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Friday I finished my scheduled work for the day a little early so I decided to head down to Owls Head Park<\/a> in Bay Ridge. The rocks along the bicycle path that starts from there are often a good place to look for Purple Sandpipers, one of my target birds for the year. The park itself was virtually empty, just some pigeons and starlings. Down by the pier I spotted one Bufflehead and three Red-breasted Mergansers. A few Ring-billed Gulls and one Herring Gull were hanging out on the Veterans Memorial Pier<\/a>. <\/p>\n Unfortunately the bicycle path was under construction at least as far as the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and the section by the water is fenced off. I walked about a kilometer and picked up 19 Brant, one Double-crested Cormorant, and a few more Buffleheads and Mergansers. However, the fence completely blocked any view of the rocks so even if the sandpipers were there, I wouldn’t be able to see them. Foiled again by my nemesis bird! So I split early and went home.<\/p>\n Walking back to the subway through the suburban neighborhood of Bay Ridge (suburban by Brooklyn standards at least) I heard a Blue Jay calling, and then, surprisingly, a familiar chuck, chuck, chuck. I scanned the trees with my binoculars for a few seconds (attracting some puzzled looks from one homeowner taking down his Christmas lights) and there it was: a Red-bellied Woodpecker, my final bird for the day. <\/p>\n Birding wise this wasn’t my most successful trip (a mere ten species) but I did take my GPS along. I can now report with confidence that I walked approximately 2.45 kilometers from 1:16 P.M. to 2:19. P.M. I’ve also figured out how to load the track log onto a topo map so I can figure out where I was when. It’s pretty accurate. You can clearly see where I walked out onto the pier, along the waterfront, and which street I took back to the subway. Besides pretty pictures this should enable me to report more accurate data to eBird<\/a>. Cool. <\/p>\n The topo map doesn’t show street names. The next step is to figure out how to combine the track log with Google Maps so I can plot my routes on their map data. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday I finished my scheduled work for the day a little early so I decided to head down to Owls Head Park in Bay Ridge. The rocks along the bicycle path that starts from there are often a good place to look for Purple Sandpipers, one of my target birds for the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birding","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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