Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » April

I was in Prospect Park today to look for yesterday’s Blue Grosbeak (found it) and generally see what else might have been chased in by the storms. Although chilly, quite a few birds were active and it was a quite good day. About 1:00 I ran into Starr Saphir for the second time on the Peninsula Meadow. She’d come out to see the Blue Grosbeak with Lenore Swenson, Anne Lazarus, and some other Manhattan birders. (They found it too, though not everyone looking for it did. It seemed to disappear for up to an hour at a time before popping back up at the same location in the Vale of Cashmere.) Anyway, she told me that Pete Shen had told her that Alex Wilson had spotted a Yellow-throated Warbler on Three Sisters Island. So we all trotted off to Three Sisters as fast we could manage. I got their first, but did not find the bird. Starr arrived, pished a little, and damned if the bird didn’t fly right over to her. Then it flew back into the phragmites and hopped around, gleaning insects off the reeds.

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Yesterday Rafael Campos found this Blue Grosbeak in Prospect Park at the Vale of Cashmere. It’s not the best picture, but you can make out the blue on the face:

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On the advice of numerous people I’ve installed WP-Cache here on Mokka mit Schlag. It’s supposed to dramatically speed up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If it makes a noticeable difference, I’ll install it on The Cafes too.
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I have written a WordPress plugin to rearrange the buttons in the post editor (the regular one, not the fancy WYSIWYG one) in a way more to my liking. It changes the names of some buttons, removes others I rarely use, and adds a few more I do use.

The code involves some really awful hacks and is a confusing mix of CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. I use CSS to hide the buttons I don’t like, and JavaScript to change the names of existing buttons and add new ones. PHP integrates this whole mess into WordPress. WordPress wasn’t really designed to support this level of customization. That’s why I have to use JavaScript to change the buttons after the page is loaded.
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I’m going to have two days to bird in the Bay Area the weekend of May 12 and 13. Plus I may have an afternoon the previous weekend. I’ll be staying downtown, and probably don’t want to bother renting a car. I haven’t done any birding in this area and this time of year before, so there should be some good stuff locally. What’s recommended?
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The weatherfolk are saying that today starts a three-day Nor’easter, so I decided that I better get any birding I planned to do done yesterday. Thus I joined Starr Saphir’s Saturday walk in the Central Park North woods. We met at 103rd and Central Park West, and almost immediately got Downy Woodpecker and Red-bellied Woodpecker, as well as four great Blue Herons flying over and an Eastern Towhee that was singing up a storm, but really didn’t want to be seen.

Before we left the Great Hill area, we’d tallied all the other regular local woodpeckers including Northern Flicker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and Hairy Woodpecker. Northern Flicker and Yellow-bellied Sapsucker are usually only seen during migration and Hairy Woodpecker can be hard to find unless you know where one is hiding or you can distinguish the call from the Downys (Starr can. I can’t.)

Any day you get all five woodpeckers is a good day, but usually that’s it. Even that’s good. The rampant European Starling population do their best to drive out any hardy urban woodpeckers so they can steal their holes. Most woodpeckers can’t even think about breeding here until the starlings have finished for the season. There just aren’t any other woodpeckers that are remotely likely to be seen in New York City, even during migration; but not yesterday.
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