Mokka mit Schlag

2010 was a pretty good year bird wise. Although at 266 total species, I ticked about 60 fewer species than 2009, 39 of those were life birds. These mostly came from my trips to Puerto Rico in the spring and Iceland in the fall, but also included three life birds within walking distance of my apartment in Brooklyn. (That’s unlikely to happen again. There are no more regular or even irregular visitors to Prospect Park I haven’t ticked.) Still, that’s more than I’ve added in a long time. My total now stands at a respectable 516 species.

Chaseable life birds are getting rarer though I did pick up Mourning Warbler, Kentucky Warbler, and Common Nighthawk in Prospect Park. Just a little further away but still in Brooklyn I saw my first Lapland Longspur at Floyd Bennett Field. And I managed Hudsonian Godwit at Cupsogue State Park further out on Long Island. I passed on assorted birds that were found at Montauk, but this year I may have to go for some of those if I want any life birds on Long Island.

In a different state but considerably closer, the cooperative Cove Island Forktailed Flycatcher was my last life bird for the year. However a couple of days later I once again whiffed on the banded Barnacle Goose at Pelham Bay Park, and I didn’t chase it when it showed up again two hours further north. I also whiffed on an expedition in Louisiana to find the much more common Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. I’ll try for that again this year. And speaking of finding the rarities, while missing the common cousins, Northern Shrike continues to elude me, though I did see the much rarer, for New York at least, Loggerhead Shrike at Jones Beach.

New Jersey added one life bird to my list last year when I finally got down to Barnegat in January and ticked Harlequin Duck. As often happens after seeing it the first time, I then found that species repeatedly much closer to home throughout the year. I also got two species sitting at my desk when the AOU split the Winter Wren into three species: European Wren, Pacific Wren, and Winter Wren, all of which I’d found previously in their respective locales.

For 2011 I’m planning trips to Florida, Texas, and Germany. If I can sneak in a trip to the Caribbean or Central America, I just may be able to break 600 in 2011. See you next year!

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I’m on call over New Year’s so no major plans for the holiday. Anticipating getting a lot of little things done around the apartment since I can’t get too far from a net connection. Otherwise I’d be tempted to drive out to Suffolk to chase Trumpeter Swan A60 which might well become the first accepted New York State record for this species. Maybe it will stick around till next weekend.

I’ve updated this site and The Cafes to version 3.0.4 of WordPress to close a reported security hole. Everything seems functional, though the admin page does take forever to load. Anyone know how to fix that? Otherwise let me know if you notice anything strange.

I’m dictating this using Dragon Dictate 2.0.1 for the Mac. This is a product a lot of people have been waiting for for a long time. Personally, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the only reason I’ve even booted Windows this year. My initial impressions of the Mac product are reasonably positive. However, it still doesn’t have feature parity with NaturallySpeaking on Windows. For instance, I notice that you can’t actually select text and then modify it with commands like “Cap That” and “compound that”.

I’ll have to experiment more but it does seem that Dragon for the Mac does not edit quite as well as NaturallySpeaking for Windows. It has definite problems finding words earlier in the sentence. It’s good enough for a first draft, but I’m not sure you could really publish something–even a basic letter–without going back over it with the keyboard. Still, it is faster than booting up Parallels just to dictate a letter. Given the limited editing functionality, NaturallySpeaking for Windows is still clearly the superior product. Anyone who depends on voice dictation as their only means of input will definitely want to use Windows and NaturallySpeaking. However, the Mac product is at least good enough for occasional use in conjunction with a keyboard.

Nuance is offering a $79.99 cross grade price for registered owners of NaturallySpeaking for Windows. For some reason they aren’t advertising this on their website. You have to write in and ask them. Upgrades are also available from earlier versions of MacDictate.

Northern Shrike has been on my target list for a little over a year. It’s not a common bird around New York City, but it does show up regularly in early winter; and when it does it often sticks around one spot for a week or more at a time. However I’ve never before made the effort to chase it, so it doesn’t qualify as a nemesis bird. Nonetheless it was a bit galling when Steve Nanz and the Brooklyn Bird Club found one last week at Jones Beach State Park on a trip I skipped to go to the PDN Photo Expo. Fortunately the bird hung around, probably feeding on Yellow-rumped Warblers and other small birds, and was still near the Theodore Roosevelt Nature Center yesterday where Peter Dorosh, Mary Jo Eyster and myself relocated it yesterday:

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Thursday I took a long drive (well long for Iceland– the whole country’s about the size of Kentucky) around the Reykjanesbær peninsula. I didn’t see many birds though. The last stop was a small migrant trap called Seltjörn on the road between Njarðvík and Grindavik. This is a park where someone has planted a lot of conifers along a hillside. Iceland doesn’t have a lot of trees, so places like this attract occasional European vagrants. I didn’t find any rarities, but the woods were filled with Redwings, and I’d occasionally encounter a small flock of Common Redpolls.

However the real prize was in the fields west of the trees. Here I flushed two birds that flew rapidly out of the grass and away from me. They looked vaguely like a cross between a shorebird and a Mourning Dove. At first I thought they might be more European Golden Plovers, which I’d been seeing everywhere but that didn’t seem quite right. They didn’t act like them, and this wasn’t the ideal habitat either, but in migration birds can show up anywhere. However 15 minutes later in the way back I flushed a third that burst out of the ground and flew a long looping flight until it landed back in the grass about a hundred meters away from me. This time I was able to get my binoculars on it while it was in flight, and the obvious long straight bill made it very clear this was no plover. (The key defining characteristic of the plover family are their short, stubby bills.) The flight, behavior, bill, and pattern made it really obvious this was a Snipe, and in Iceland more specifically a Common Snipe. This is very closely related to America’s Wilson’s Snipe. Indeed until quite recently they were considered to be the same species, but in 2002 the AOU split them.