In tegenstelling tot wat Nature Today hier beweert, kunnen schorpioenvliegen wel degelijk steken. Niet met die vervaarlijke stekel op hun achterlijf inderdaad, maar na een weekje veldwerk in het zweet des aanschijns kan ik stellen dat ze mij behoorlijk prikken en vervelende jeukende bulten bezorgen. Net hun snuit dus, net als dazen eigenlijk, doen daar qua gedrag ook wel wat aan denken. Ik ben benieuwd of iemand mij iets soortgelijks kan posten, want tot nu toe lees ik dat het onschuldige beestjes zijn, maar ik heb het idee dat iedereen gewoon elkaar zit na te praten en nooit eens even goed zijn nek of hoofd of achterbeen heeft uitgestoken naar deze beesten.
Ecuador
Octobre 2019 Pien and I went for a full month of sightseeing in Ecuador! First spent two days Quito, which we found
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Dunes
Cape Verde
PADI open water diver license
Suddenly coming up, I decided to finally dive into this one.
Booked a course in Marsa Alam area, Egypt… Read more…
Indonesia 2017
Returned from Java and Bali holiday all in one piece.
That is to say: Hajo left behind his appendix and has a cool scarf on his belly. More…
Hedgehog Care (Egelopvang Haarlem)
From 24 Nov 2017 til 3 May 2018 we had two new hedgehogs: Henry and Joris.
Both young males. Henry (green) was brought to the Care Centre on 11 nov ’17, thin, 377 g. Joris (red) was brought 23 oct ’17, just a 156 g puppy, found under attack by magpies.
Both were still quite active the first month, walking the garden by night. Read more…
Made my own wine
2017 I did a second round of harvesting and bottling. The endresult is a bit uncertain: I may have add too much sugar to make it ripe towards a great wine. Received mixed comments ranging from “nice!” to “where’s the sink? “. Lot of bottles though, 38, twice as much as in 2016…
2016 was a splendid autumn for grapes in Holland! Read how I processed 16 bottles from two city gardens.
Bought a seawater tank!
Costa Rica 2014
Science online course (“Ken de Natuur”)
Campsite Holidays
Choir singing
Joined Projectkoor 023
Kitchen Gardening
Just around the corner lies the Cornelia Westendorp Tuin, an acre of land surrounded by trees, creating a green loft within the city. People can hire a 4×4 meters lot for Kitchen Gardening. This is fun. Spent a lot of spring times there digging and weeding, the first years with my kids, nowadays on my own.
Idea to capture identification keys
I was walking on the banks of the Allier river in the Auvergne, France, when I heard a whirring sound in the reed just next to me.
In spite of all my education and time spent in identifying animals, I had to admit i could not even tell whether this species was a kind of toad or a kind of cricket… Then it popped in my mind that it should by now, I’m talking 1998, very well possible to just grab my microphone, record the sound, and within an instance let the speaker from the laptop in my backpack tell me the right name of that creature! All in between steps are already developed in this IT era, it was just a matter of connecting it all together. An idea was born.
In the years from then on I scoped to the topic of converting from dichotomous keys to multi-acces keys, and devoted time to learn developing dynamic web pages with Oracle Apex. I realized the idea forms a nice crossroad between all my time spent in biology and all my time spent in computers. And the use of Apex confined to elements I was already familiar with: setting up data models, working with Visual Basic and Oracle PlSql programming.