Mokka mit Schlag » 2006 » January

Boxing day I did the Bronx/Westchester Christmas Bird Count for the first time. I was on the Van Cortland Park team led by Christopher Lyons. John Young and Chuck McAlexander were the other two birders. Not counting the European Starlings and Rock Pigeons in the subway station, my first birds were five American Robins on the Parade Ground as I walked in to meet up with the team at the North end of the lake.
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Today was (is) a throughly nasty, wet, rainy day; but it’s the first day the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s been open in the New Year. Since no one’s yet reported a Northern Mockingbird, and since that’s a relatively easy find in the garden (and a relatively hard one in the park) I took a quick spin around at lunch to grab one more year first. To my surprise, not only did I find the mockingbird I was looking for. I also bagged a late female Eastern Towhee that’s been hanging around the south end of the garden for the last month or so.

The rain kept most other birds out of their usual spots. There weren’t even any mallards in the pond. I did spot a few Northern Cardinals, a couple of Blue Jays, some White-throated Sparrows, two Black-capped Chickadees, and one Ring-billed Gull flying over.

At this point all the easy year birds have been logged. There won’t be any more until Spring migration kicks off; probably with grackles in February. Possibly someone could get a Sharpshinned Hawk, House Finch, or Winter Wren before then. This is also a good time of year to check the lake for unusual gulls like Iceland, Lesser Black-backed, Bonaparte’s, and Glaucous. Last year we had Lesser Black-backed and Bonaparte’s quite early in January. However none of those are sure things in any given year.

Update: I was wrong about all the easy birds being found for the month. Doug Gochfeld found two more species in Prospect Park on January 4, Merlin and Brown Creeper. Now that I think of Merlin, American Kestrel is also a real possibility. I had that in February last year.

Ted,

You’re technically right that HTML is not part of the Web architecture; but you’re living in dreamland if you think the Web could have succeeded with PDF, Flash, Word, or any of hundreds of other possible stricter formats.

The Web’s success depended critically on the looseness (I hesitate to call a non-programming language weakly typed) of HTML. People could open it, edit it, make mistakes, and still get good results. Plus they didn’t need any fancy payware tools to make things work. Plain text was good enough. A stricter format would not have brought the Web where it is today.

P.S. Your spam prevention code locks out blind users, much as PDF, Flash, and so forth are much less accessible to the visually impaired than plain vanilla HTML.

P.P.S. Your comment system is locking me out too, for no obvious reason so I’ll post this response on my own blog instead.

1. If something is going wrong (e.g. in my case getting a 403 Forbidden error for pages that should be accessible) the first thing to do is check the error logs. Don’t even try to fix the problem until you’ve looked in the error log. “tail” is a very useful command to find out just what last went wrong:

elharo@cafe:/usr/httpd/logs$ tail -4 cafe.elharo.com-error_log
[Mon Jan 02 18:29:45 2006] [error] [client 216.254.67.87] Options FollowSymLinks or 
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: 
/var/www/cafe/wordpress/
[Mon Jan 02 18:30:07 2006] [error] [client 216.254.67.87] Options FollowSymLinks or 
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: 
/var/www/cafe/wordpress/
[Mon Jan 02 18:32:06 2006] [error] [client 216.254.67.87] Options FollowSymLinks or 
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: 
/var/www/cafe/wordpress/
[Mon Jan 02 18:32:10 2006] [error] [client 216.254.67.87] Options FollowSymLinks or 
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden: 
/var/www/cafe/wordpress/index.php

2. If the error in the log happens to be, “Options FollowSymLinks or
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden” add Options +FollowSymLinks to your .htaccess file in the affected directory, right before you turn on the rewrite engine. i.e.

Options +FollowSymLinks 
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

I rolled out of bed about 6:00 this morning with plans to get to the park bright and early and grab as many year first birds as I could. However, Shayna, our Maltese, had other ideas; but after a quick walk with her, I still managed to get started at the North end of the park about 7:45.

The Vale of Cashmere produced the first good bird of the day: a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. This was almost immediately followed bya Fox Sparrow. Several White-throated Sparrows, and a couple of Northern Cardinals. Then, walking back to the Rose Garden, I relocated a Hermit Thrush I’d spotted several times in the last month. I’m not sure why, but there seem to be a lot of late Hermit Thrushes hanging around New York City this winter.
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My goal for 2006 is to finally add all the regular New York City species to my life list. They’re a few that reliably show up here, but I just haven’t gotten yet. In decreasing order of probability they include:

• Purple Sandpiper. This one’s regularly seen at various locations along the New York City shoreline, including here in Brooklyn. I’ve looked for it a few times. I just haven’t gotten lucky yet.
• Common Nighthawk. These are reliably seen during for a couple of weeks migration in Central Park. Of course I went out the first night they didn’t show up. This year I’ll go sooner. They also show up in Prospect Park, but not as reliably.
• Eastern Screech Owl. At least two roost in Central Park. Officially those are released birds and not “countable”, but I’d still like to see them.

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