Mokka mit Schlag

I’ve had a little more time for local birding this year. I actually managed to get my sixth (and final expected) woodpecker for Brooklyn on February 8, a Red-headed Woodpecker that has set up housekeeping in Greenwood Cemetery:

This is months earlier than I’ve traditionally done it, but thanks to global heating and the fossil fuel industry, Northern Flickers and Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers are now spending the winter here. Red-bellied Woodpecker is another traditionally southern species, especially in the winter, that moved northward with rising temperatures decades ago. Downy and Hairy are the only two that should be around right now. I even heard a repeated double tap in Prospect Park today and looked around because, well, you never know.
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I’m trialing On1 PhotoRaw 2025 as a possible non-subscription Lightroom replacement, but it’s not looking good. PhotoRaw isn’t as hideously clunky as Canon Digital Photo Professional, but it’s still far behind the state of the art. It has security issues, has much worse file and album management compared to Lightroom, and makes a lot of UI mistakes we should have put aside 40 years ago. Medium gray text on dark gray background? Seems On1 really doesn’t want people to read the labels, do they?
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My life list for Jefferson Parish is embarrassingly low given that it’s where I grew up. Part of that is that the East Bank where I lived doesn’t have a lot of good habitat, even compared to adjacent Orleans Parish. If I ever get down to Grand Isle, I should pick up a bunch of species, but for now it’s been a slog of chasing one or two species at a time. Last week there were maybe three I could have gotten without crossing the river. I tried for two and found one after a couple of tries: Savannah Sparrow.

I found this one on the last morning of my trip at the Bucktown Marina, which is rapidly developing into a really nice hot spot with some good habitat. It is a shame that most of the rest of the Jefferson Parish lakefront has been mowed into oblivion. It had far more interesting brushy habitat when I was living there last century. Who else remembers Mr. Walter’s Park? I never did find out who Mr. Walters was. Now I wish I had met him.

I’m in process of doing my usual New Year’s batch of host changes, DNS reroutes, software upgrades and the like. If you notice anything wonky on any of my sites, please drop me an email. Thanks.

Update: site is mostly migrated and updated. Now if I can just figure out how to turn off the WordPress block editor…
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Overall 2024 was a slow year. I didn’t travel anywhere I hadn’t been before, and I lost a month of prime rarity season in New York to a bout with pneumonia that put me in the hospital for over a week. But there were still some interesting birds to be found the rest of the year.

I finished the year with 364 species total (surprisingly 19 more than 2023, perhaps because I traveled to the West Coast a couple of times for the first time since quarantine) but no life birds. (Harris’s Sparrow was new on my ebird life list, but I did see one on Long Island years ago before eBird was a thing.) I did pick up some species for my state and county lists though.
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When I was a young child I believed in God for the same reason I believed in the president or England: other people told me and seemed to act as if there was such a thing, so it didn’t even occur to me doubt it. I also believed in Santa Claus until maybe the age of 8. Fifty years later, I’ve seen lots of evidence that the president exists. I’ve been to England. I even believe in a lot stranger things like neutrinos and mitochondria, mostly because almost everyone who seems to know anything about these things believes in them and tells me I should too. It also helps that believing in them doesn’t seem to lead to any obvious contradictions or problems.

On the other hand I don’t believe in string theory because some people who seem to be smart and have deeply investigated these topics either don’t believe or actively disbelieve. I’ll even say I don’t believe in quantum gravity. I don’t disbelieve in quantum gravity, but there are enough contradictions and problems with every quantum gravity scheme anyone has ever proposed to make me cautious.
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