In recent years I’ve only added one or two Brooklyn birds to my list, but this year
I added a shocking 8 birds to my home county list, even though I whiffed on the Gray Kingbird at Canarsie Park, which I missed by a day:
Black Vulture I should have had before now, but I just got unlucky. Wild Turkey, Anhinga, and maybe Western Meadowlark were first county records though.
I also ticked Purple Gallinule on eBird for Kings County for the first time, though it’s not the first time I’ve seen it in Prospect Park. My first sighting there in the early 2000s came before eBird was a thing.
My Brooklyn total is now 297. Maybe in 2024 I can hit 300, especially if I spend more time at Plumb Beach where several uncommon shorebirds show up every summer. Regular birds I’m still missing here include Purple Martin, Brown Pelican, Whimbrel, Pectoral Sandpiper, Stilt Sandpiper, and Hudsonian and Marbled Godwits. And of course there’s always the possibility of a good Western, Caribbean, or South American vagrant or two. Even Limpkin isn’t out of the question these days.
I added Black-chinned Hummingbird to my New York State list the day after Thanksgiving, thanks to a very cooperative first state record on Randall’s Island.
I added four birds to my Orleans Parish list, though none on the Christmas count:
My total in Orleans now stands at 186 and there are many more obvious birds there if I can travel at the right times of year.
My Arizona list is now at 242, behind only New York (343) and California (318). Still lots of birds to find there though, including multiple possible lifers, especially if I can visit in the Fall or Winter.
My US list is around 600, my world list around double that. Possibly in 2024 I can get to Japan. That should add a few dozen birds. We shall see.
]]>32.5 megapixels on a full frame camera is not equal to 32.5 MP on a crop sensor like the R7. Even 45 MP on a full frame camera is not as good as 32.5 MP on an APS-C crop sensor. Instead you need double the number of pixels on a full frame camera to match a crop sensor because sensor size doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how many pixels you can get on the bird (or insect, or spider, or whatever.) Unless you’re shooting tame geese in a park, you can’t get all the pixels of a full frame camera on the bird. If you’re shooting a warbler or a sparrow at anything beyond minimum focusing distance, you’re lucky to fill the frame of an APS-C sensor. Yes, there are lucky shots, but 90% of the time you’re cropping way smaller than the APS-C sensor size anyway. The full size sensor is just wasted space.
For example, here’s a Red-bellied Woodpecker shot at a quite long 500mm without cropping on a Canon R7:
I still have to crop this down to get the shot I want:
If I had used my 800mm lens, I could have gotten maybe twice as many pixels on the bird, still not enough to fill even the APs-C frame. If I’d taken this on my full frame R6, or even an R5, all that would give me is more sky and tree. I’d have a lot fewer bird pixels left at the end.
Now both these images were sized down for the blog, and this doesn’t matter as much as it did when cameras only started with 5 or 8 megapixels, and cropping could bring you down to the point where the picture wasn’t usable or salable for many purposes, but it’s still better to have more pixels to play with than fewer.
Here’s another example. In a city park with rather tame birds, I photographed this juvenile Ring-billed Gull at point blank range with a 500mm telephoto on my R7:
A Ring-billed Gull is larger than pretty much all songbirds except a few corvids, and I was below the minimum focusing distance for some long lenses. Nonetheless, I still need to crop out about half the pixels to get a good framing.
If you can’t fill the frame of an APS-C camera with a large bird like a gull with a 500mm lens from far closer than you’d ever get outside a zoo or city park, you simply don’t need a larger sensor.
For insects, it’s even more obvious. Most non-flying arthropods you can get close to — spiders, ants, springtails, etc. — are smaller than an APS-C sensor. Larger arthropods like dragonflies, centipedes, and butterflies are usually too fast or too far away to shoot at 1:1. There are a few beetles and spiders that sometimes fall into the gap between APS-C and fullsize, but again 90% of what I shoot easily fits in an APS-C sensor.
I am of course talking here about wildlife photography of animals in the wild. Studio setups with dead animals are very different. Portrait photography is different. Anytime you can walk right up to the subject and change your distance to the subject as needed to frame the shot, you can move closer to put more of your larger full-frame pixels on a subject. But in nature photography in the wild? Just not going to happen. You want the smallest, densest pixels current technology allows, and that is rarely available on a full-frame camera.
Yes, there can be many other reasons to prefer an R5, R5 Mark II, R3, etc. over an R7: better autofocus, better camera controls like a third dial on the back, faster frame rate, etc. — but sensor size just isn’t one of them. The R7 puts more pixels on the bird than any other Canon camera you can buy today. Even the 45 MP R5 isn’t close. You can use much longer, heavier, and pricier lenses like a 600mm f/4 on the Canon R5 and you still won’t be able to put as many pixels on the bird as you can with a 500mm lens on an R7. Even a 61 mp Sony ?7R IV still comes up a little short compared to the R7 despite the astronomical increase in price. Crop sensors aren’t just cheaper. They’re better.
]]>2010-January 6 2023
Best Dog Ever. We miss you so much.
In total I added 19 birds to my life list, all but one in Arizona. The one I saw in New York was a Slaty-backed Gull on the Central Park reservoir early in the year.
Olive Warbler and Mexican Chickadee were especially good gets, since they require climbing a lot higher than I’m comfortable driving. They’re usually only found at the highest elevations, 9,000 feet and up. Five-striped Sparrow I saw multiple times after missing it in 2021. Nutting’s Flycatcher was the rarest of the batch, at least in the United States. Most of these were with guided groups, were known stakeouts, or both. However I did find Gilded Flicker, Gray Vireo, Cassin’s Vireo, and Virginia’s Warbler completely on my own.
Aside from the Slaty-backed Gull, it was a relatively quiet year in home territory. My only new bird for Kings County was a Townsend’s Warbler that Doug Gochfeld found in Fort Greene Park late in the year and that cooperatively hung around through Christmas bird count. This was particularly satisfying since I’d tried and failed to find one that visited Greenwood Cemetery in 2021.
I did add 22 species to my Louisiana list, 23 to my Orleans Parish list, 10 to my Jefferson Parish list, and 6 to my St. Tammany Parish list. I visited the state multiple times, including months I hadn’t previously birded there.
]]>
This is the first time the martin has been seen in the United States in over a hundred years, and the previous record is from Texas. How and why it came to Brooklyn is a mystery. Possibly it got caught in a storm system.
Besides the martin, I added 17 birds to my life list including:
I also added an Eastern Whip-poor-will in Prospect Park for #19. In fact, this is a a species I heard frequently as a child in Alabama but had never officially counted on my life list.
Complete year list follows:
Besides the Eider, I added five birds to my Kings County list including:
Complete year list follows:
Before 2020, there were eight presidential elections in my lifetime in which an incumbent candidate ran. The incumbent won five—1972, 1984, 1996, 2004, and 2012—and lost three—1976, 1980, 1992. Three of eight doesn’t sound like a big advantage and is well within the margin of error. One flip and its fifty fifty. Add in 2020, and the ratio drops to 5/9.
Presidential elections generally draw real opposition, unlike most congressional elections so it’s not a surprise that challengers due better here than down ballot.
Naively I would expect that incumbents are more likely to win, simply because (except for a vice president who inherited the presidency) they’ve already demonstrated an ability to manage a campaign and win an election. That can’t be said for challengers since parties do occasionally nominate a truly bad candidate. Goldwater 1964, McGovern 1972, and Clinton 2016 were all deeply flawed candidates. They might have made good, or at least better, presidents; but they were all exceptionally weak as candidates.
However the numbers don’t seem to bear that out. If incumbency were a measurable advantage, I’d expect to see better results than five out of nine.
]]>That’s actually five species, but the Black-throated Magpie-Jay isn’t officially countable in the U.S. since it likely either is or descends from escaped pets and does not have an established population. Still a gorgeous bird though.
I didn’t add any birds to my New York state list last year.
There were a few opportunities but nothing that seemed worth the effort of chasing, given that they were all birds I routinely see out west.
Besides the pelagic birds and the Magpie Jay, I added Ruff and Yellow-crowned Night Heron to my
California list bringing that state to 324. Both of those were in Orange County where I now have an even 250 species. I missed a couple of others there though including Swainson’s Hawk and Laughing Gull.
I made one trip to Louisiana for Christmas Count where I managed to add
4 species to that state’s list:
The Brown-crested Flycatcher took six trips and I only saw it for half a second, but it is an ABA area bird for me.
For Kings County I added Canvasback and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher bringing the total in my home county to 279. 300 used to seem impossible here, but there are now at least eight people who have crossed that mark and a couple of others who are very close so who knows? Maybe in another few years I can hit it. There are still several regular species that show up every year I’ve yet to find in Brooklyn including Cliff Swallow, Black Vulture, Red Knot, Golden Eagle, and lately Brown Pelican. I’ve seen most of the rarities and mega-rarities here in the last 15 years with the notable exception of several that showed up during the two years I lived in California.
In New York County, I added 16 species, bringing that to 189:
Honestly, I’ve probably seen some of the more common ones like Killdeer, Belted Kingfisher, and Blue-gray Gnatcatcher in Central Park before I started keeping relatively detailed records.
The biggest uptick was in Clark County, Nevada. I traveled to Las Vegas twice, and although I whiffed repeatedly on Crissal Thrasher, I did score a respectable 102 total species for Nevada.
]]>There’ve been any number of storylines trying to justify why Superman/Captain America/etc. don’t save the world. However they’re never anything but flimsy rationalizations because ongoing series won’t let the fictional world diverge too far from the real world we live in. That might be one reason why characters like Batman and now Hooded Justice are more satisfying. They’re not demigods and they can’t fix everything. That’s why their stories have more heart.
This story also goes into my very short list of greatest retcons of all time, up there with Affliction/Divergence on Star Trek Enterprise. It expands and develops our understanding of the story, without actually changing anything we already know to have happened, or resorting to magic plot devices like time travel and wishing rings. Before Watchmen wasn’t bad, but ultimately it didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know about the world and characters. This episode in particular, and indeed the whole series, very much does.
]]>Also we’ve established that Veidt’s creepy servants aren’t exactly human. Perhaps they’re the “life” Dr. Manhattan was thinking about creating at the end of the first series? This revelation doesn’t exactly redeem Veidt’s actions, but perhaps he’s not a complete sadistic psychopath. He’s still not exactly all there, though. Solitary confinement has sent him around the bend, even assuming he wasn’t there already.
In other developments, I enjoyed Looking Glass’s backstory. He’s still not a hero or a good man, but I’m willing to upgrade him to a somewhat broken but understandable human being. He’s at least somewhat sympathetic now in a way he wasn’t in Episodes 1-4.
]]>