One of the presents Santa brought us for Christmas was a Flip video recorder.  This thing is pretty cool.  I’m usually slow to adopt new technology, but we had a coupon that, combined with the pre-Christmas sale, brought the thing just under $100.  An HD-quality, one-hour camcorder for under $100?  Couldn’t pass that up.  I haven’t used it enough to do a real review of it, so that’ll come later, but so far it seems pretty slick.  Just press the button to start recording, then again to stop.  Hardest part is holding it steady.

So here’s a short video I made of our chickens eating some soaked oats I gave them.  (Being able to film the chickens was a major incentive in getting a video camera; pictures just don’t do them justice when they’re strutting around and scratching.)  As I mention in the video, they’d been cooped up for about a week, because they really hate to walk in the snow.  So I spread some straw in front of their door, and then gave them the oats on a sunny day so they’d come out and get some sun and fresh air.

Like I said, I need to get better at holding it steady, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to use. (This video is set to play in HD quality by default, because I wanted to show off the video quality. If it keeps stopping and starting, it’s because your connection (or YouTube’s) can’t move that much data fast enough to keep up. Just turn the volume down and give it a few minutes to finish downloading and then play it again, or run your mouse over the “720p” below the video to select a lower-quality resolution.)