Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis
Prospect Park, 2007-01-21

I really wanted to turn this juvenile redtail into a Goshawk today, but it stubbornly persisted in remaining a Buteo. :-(
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Shoreline Park, Mountain View, CA, 2007-12-16

This is the only bird I know that’s even more impressive in winter plumage than breeding plumage.

Ophyiulus pilosus
Ridgewood Reservoir, Queens County, 2007-10-20
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Clover Looper moth, Caenurgina crassiuscula
Calvert Vaux Park, Brooklyn, NY, 2007-09-20

Calvert Vaux Park (nee Dreier-Offerman) is one of the little-known jewels in Brooklyn. Although small, it has one of the most diverse batches of fauna over the year anywhere in Kings County. Sadly it’s going to be “improved” in the near future with astroturf and various other items designed to make it a “destination park”.

Mike Freeman has retired the NYC Bird Report. However I do plan to leave the submission forms up for the indefinite future because I know some people liked to use them for creating personal day lists. Prospect Park submissions sent through that form will still be added to the Prospect Park database that tracks records going back more than a century, even if they are not currently available on the Web. Maybe one day I’ll have time to recreate the work Mike did, but I hope this is at least somewhat helpful for now.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with creating a new site/forum/social network for Five Borough Birders at Ning. If people would like to use the blog to announce rarities, and post day lists and trip reports, please do so. It doesn’t merge and accumulate the reports from different observers like NYC Bird Report did, but it will let us at least see who’s reporting what. It also has some features NYC Bird report didn’t including general discussions and photo, video, and audio uploads.
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I had a spare afternoon to kill in Silicon Valley today so I headed over to one of my favorite birding destinations in the country, Shoreline Park and Lake in Mountain View. As usual I was not disappointed. On a lazy afternoon in December, without even a scope, I managed 49 species including a life bird!

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