Mokka mit Schlag

The weatherfolk are saying that today starts a three-day Nor’easter, so I decided that I better get any birding I planned to do done yesterday. Thus I joined Starr Saphir’s Saturday walk in the Central Park North woods. We met at 103rd and Central Park West, and almost immediately got Downy Woodpecker and Red-bellied Woodpecker, as well as four great Blue Herons flying over and an Eastern Towhee that was singing up a storm, but really didn’t want to be seen.

Before we left the Great Hill area, we’d tallied all the other regular local woodpeckers including Northern Flicker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and Hairy Woodpecker. Northern Flicker and Yellow-bellied Sapsucker are usually only seen during migration and Hairy Woodpecker can be hard to find unless you know where one is hiding or you can distinguish the call from the Downys (Starr can. I can’t.)

Any day you get all five woodpeckers is a good day, but usually that’s it. Even that’s good. The rampant European Starling population do their best to drive out any hardy urban woodpeckers so they can steal their holes. Most woodpeckers can’t even think about breeding here until the starlings have finished for the season. There just aren’t any other woodpeckers that are remotely likely to be seen in New York City, even during migration; but not yesterday.
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Yesterday I took the B41 out to Marine Park to look for the European Common Gull that had been spotted there on Sunday and Monday. There were hundreds of Ring-billed Gulls, at least a couple of Herring Gulls, one or two Great Black-backed Gulls, but the Common Gull was not found; or if it was found nobody recognized it. It looks a lot like this much more common Ring-billed Gull:

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Had a good time at the WordPress meetup in NYC last night. Finally met Matt Mullenweg and various other people. It was surprisingly reminiscent of the early days of the Web, circa 1995. Most of the user group meetings/meetups/conferences I’ve been going to lately are very heavily weighted toward techies and programmers. This one was a real mixed group of programmers, artists, writers, sysadmins, VCs, and business folks. I haven’t run into a group like that for a while.
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ThinkSecret is reporting that Apple is revising the QuickTime APIs in Leopard:

A new Application Programming Interface (API) for video, which may feature a “Core” moniker akin to Apple’s Core Image, Core Audio, and Core Animation components, will deliver most of the improvements to QuickTime. While QuickTime from a end-users perspective is not expected to undergo any substantial improvements, the new API will take years of legacy QuickTime code and replace it with a more modern and efficient architecture to deliver improved performance and maintainability.

This is long, long overdue. If I ever get around to writing my API Design book, I was planning to use QuickTime as a classic example of how not to design an API. Now if only they’d rev QuickTime for Java too.

As you may recall I found another banded goose, RE08, back in January at Jones Beach, RE08:

Well, it’s now been identified. According to Tiffany Pinheiro at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,

These geese are part of a movement study and are collared in order to be individually identified from a distance. This goose were originally collared at Lido Beach Golf course on June 30, 2005. RE08 is an adult male.

Blog entries written in the first person on multi-author blogs that never say who’s writing them.