November 3rd, 2012
Wow! What a day! Best day in Prospect Park in years! After being cooped up for so long from Sandy and with all parks annoyingly closed, it was great to finally get out and there were birds everywhere! and great birds in great light! Perhaps I should have taken my camera, but I was just enjoying the pleasant weather and a relaxing walk through the woods.
It was an excellent fall day, but things really kicked up when I got to the Binnen Bridge near the Pagoda Swamp. A small bird, a House Finch? associating with a couple of American Goldfinches hopped down onto the falls, and then the bird popped up into a nearby sapling.
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October 31st, 2012
My previously scheduled talk for tomorrow night, Thursday, November 1, on Birding Cuba for the Brooklyn Bird Club has been cancelled due to transit issues and the continuing closure of Prospect Park where we usually hold meetings. It will likely be rescheduled in early December.
Update: The new date is Thursday, December 6 at the Litchfield Villa in Prospect Park. See you there!
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September 1st, 2012
Despite watching this bird for about an hour last week, and taking many photos, it took me a really long time to decide what it was. I’m not going to name it because I’m still only 90% sure:
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August 26th, 2012
After realizing how much I was hearing this year I had heard last year in St. Louis and forgotten, I decided to write a few things down.
Art
Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
Get low.
Use a polarizing filter to get rich colors in landscape photography.
Biology
Some ants have stingers, not just fangs.
Toads have been recategorized. There are no more Bufos left in North America!
Butterflies aren’t even a clade. They’re just different families of moths that have evolved along similar lines.
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August 25th, 2012
OK. This is the second to last day at Bugshot and a hurricane is coming. I’m staying at the Archbold Biological Station, home to one of the major, possibly the largest breeding colony of the endangered Florida Scrubjay. I’m told they come to the parking lot here but I still haven’t seen one. So this morning early I took off across the railroad tracks before breakfast and promised myself I wasn’t turning around until I found a scrub jay. And I was not disappointed:
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July 27th, 2012
Better-than-expected, in fact. I’m dictating this entire thing with dictation and Mac OS X mountain line.Compared to the various versions of Dragon dictate that I’ve used, it seems to work pretty well. I greatly accuracy about on par with Nuance naturally speaking 11.On the other hand, user interface leave something to be desired. In particular, I can’t just dictate continuously. I have to keep pressing the function key for each sentence I want to dictate and then click done.That’s probably because the recognition doesn’t happen directly on my own computer.Instead, it sent to Apple for recognition on Apple servers.
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