Mokka mit Schlag

Today I slept in and went down to Prospect Park around 8:30 AM where I promptly ran into Tom Stephenson who informed me that Rafael Campos had found a Kentucky Warbler in the Vale of Cashmere. We hurried down to the Vale just in time to see it fly across the grassy path leading out to Nellie’s lawn. Unfortunately, all we really saw was a small brown bird fly very fast across in front of us. There was no way to ID it. However after a few minutes of waiting it was spotted again, and I got one good look at it. I saw it for less than a second, and I didn’t get a photograph, but it’s distinctive enough that there really wasn’t any doubt. It looks a lot like the Common Yellowthroat except instead of a black mask it has a slightly more patterned brown mask. The Kentucky Warbler is a Southern bird that usually doesn’t get as far north as New York City, but every year a few birds overshoot their marks and end up in Central Park or Prospect Park or Forest Park and similar environs.

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Tomorrow, Saturday, May 15 I will be leading a Brooklyn Bird Club field trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. We’ll Start outside the Eastern Parkway entrance at 9:20 AM, just down the street from the Brooklyn Museum stop on the 2/3. Spring migration is in full swing so I’m hopeful that we will have many interesting warblers, thrushes, tanagers, and other uncommon species. As bird club trips go, this is a fairly relaxed one. We start late and finish early, so it’s a really nice walk for beginners or folks just dipping their toe into the water for the first time. Bring binoculars. Hope to see you there.

Common Grackle at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2010-05-06

Scarlet Tanager, Piranga olivacea, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2010-05-08

My friend Steve Nanz is of the opinion that in 2010 I shouldn’t even consider a lens that doesn’t have image stabilization. He suggested that I might want to try Canon’s 100-400 mm f/5.6L zoom lens instead of the 400mm f/5.6L prime that I have been using. I actually did test the 100-400 mm f/5.6 L lens rather thoroughly while I was shopping for lenses last year and earlier this year. It’s a good lens to be sure, but I just found that I got better results of the prime lens. Still Steve is a better photographer than I am so I thought I’d give it one more try. Here’s what I found:

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I had a serious and scary flareup of RSI this weekend, so I decided to give Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows one more chance. If Dragon craps out on me again, I’ve discovered that I may actually be able to get in touch with Nuance technical support by posting nasty comments about them on their Amazon product pages. You’d think it would be more efficient to just answer customer e-mails in the first place, but apparently Nuance doesn’t agree.

One other thing I’m trying, is to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking in Parallels 5 on my Mac. Parallels 5 is a little faster than VMWare Fusion was, and is actually usable on my MacBook for basic web surfing and other simple operations. However, I’m skeptical of its ability to run CPU intensive applications like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and FPS games. I am considering upgrading my Mac to either one of the new MacBook Pros or perhaps a Mac Pro if Apple ever gets around to releasing new models.
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Only one life bird today, the endemic Puerto Rican Bullfinch. I saw it only very briefly; but it’s very distinctive and easily identified: a jet black bird with big orange on its head and throat. I saw this on the Ballenas Trail in the Bosque del Seco. Unfortunately, I did not get a photo of this one, so how about a much better photo of a Puerto Rican Tody instead?

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