Details are now being posted for the the ABA Convention in Bangor Maine this summer. (That’s American Birding Association, not American Bar Association.) My personal goals for this convention are Gray Jay, Boreal Chickadee, Atlantic Puffin, and Bicknell’s Thrush. Plus possibly a good spotting scope. Hope to see you there!
Saturday I told my editors that I would have the first draft of my latest book finished by Tuesday “barring major disaster”. I should know better than to say things like that.
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?
–Stephen Colbert
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As well as adding Cackling Goose to my life list, and my first ever four goose day, today stands out as the first time I’ve read a band in the field. Of course when they’re this close and obvious it’s no great achievement:
I wasn’t planning on going birding today since I’ve got a deadline rolling up on me in just two days, but what can you do when a potential life bird shows up almost in your back yard? You chase it, of course. However today was unusual not just for the life bird. This is my first ever four goose day, and possibly the second ever four goose day in Prospect Park (the first being yesterday).
You see, there’s only one species of goose that’s regular in the park, Canada Goose. That’s an easy bird. There are over hundred, sometimes over 200, here year round; but there’s no other goose you can count on, not even for the year, much less the day. Two other species are not surprising, Snow Goose and Brant. However both are just occasional. Neither is a guaranteed bird for the year in the park. For instance, we missed Snow Goose in 2004. (That still galls me. It would have been our 200th bird for the year. I am sure there was at least one snow geese flock flying over the park sometime in 2004, and just nobody was looking up at the right time.)
But today the stars (or at least the geese) aligned. Simultaneously on the lake we had not one, not two, not three, but four separate species of geese at the same time! This is more than we get most years. The usual Canadas were out in the hundreds. The Snow Goose that was found on the Christmas Count last year was still hanging around. (This bird’s unusually unafraid of people for its species. Most Snow Geese are much more skittish.) A flock of 26 or so Brant that flew in on Friday was still on the lake, and the piece de resistance: a Cackling Goose! Possibly the first ever in the Park.
I am not a musician or a composer. I can’t personally hear or judge the complexity of different songs and records. However I recently noticed that maybe I don’t have to. I’ve been reencoding most of my CD library using Lame. Lame uses variable bit rate encoding. I’m sure audiophiles will correct this simplistic explanation, but in brief Lame samples different pieces of a song with more or less frequency as necessary to match the music. A pure tone could probably be reproduced using very limited sampling, whereas a dissonant cacophony of white noise with no predictability would require a very high sampling rate. Lame also takes into count the nature of the human ear. Frequencies humans can’t hear can be thrown away, and frequencies we hear preferentially need to be sampled more frequently.
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