Mokka mit Schlag

I’d estimate that about 50% of my external hard drives fail over their useful lifetime. The manufacturer doesn’t seem to matter a lot. Lacie, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc. I’ve tried them all and they all fail. Multiple redundant backups, and close attention to signs of problems are necessary to maintain data. And yet to date I think I’ve had exactly 0 hard drives replaced or repaired under warranty. Why? It simply isn’t safe to send hard drives back for replacement. Today’s multi-terabyte drives, and really any drive, contain too much personal data to let it out of my sight; at least not without running it through a degausser that costs as much as several dozen replacement drives first.

Once an external hard drive has failed, it is usually not possible to erase it, much less securely. However the most common mode of failure for an external hard drive seems to be that the enclosure fails, but the data on the platters is still there and can be recovered with enough effort and tools simply by pulling the platters out, and shoving them into a working enclosure. It’s not something I would usually do unless I didn’t have backups. However more often than not it’s something that could be done, either by someone who intercepts the package, a tech working at the hard drive company I return the drive to, or the next warranty servicee who gets back a reconditioned drive with my data still on it. Usually they’d have to use a disk recovery tool to see that data, but sometimes not even that. One third party Mac repair shop once sold me a “new” hard drive that came complete with the contents of someone else’s system: Quicken files, college essays, personal letters, etc.

I recently had the uncommon experience of getting enough warning to erase a hard drive before it failed completely. One of the Western Digital Elements 2.0 TB USB drives I use for rotating Time Machine Backups began making a whining noise. That’s a pretty reliable sign of imminent failure. For a little while, it wouldn’t mount at all, but after some coaxing I got Disk Utility to recognize it and did a single pass erase with all zeros. After that, I was reasonably comfortable sending it back for replacement under warranty. I paid for postage, but otherwise, Western Digital made the process relatively painless. I just entered my serial number in an online form, entered a reason for return, and they gave me a shipping label. I packed the drive up, took it to the mail room, and sent it off. And then a week later they sent me back the wrong drive.
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Looking around my apartment, I notice a significant number of Canon lenses and cameras I’m not using any more. If you’re interested in any of this (especially if you’re in Brooklyn or Manhattan) drop me an e-mail:

• Canon 400 mm f/5.6L lens: $1100
• Tamron AF 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 SP Di VC USD XLD for Canon Digital SLR Cameras, barely used, $350
• Tamron AF 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 XR Di LD Aspherical (IF) Macro Ultra Zoom Lens for Canon Digital SLR Cameras: $275
• Canon 18-55 IS II, broken autofocus: $50 or best offer
• Canon Extender 2X II: $250
• Canon Powershot SX30IS, barely used: $350
• Canon Powershot A650IS: $175

Most have original boxes, manuals, chargers, batteries, lenscaps, etc.

The Tamron 70-300mm and the Powershot SX30IS are still under warranty. The rest aren’t. Shipping is not included.

I will also consider trades for Canon DSLRs and pro-grade lenses.

Lately my life birds have been getting further and further from home: Connecticut, Iceland, Texas, Munich, and Florida. That’s the natural state of things as you gradually fill out the local species, and even local accidentals. My Brooklyn list is over 200 out of 328 total species, and my New York list is around 275 out of a possible 400 or so. However, many of the species I don’t have in New York, I have seen elsewhere so I haven’t felt the need to chase them locally. But surprisingly there are still a few local birds left for me to tick, and one I found today in my home territory of Prospect Park.

I was up on Lookout Hill today with about nine other birders, all enjoying spring migration and the warblers that come with it, when one of them asked me to look at a strange bird he had spotted and didn’t recognize. However, I was having trouble finding it and before I could put my binoculars on it, it took off and flew across our field of view. It was dark and vaguely gull shaped, but no gull. That could mean only one thing: nightjar! But which one?

It was large, seemed almost Ring-billed Gull sized. And it didn’t show any white wingbars in flight. That ruled out the most likely suspect, Common Nighthawk, and left two possibilities: Whip-poor-will and Chuck-will’s-widow. Whip-poor-will is sadly uncommon on Long Island these days, though it used to be more prevalent. Chuck-will’s-widow is relatively easy to find on Staten Island at certain locations, though I’ve never bothered to trek out there at night to listen for it.

The bird returned two more times, each time flying in front of us quickly and then vanishing into a tree. These are incredibly well camouflaged birds in daytime. They are very hard to spot, and we were not able to relocate it even when we saw exactly which tree it flew into. After much fruitless searching, we thought the bird might have sneaked out down the hill away from our view. However the consensus of birders there was that by size alone this was a Chuck-will’s-widow, #540.
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Today I arrived in Florida for a long weekend at the Alligator Farm. (No Accountemps jokes please.) I was mainly there for a photo workshop, and you can see some of those photos in my Picasa album. However I’d be lying if I said one of the attractions of the site wasn’t a really easy life bird:

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Saturday the weather wasn’t looking good so I stayed close to home, and revisited the English Garden. Fortunately the promised rain never did come, and I managed to explore pretty much the entire garden from one end to the other and back (about eight miles). However it was still relatively quiet. The birdiest spot was in the far northeastern corner where I added a couple of new trip species including Eurasian Jay. A little south of there near what looked like some sort of community garden, I saw one small new bird and heard a second. Unfortunately I couldn’t identify either one. :-( Such are the perils of birding alone in unfamiliar territory.

Saturday afternoon I went back to Park Schloss-Nymphenburg to check out the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibit at the Museum Mensch und Natur. I could have seen this the previous weekend, but I hadn’t known it was there. At least this time I knew where the tram was. :-) I didn’t do any serious birding of the grounds this time, but I did find one really obvious Eurasian Treecreeper with a big white eyebrow. (According to my field guide, in this part of Europe only Eurasian Treecreepers have white eyebrows. Some Eurasian Treecreepers don’t have white eyebrows, but no Short-toed Treecreepers have them.) Update: going over my records, I found that although I have seen Treecreepers before I’ve never had one with enough distinguishing characteristics to conclusively call it a Eurasian Treecreeper. That makes this bird #535!

Sunday, though, was a lot sunnier; and I hopped the train down to Herrsching on the Ammersee. As near as I could tell, this seemed to be the best spot I could reach outside of the city without renting a car. Trains weren’t running frequently on Sunday. I just missed one in Munich so I had to wait 30 minutes at the Hauptbahnhof, and another 15 minutes in Wessling. While waiting to change trains at Wessling, I ticked off a few birds from the platform including a Great Spotted Woodpecker, a European Greenfinch, and the only Eurasian Collared-Dove I saw the entire trip.

I finally reached Herrsching just before 10:00 AM. Given my complete lack of even basic reading German, I wasn’t sure where to go from the train station. I wandered around for a bit looking for a sign that made any sense. I never did find one, but I did find a Marsh Tit. Looks a lot like a Chickadee back home.

I eventually remembered that water flows downhill and into the lake, at least most of the time, and thus was able to point myself toward the lake by orienting along a stream. Turned out I had to go under the train station to reach the other side of town. Once I did that, finding the lake was easy. Herrsching proved to be a lakeside vacation community. It reminds me a little of Block Island. Once I reached the lake, I simply followed the lakefront to see what I could see.

Birds along the lake included Whooper Swan, White Wagtail, Red-crested Pochard, and many Black-headed Gulls. My guidebook had suggested I take the ferry around the Ammersee to several other lakefront towns, and I was hoping to do a little pelagic birding on the way; but it turns out the ferry wasn’t running for another month or so. :-(

Fortunately, a small trail continued around the lakefront even after the paved path ran out, and in a small but of brush between the path and the lake, I saw quite a bit of activity. First was a small olive-brown bird which was wagging its tail. Plumage wise there were two obvious possibilities: Common Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler, either one a lifer. However, only the Chiffchaff wags its tail like that. #536!

And in the same patch of brush I then found several Eurasian Siskins #537! These were easier to identify since they’re more distinctively plumaged, and yet are obviously related to our Pine Siskin back home:

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I woke up Sunday about 7 AM local time, so jetlag was effectively over after less than a day. Hooray for melatonin! I had a solid breakfast with quite a lot of sausage including Weisswurst at the hotel. Then I grabbed a tram outside the central station to the Botanic Gardens. At least I thought that’s where it was going but it turned the wrong way down Bayerstrasse so I had to hop off at the next stop and catch it going back the other direction.

Nonetheless I got to the Botanic Gardens around 10 AM. Almost immediately as soon as I entered I heard an unfamiliar song and spotted the bird, a Green Finch, not a lifer but the first one I’ve seen in several years. A little further in, I heard another unfamiliar song, and this one did prove to be a lifer, number 532, Green Woodpecker. He did not hang around for a photograph though.

I spent the next couple of hours exploring the Botanic Gardens in depth and racked up a nice list of species including Great Spotted Woodpecker, Carrion Crow, Great Tit, Eurasian Blue Tit, Eurasian Nuthatch. European Robin, Eurasian Blackbird, and Common Chaffinch. By 12:15 or so I had thoroughly covered the grounds a couple of times so I exited out the back and headed into the much larger Schlosspark Nymphenburg.

The park is the grounds of an old 19th century castle so, while it does have a couple of hundred wooded acres, it also has several hundred acres of mowed lawns and man-made canals and ponds. And what would a European castle be without ducks, swans, coots, and geese? Usually in an urban European park like this, the geese are Graylag geese, but here they were Canada Geese and some funny looking smaller geese. Oh my God, those are Barnacle Geese!

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