jason – Page 115 – brewster's linnet . com

Early May Fun

Today was an excellent day, good birds everywhere. Starting at Arlington Res with just under 50 species, including 5 species of swallow, 6 warblers, and 5 blackbirds. A quick stop at Arlington Great Meadows was less productive (I was hoping for duskywings and elfins, but the clouds kept butterflies away), but I picked up a few more good birds including a Brown Thrasher, an Eastern Towhee, and a flyby Accipipter.

Later in the day, we headed out to Great Meadows in Concord. It was surprisingly slow, with only cormorants, mallards, geese, and swans on the water. A few Least Sandpipers made the trip worthwhile though.

Quiz: which one’s which?

This parula was singing in a bush well below eye level, wish the shot was a little better.

And this guy was singing right above (and another to the side, and 3 more further, and …)

Now you see me

Now you don’t

That got boring, so let’s sing instead.

No clue what this one was up to

Savannah posed nicely.

As did this Least Sandpiper later in the day at Great Meadows.

Assabet River Vultures

These guys all landed right in front of me. I got a good 60 shots. After I left, they moved on as well, and from the sound of things took the branch off with them.

This one really looks like a turkey at this angle:

Nothing other than these and the butterflies wanted to pose, but there were a few more things about including some Rusty Blackbirds (finally this year) and a Wild Turkey on the way over.

Assabet River Butterflies

Red-headed Woodpecker

The big prize:

Unfortunately, he never got closer than probably a hundred yards, so I couldn’t do much with the camera. Luckily, he was distinctive enough that I didn’t have to run back for the scope.

But before he was found:

Yes, that’s sawdust from him.

There were birds all over, including 6 species of woodpecker, singing Winter Wren, too many Tree Swallows to count, and this guy:

Even further than the woodpecker and after it had clouded over, but still was worth trying.

Pileated

A few shots from the BBC walk to Crooked Pond today:

Note the closed eye:

Owl Nest

Among other things, I took a walk around Lyons-Cutler Reservation today. Walking through the woods, I noticed an eggshell on the ground:

I started looking up and noticed a couple sticks in the tree right on the path. Looking carefully, a tail was visible:

At this point, I was fairly sure it was an owl, but not convinced. I took a few steps off the path and couldn’t find the bird. A few more steps however:

Guess that confirmed it. That’s Block Framingham 4. If the owner of the block wants more details I can try, although it was pretty much see the egg and look up.

Also had at least 4 Great Blue Herons on the nest.

Switching Hosts

A bit of a spam issue finally pushed me to switch hosts. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while for code hosting purposes (not to mention backup), so hello textdrive.

Thanks to PSF for the 3 years of hosting, recommended if you just need to dump files.

As I transition, I’ve lost the timestamps on posts, so things are out of order right now. Luckily it’s only a couple months of stuff.

Flickr Plugin

I decided it’s easier to use flickr for hosting pictures with the new camera. Flickr has a requirement that all photos link back, so it would get ugly pretty quickly if I had to do the link and image tag every time (although I could just cut and paste their code).

Instead, I wrote a Blosxom plugin that takes the url to the picture itself and a description and builds the link. It was all of 20 lines, most of which was blosxom required empty methods. The actual linking consisted of one regex match, a small bit of parsing that and then a replace with the url and image link.

Unfortunately, flickr urls include underscores and the Markdown plugin tried to make those into emphasis. Instead of just renumbering/renaming, I added a Markdown fixer that does a search and replace for <em> tags in the src links and reverts them to underscores.

New Toy

Finally got to take my new toy out and use it a bit. Click around and you can get closer to the original size. Already learning a bit about the advantages of RAW as the first shot was raised 2/3 of a stop in Lightroom. Not sure if I want to use Lightroom or Aperture yet, although it seems like Lightroom is easy to use with multiple disks.

Yard Sharpie

Yard Sharpie with Mourning Dove remains

Unfortunately the dove was just about finished when I got home. Every last bit of meat was plucked off. After the hawk left, we walked over and looked around and could barely find a trace other than the feathers.

Watching the hawk as it finished was quite interesting. Working on the last piece appeared to be difficult. The bird was having trouble holding it down to rip off the meat and kept pulling it up from under its other foot. Eventually, it moved to a branch where it was able to hold it down. After finishing, it spent quite a while wiping its bill on the branches, before shaking off a few times and taking off.