Mokka mit Schlag

This Sunday, September 16, I will be leading a bird walk in Prospect Park for the Brooklyn Bird Club. We meet at the Grand Army Plaza entrance at 8:00 A.M. by the Stranahan statue. (Just look for the folks holding binoculars.) Fall migration is in full swing so we should see lots of good birds and quite a few confusing Fall warblers.

Everyone is invited. Preregistration is not required. If you’re coming from outside the neighborhood, take the 2-3 train to Eastern Pkwy, and walk down the hill past the library and cross Flatbush Ave. and you’ll be right there. (You can also get out at Grand Army Plaza and walk around the circle, but I usually find it a little easier to go one stop further and walk back. )

The Firefox password manager mostly works, but they’re a few sites whose passwords it can’t seem to collect or remember no matter what. Del.icio.us is the most prominent. Speakeasy is another.

Does anyone have any idea why this or how to fix it? I’ve confirmed it with Firefox 2 on both Mac and Windows. Possibly these sites are doing something weird with JavaScript. I can’t see anything in the plain HTML that would cause this problem. If they are deliberately blocking the remembering of passwords, I wish they’d stop. It’s very annoying, and will just lead to me choosing a more memorable but much more easily guessable password than the one I use to secure my password vault.

For my insect photography, I’ve been reading a lot of books and web pages about closeup photography. They usually suggest three things:

• Diopters, a.k.a closeup lenses
• Macro lenses
• Extension tubes

I haven’t tried extension tubes yet, but I did buy myself a cheap set of macro and closeup lenses. However, I discovered that the directions were distinctly lacking. Furthermore, none of the books and web pages I consulted explained what these did or how to use them in words I could understand. So today I ran a few experiments to figure out just what they did and how to use them. Since flying insects in the park aren’t exactly a reproducible test case, I set up my tripod and took some pictures of a flower on my dining room table with different lenses. Here’s what I figured out:
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Common European Honeybee, Apis mellifera
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2007-09-01
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Leaffooted Bug, Leptoglossus fulvicornis, formerly Leptoglossus magnoliae
Brooklyn Botanic garden, 2007-09-01

Last night I was walking through Battery Park on my way to a meeting when I noticed an unbelievably large bird strutting around the grass, apparently unconcerned with all the people, most of whom were equally unconcerned with it. It was, to all appearances, a Wild Turkey. This is the first one I’ve ever seen in Manhattan and only the second I’ve seen in New York City. (The first was in a remote corner of the Bronx Botanical Gardens in the late-eighties/early nineties.)

I called it in to the rare bird alert, but apparently turkeys aren’t rare enough to qualify, even if they’re locally rare in downtown Manhattan. Lloyd Spitalnik did tell me one had been seen at this location last year too, so it may be the same bird returning.
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