Mokka mit Schlag

This morning before the conference workshops started, I followed a tip out to the Bangor City Forest. (No, that’s not a typo. Most cities have city parks; but in Maine, or at least Bangor, they have City Forests instead.) This seems to be a forestry research area situated around a landfill so there’s habiat for both forest birds and grassland birds. I only had about an hour to spend there, but it was productive. As soon as I parked outside the gate and stepped out of my car, I could hear numerous species singing. Almost immediately I picked up American Robin, Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, and Red-winged Blackbird.
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I think my Powerbook battery has died. I’m plugged in right now, but the time “until full” appears to be monotonically increasing. I wonder if it’s possible to buy a Powerbook battery in Bangor? Does Wal-Mart or Best Buy stock them? I don’t think there’s an Apple store up here. Amazon has both Apple and third party batteries, though they don’t seem to be the cheapest.

This morning I took Donald Kroodsma‘s Singing Birds workshop at the ABA convention. During the course of the morning he let out one bombshell. “Unequivocally, there are two species of Marsh Wrens.”
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Yesterday I took a six-hour Pelagic trip out of Bar Harbor on the Friendly V with the American Birding Association. This was my first East Coast Spring pelagic, and it paid off: eight life birds out of roughly 24 species total.
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There seems to be one special rule for driving in Maine. Whatever road you’re one, whichever lane you’re in: left, middle, or center, it will eventually turn into a right turn only or left turn only lane. You cannot drive straight in this state.

Version 0.81 of fink, the Unix package manager for Mac OS X, has been released. fink is critical software for all of us who bought PowerBooks because they run Unix with a decent GUI and promptly added the terminal to our docks. This release is the first to support Intel Macs, though a “number of packages (particularly packages in the ‘unstable’ tree) either do not compile, or compile but do not run. Work to improve this situation is ongoing.”