Mokka mit Schlag

Prospect Park, Peninsula forest, 2006-04-18

So I hear about this new Twitter thing, think it sounds sort of cool, and decide to try it out. I cruise over to their web site and fill out the registration form, and here’s what I see:

Believe it or not, it won’t accept “Elliotte Rusty Harold” as a name. It gets stuck right before the d. Seems it believes no name can be longer than 20 letters, and “Elliotte Rusty Harold” is 21.
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Migration’s getting weird. Normally Fall is when the rarities show up, but we’ve hit a triple this week. First there was the Blue Grosbeak Rafael Campos found in the Vale of Cashmere on Tuesday. Then Alex Wilson found a Yellow-throated Warbler on Three Sisters Island yesterday. Then last night John Ascher found the rarest bird yet, a Sora:

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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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