Mokka mit Schlag

The birding trip for Saturday afternoon was to a couple of areas on either side of Indian Lake. They had some great insects, but not too many birds. Afternoon is not generally the best time to see birds. Too hot, and many birds are resting. However toward dusk we made a final stop at a marsh on the south side of Indian Lake. I mostly stayed by the car and the road, looking at spiders and turtles, while the rest of my carpool explored the surrounding area hoping to pick up a woodpecker or two. They should have stayed by the car too. While they were off in the swamp, a Black-Backed Woodpecker flew into a dead tree, called once or twice, and then flew off. #845 and third life bird of the trip for me.

Don’t feel too bad for the other members of my party though. They all got Black-Backed Woodpecker the next day at Northville-Placid Trail too. In fact we had several there.

Today’s scheduled morning bird walk at Lake Durant finished much earlier than scheduled, so rather than head back to the cabin, Monica, Sandi, Janet, and I decided to try Ferd’s Bog again since we’d whiffed there yesterday on both Gray Jay and Boreal Chickadee, and it’s one of the best sites in the area for both those species.

Apparently this was the right choice. The problem yesterday may have been the excessively large group. We walked out to the end of the boardwalk and waited patiently for 20 or 30 minutes, and before too long the Gray Jays found us:

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We woke up early this Friday morning to get to the first walk of the Adirondacks Birding Festival. The destination is Ferd’s Bog, a site I’ve heard about and wanted to visit for years. But when we got to the meeting location at a school it soon became apparent that the festival organizers had vastly underestimated the number of people who would show up on Friday. We had almost 50 people, way too many for a birdwalk, and frankly too many to bring to the site at one time, not that that stopped them.

We combined cars to some extent. I already had three passengers in my vehicle–Sandi, Monica, and Janet–so we added a fifth and headed down the dirt road. Luckily I was either the first or the second car so I got a clear view of a really weird looking chicken strutting down the road. Funny, this doesn’t look a farm road where people keep chickens, and that really is a strange looking chicken, and wait a minute, wasn’t one of the target birds a grouse? Shit! That is a Ruffed Grouse! #843 and one of the birds I was hoping for but really didn’t expect to see.
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Anyone recognize this bird? There were two of them at the Mcllellan Ranch feeders (in Cupertino, CA) this morning and I didn’t bring a field guide with me on this trip:

Maybe a Lincoln’s Sparrow? a Juvenile Swamp Sparrow? a hybrid? unfamiliar subspecies of Song Sparrow? Nothing seems to quite fit.
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I’m glad I don’t rely on JetBlue to book my hotels:

Do you see the mistake? Hint: Bermuda is not known for its tulip fields. :-)
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Sometime over the last couple of weeks while I was in Cuba, MySQL corrupted the wp_posts table in my WordPress database. At first I thought I was hacked, but it looks like the database was just corrupted:

mysql> check table wp_posts;
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table                     | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text                                                                         |
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | warning  | Table is marked as crashed                                                       | 
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | warning  | Size of indexfile is: 1148225      Should be: 467968                             | 
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | error    | Can't read indexpage from filepos: 56320                                         | 
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | Error    | Incorrect key file for table './elharo_wordpress/wp_posts.MYI'; try to repair it | 
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | error    | Corrupt                                                                          | 
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> repair table wp_posts;
+---------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| Table                     | Op     | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+---------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | repair | status   | OK       | 
+---------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (0.34 sec)

mysql> check table wp_posts;
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------+
| Table                     | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------+
| elharo_wordpress.wp_posts | check | status   | OK       | 
+---------------------------+-------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (0.08 sec)

I think I’ve fixed this now, but do let me know if you see any lingering problems. Hmm, it does look like the categories may be borked too. I’ll look at that next.
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