Mokka mit Schlag

I wasn’t initially planning to go out to Prospect Park on Labor Day. Given that I live right at the end of the route for the West Indian Day Parade, the crowds of the noise are usually quite excessive. It’s just too much trouble to get up and down Eastern Parkway. However, when I heard from Peter Dorosh that a Mourning Warbler had been seen at the south end of the Vale of Kashmir, right near where I usually enter the park, it was just too tempting.

I headed out just after 11:00 AM. Fortunately the start of the parade was just beginning to reach the end of the Eastern Parkway, and the crowds are not too excessive yet submitted to the park fairly quickly and got to the Vale about 11:15. I promptly ran into Tom Stephenson who was also out looking for the bird and hoping to photograph it. We wandered around a bit, later being joined by Phil Malek, and kept looking for the Mourning Warbler. We had some tantalizing possibilities but nothing that looked definite, especially given that there were at least two and probably more Common Yellowthroats wandering around in the vicinity.

The Mourning Warbler is not an especially uncommon bird around here, but it is one that is relatively hard to find because it is a real skulker. It likes to get down in the leaf litter and below the leaves and not come out very much where it can be seen. Tom played the calls and the song of the Mourning Warbler but we didn’t get any responses. That’s not too surprising in the fall when birds are generally not singing and not paying much attention to their song.

Round about noon, Tom decided give up the search and headed home before the parade traffic got too disastrous; and as often happens about 10 minutes later as I was walking along the fence down toward Nellies Lawn, up popped the bird. It was a small brown bird with a completely yellow underside. It was considerably thinner and pointier than a female Common Yellowthroat, the most similar local species. However a Yellowthroat is a much fatter bird. It usually looks like it swallowed a ping-pong ball. This bird was much skinnier and showed complete yellow underneath, not just yellow on the throat and the undertail coverts. The bird also had either a thin eye ring or eye arcs — I didn’t have quite long enough look to tell whether the eye ring was connected or not. On the Mourning Warbler you’d expect that it wouldn’t be connected; on a Yellowthroat you’d expect that it would be. I couldn’t definitively say one way or the other. However, given the expensive yellow on the underside of the bird all the way down to the undertail coverts, and especially given the shape of the bird which was very slender not at all yellowthroat like, I’m very confident in saying that this was a Mourning Warbler.
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The newly announced Canon 60D SLR is shockingly not necessarily an upgrade from the 50D, and even less so from the 7D. Here, briefly, is an outline of the key differences between the cameras:
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Common Nighthawk has been off my life list for an embarrassingly long time despite the fact that I’ve lived smack in the middle of its breeding range for about the last 20 years. To make matters worse, this is a bird that can be seen easily from a mile away; and it’s not really hard to identify it. The only thing that makes the common nighthawks a little challenging is that it does come out in the evening after most birders who gone home for the day. If you get up at 6 AM to catch the dawn chorus, you’re going to be pretty tired by the time you see your first Nighthawk. It pretty much requires a special trip. Nonetheless, it isn’t that hard to find and yet for reasons I can’t fully explain, I have missed it time and time again for years. For instance, a few years ago nighthawks were flying over the Turtle Pond in Central Park every night for several weeks until the night I took the subway out there to see them at which point apparently every last one of them had decided to migrate south. I have gone on nighttime walks in Prospect Park, and shown up two minutes after nighthawks flew over and everyone else saw them but me. I have been out to numerous locations where they are known to fly nightly and still managed to miss them time and time again. Most recently, yesterday, Saturday, I was on a Brooklyn Bird Club trip to Jamaica Bay when the leader got separated from the group. He saw two nighthawks fly over while I was busy looking at yet another Black-throated Blue Warbler.

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There were more announcements from Canon today of more new equipment than I ever remember seeing from them before. If Canon was making computers, there’d be enough meat here for a MacWorld keynote. I hope they keep up this pace in the future. Previously, they’ve been rather lackadaisical about releasing new professional grade equipment. Some of their lens models are almost 20 years old at this point. Let’s hope this is a precursor of more cool things to come. And now on to the specifics.

Canon 60D

The 60D was decidedly underwhelming. In some ways, it’s a downgrade from the 50D, especially if you don’t want to shoot video. It is slightly lighter, which is nice, and the controls it removed are controls I’ve never used anyway. Perhaps I’d find a use for the articulating screen. However I was really hoping for something that would be an improvement on the 7D, not merely a slight upgrade over a Rebel. Features I was looking for included better high ISO performance, waterproof, 45 point autofocus, better autofocus, ring of fire, and the ability to autofocus at f/8. Just maybe this camera has less noise at medium and high ISO than the 50D does. Once again, we’ll have to wait for reviews to find out. However it failed to meet all the other desiderata. At $1099 (body only) it is reasonably priced, but unless you want to shoot video you might well prefer the slightly cheaper 50D.
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You be the judge:

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thought that mark enyiw should hur
two 0’s in the name (44100, 60-ogb).
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company was owned by the chinen
government. We meres didfczur out
what they were up to, or what. they
thought they won up to; but by
the time thy finals shutdown
they had burned through an
100 avian dollars in ayuht.
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Surely I’ve seen a Winter Wren before now? Well, yes I have. Many times and on more than one continent. However, the American Ornithological Union has just split the species into 3, Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus) in the Pacific Northwest, Winter Wren (Troglodytes hyemalis), back here in New York, and Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) in Eurasia. In fact, I’ve seen all three, Troglodytes hyemalis from New York and other locations, Troglodytes pacificus in the Bay Area in California, and Troglodytes troglodytes from Europe. I’m not sure which I saw first, Eastern or European. It may actually have been the European species back when I first started getting serious about this.