Mokka mit Schlag » 2009 » January

Here’s one from the vaults. I found these in August, 2007, when these tent caterpillars were all over Jamaica Bay. However they weren’t ID’d until recently. This is the caterpillar of the Ailanthus Webworm Moth – Hodges 2401, Atteva punctella. In this case the moth is a lot prettier than the caterpillar:

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A MacGillivray’s Warbler has been hanging out in Huntington Central Park near the Gothard Street parking lot for probably a month or more now. I have repeatedly tried to find it, and repeatedly come up empty. MacGillivray’s Warbler is one of my nemesis genus: the Oporornis. Its cousin the Connecticut Warbler (Oporornis agilis) eluded me for years. I still have never found a Mourning Warbler (Oporornis philadephia) or a Kentucky Warbler (Oporornis formosus). These birds all skulk around in the underbrush, and are very hard to locate.

However, others have found this particular individual, including on the recently completed Orange County Coastal Christmas Bird Count, and yesterday Sea & Sage was running a special trip to relocate as many of the rarities found on that count as we met up at the Slater Street parking lot a little before 8:00 A.M., discussed the various rarities found on the count, and planned out a plan of attack.

A White-throated Sparrow had been found in the immediate vicinity, but it probably moves around with a flock of the related White-crowned Sparrows, and one of those were in evidence at the moment. We pished a few bushes, but got nothing but a Towhee for our troubles, so we began walking slowly between the edge of the park and the island, toward the amphitheater, scanning the treetops for a Yellow-throated Vireo that’s also been hanging around for the last month or so. Yellow-rumped Warblers were abundant, and near the amphitheater I spotted our first Townsend’s warbler, but otherwise No luck, and after about an hour we turned back and began pishing our way back to the Slater Street parking lot.

However, this time we walked further up, alongside the Gothard Street parking lot as we passed it, we fanned out through the bushes. (There are a lot of “trails” in between the bushes because at different times of day, this is also a popular cruising area, much like the Ramble in that other Central Park back East.) By this point, birds other than yellow-rumps were beginning to wake up, and we found Orange-Crowned Warblers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Wilson’s Warblers, Bushtits, and finally in a bush? Could it be? No, it was a Song Sparrow.

But wait! What’s that that just skulked into that bush? Is it…? Nope. It’s a Common Yellowthroat. But then, as I’ve split off a little from the group and am scanning what i think has got to be my fifth Common Yellowthroat in the middle of a bush, I notice that:

1. It’s much brighter yellow than usual.
2. The yellow covers the entire lower half of the bird, not just the throat and undertail like on a female Yellowthroat.
3. Those sure do look like eye arcs on its drabber face.

By this point, the rest of the group that’s down on the sidewalk has also noticed the bird from the other side, and is gesturing wildly into the bush. Yep, it’s the MacGillivray’s. I never see more than about 3/4 of one side of the bird, for probably a minute as it hops around in the bush. Then it hops up from the bush into some overhanging vegetation and vanishes. No one can relocate it even though 20 people see exactly where it went. Oporornis are like this. Even when you see one, you don’t see it for long, and then they vanish while you blink. But that’s good enough for bird #455 and my first life bird of the year. No photo, I’m afraid. Finding these birds is difficult. Photographing one is nigh-on-impossible.
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I’m debugging a weird class loading issue in XOM. Some of my unit tests can find the Crimson parser. Some can’t. I don’t know why. In Eclipse, I can press F3 and it locates both the class and corresponding source for this jar. But where did it find it? is there any way to see where (i.e. path in the file system) that class came from?

The New Orleans area Christmas Bird Counts were organized too late for me to participate–I’d already made my plane reservations so I could be available for the Orange County Counts–but my brother Tommy offered to take me out to Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge in St. Tammany Parish to look for the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. This is an endangered species that depends on relatively rare stands of mature pine, much like the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, only not quite as endangered/extinct yet.

Tommy told me that all we had to do was drive up to the parking lot, and we’d get one. yeah, right. It wasn’t quite that easy. However, we did find a Brown-headed Nuthatch in the parking lot so we got at least one life bird there, #452. We saw several of these throughout the day. Here’s one from a little later. Look on the left side of the tree near the top, above the Red-bellied Woodpecker:

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I had New Year’s Eve off so I decided to see if I could add a few final birds to my BGBY list. I could have tried for the Northern Waterthrush at San Joaquin or a possible Yellow-throated Vireo at Mason Park. However, those sites are just too familiar. I’ve been to each of them many, many times over the last year; and they hold few surprises any more. Instead I decided to get on my bike and head down to the beach; more specifically to Robert E. Badham, where a lot of the rocky shorebirds and pelagic birds hang out. I hadn’t yet been out to the shore on my Bigby travels this year, and thus there were at least two guaranteed new BGBY birds on almost any trip–Heermann’s Gull and Brandt’s Cormorant–and another dozen or so were possible. so I pumped up my bike tires, packed my scope and a lunch in my backpack, and took off down the Mountains to Sea trail.

The morning was incredibly foggy, not the best climate for viewing birds. Plus high tide was coming at Badham about 10:00 AM and low tide at 4:30 AM. On any other day, I would have called it off, and gone back to Mason or San Joaquin; but this was really now or never for the beach in 2009. When I started I could hear a few birds but visibility was severely restricted. I was very glad that most of the trip would be on bike paths and very low traffic roads since I wasn’t sure cars could see me. I could hear some Yellow-rumped Warblers, a Crow or two, and just barely make out a couple of Mallards in San Diego Creek. I heard Canada Geese honking long before I saw them fly down the creek. I hoped the fog would lift quickly, but by the time I reached Upper Newport Bay, it was still thick on the ground:

I could make out the American Coots in the water, a few Lesser Scaup, a noticeable group of Redheads, and a few shorebirds including a Long-billed Curlew and a Spotted Sandpiper. However, I didn’t even bother pulling my scope out of my backpack since I couldn’t see far enough to need it anyway. Searching for the Loggerhead Shrike or Short-eared owl would have been hopeless. Sidenote: Willet calls from out of the fog are really eerie.
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I finally pushed Jaxen 1.1.2 out the door, and my resolution (singular) for 2008 is to finally finish XOM 1.2 as well. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a little room to take on one more hobby project this year, but what should it be? They’re a few ideas I’m kicking around, and I’m wondering which would b the most interesting/lucrative/fun. Here are a few ideas:

1. GPS tracking software for Android

The screen on my Garmin handheld unit cracked two days after I got an unlocked Android phone to play with. Coincidence or fate? Some folks are already working on Android GPS apps. Maybe I could contribute to their efforts.

In fact, far and away the major feature I use on my Garmin eTrex is simple measurement of how far I’ve walked, along with occasional downloads of paths. I wouldn’t have to reimplement the entire Garmin stack for the Android, just the one or two pieces I actually use.
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