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.
A few shots from the BBC walk to Crooked Pond today:
Note the closed eye:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stealing an idea from the Canadians, here’s a December-February list for Waltham. Dates and locations are the first sighting. Birds in bold are my first Dec-Feb sighting in Waltham.
Dec: 1: 16, 2: 33, 6:34, 8:35, 9:36, 11:37, 13:38, 15: 39, 17: 49, 20: 50, 25: 51, 28: 52
Jan: 4: 53, 20: 54, 21: 55, 31: 56
Feb: 1: 57
So final total 57, which is the same as last year. Overall total is now 74, with the additions of Brown Creeper, Eastern Bluebird, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Hermit Thrush, and Iceland Gull. From my calculations, there were at least 210 on the overall Massachusetts list this year.
In my waiting-for-people-to-leave-so-I-can-get-into-classrooms time at work I wrote a roman numeral translator in Factor. It’s a bit different from your normal implementation as Factor’s parser actually does almost all the work:
USING: strings parser kernel words sequences math ;
: NUMERAL: CREATE dup reset-generic dup t "parsing" set-word-prop parse-definition parsed add define-compound ; parsing
NUMERAL: I 1 ;
NUMERAL: IV 4 ;
NUMERAL: V 5 ;
NUMERAL: IX 9 ;
NUMERAL: X 10 ;
NUMERAL: XL 40 ;
NUMERAL: L 50 ;
NUMERAL: XC 90 ;
NUMERAL: C 100 ;
NUMERAL: CD 400 ;
NUMERAL: D 500 ;
NUMERAL: CM 900 ;
NUMERAL: M 1000 ;
: separate ( str -- str )
"" swap [ " " append ] [ add ] interleave ;
: join-special ( str str -- str )
dup >r split1 [ 1 r> remove-nth swap 3append ] [ r> drop ] if* ;
: merge-specials ( str -- str )
[ "I V" "I X" "X L" "X C" "C D" "C M" ] [ join-special ] each ;
: convert-numerals ( string -- arr )
separate merge-specials parse ;
: all-numerals? ( str -- ? )
[ "IVXLCDM" member? ] all? ;
: roman>number ( roman -- number )
>upper dup all-numerals? [ convert-numerals sum ] [ drop "Not a roman numeral" ] if ;
Instead of grabbing characters and keeping a running tally, I defined a bunch of parsing words using NUMERAL: to hold the values. I then took the string and split it into individual characters (“XIV” becomes “X I V”). The 4’s and 9’s are then rejoined (so we get “X IV”). I then simply parse the string, which gives a list of numbers and sum that up. It’s not perfect as it allows any pattern of numerals (“IVIVIVIV” parsed to 22), but good enough.
A few pictures from the weekend:
Both at the Charles. And at Lyman Pond:
Those should be the first birds I’ll confirm for the BBA
And today I found my first Killdeer of the spring at the UMass Field Station. Too bad it’s going to be frozen to the ground tonight and the rest of the week. Things should be picking up after that.