water was ice and when it was water. I had hoped to catch the odd sparrow dropping by for a drink before flittering off, and as such - set the camera to record continuously at 120 frames per second. What I ended up capturing has fascinated me, warmed my heart and made me laugh out loud! These little poof-balls are hilarious to watch. I added a shotgun mic to the setup to capture their noises and they are truly amazing little creatures. Highly social in nature, they each have their own little personalities! Some are more aggressive, others more timid. I've found one little boy bird in particular appears to be something of a bully - any time another bird has something -- anything -- of interest, this one guy will try to take it. One bird is just a goof ball... He just shimmied down the wire into the midst of the water and started flapping like a dog, throwing water everywhere and splashing all of the other birds around him over and over and over... I actually laughed out loud in the very literal, audible sense! : )

So it is that a simple trash-picked water bowl has opened up an unexpected avenue for electronic projectory, photographic opportunity, and nature delightery. Some of those words I just made up.

Here's a snippet of video (if ~8 minutes can be called such) of these little sparrows playing in the water. They have such big personalities for such little poof-balls, and I love the fact you can hear the one bird's beak snap shut when he tells another bird to 'back off, get your own wire!' (0:51) Haha

https://www.cubeinc.net/cube/birdbath.mp4

One of the upsides of creating your own integration platform is that even when doing simple things like keeping water in a bird bath bowl from freezing, you can log and graph data about the endeavour. I've always been a big graph geek, so I love things like this.



This graph shows the water temperature in the bird bath bowl over the last couple of days. I changed the setpoints for when the heater turns on and off after the first day as I was still finding ice crystals in the water. I think there is also some influence from the position of the sensor in the water. I would guess that now it is sitting directly on top of one spot in the bottom of the bowl that is directly heated by the heater when it comes on. For this reason, the reported temperature jumps up quickly on the graph, but then falls equally quickly until it actually normalizes with the water temperature. This results in shorter cycling of the heater. One other observation I make is that you can surmise the ambient outside air temperature from the cycle frequency: When the heat cycles are closer together, it was colder and thus - the water lost heat more rapidly to the air around it; when the ambient air is warmer, the space between heat cycles increases, and on one day you can see that the outside air actually warmed the water more than the heater's high setpoint.

Granted, this now veers dangerously outside the umbrella of the topic of photography, but I hope Brent will indulge me since this is related to the photo and video above. ; )

LOL. It is okay, hopefully it will spark some more interest over here!