The Networked Bird Observatory Blog

These shots from this morning by kryptonkay make me ridiculously happy:

If my experience with the sock feeder in my backyard is any indication, this is just the beginning.

I thought I’d take another whack at getting 10 species in my 10 photos for the day. I was expecting it to be a bit harder than last time, since the Pygmy Nuthatch hasn’t been around much lately. But the Lesser Goldfinch made up for that nicely.

Like last time, I missed a bird early on that would have let me complete the tally much earlier. This time, it was an American Robin. robin54 got this photo of it at 8:18 a.m. while I was foolishly eating breakfast:

If I’d been able to get a picture of the robin, then these Mourning Doves I got at 11:17 would have been #10:

As it was, it took me until this Dark-eyed Junco at 4:06 p.m. to complete the quest:

Still, 4:06 p.m. is a new personal record (and site record, too, I believe, though I haven’t actually checked to see if anyone else has done better), and when you throw in the Lesser Goldfinch, it made for a very satisfying day of birdcamming.

Here was my final tally:

1. 05:53 - Black-headed Grosbeak
2. 06:15 - Chestnut-backed Chickadee
3. 06:23 - House Sparrow
4. 06:40 - Anna’s Hummingbird
5. 06:56 - Western Scrub-Jay
6. 10:20 - Lesser Goldfinch (!)
7. 10:57 - Rock Pigeon
8. 11:13 - House Finch
9. 11:17 - Mourning Dove
10. 16:06 - Dark-eyed Junco

See, it was the mere presence of the sock feeder. He (I think this was an immature male, but I’ll defer to the experts on that point) didn’t actually land on the sock that I saw, but the sock was added yesterday, and I was able to add Lesser Goldfinch to my list today, and that’s good enough for me.

This was the best shot I got, and I only kept one because I’m on another 10-species-in-10-photos quest:

noho_bird_club got some nice ones, including this one:

Some of you may have seen Sunbird’s picture of these two mourning doves. Taken May 9, 5:04pm.

In the comment section Sunbird writes “A hummingbird flew in front of these doves about two minutes ago.”

I was looking at the mourning doves too, and saw the hummingbird fly in. I had already taken my daily allotment of photos, but was somehow able to get a ’screen shot’ of the encounter. Here is the photo.

This just in from the gushing-fanboy department: I’ve been in contact lately with both Professor Ken Goldberg (leader of the CONE Sutro Forest project) and with Craig Newmark, and they both say they like the blog. Yay! Craig posted an item about it on his blog, and in another item he mentioned the Bald Eagle photo, and seemed to be okay with the humorous intent behind it. Prof Goldberg solicited my input on ways they might improve the system (which he’s probably regretting, since I proceeded to email him a novel-length treatment of the subject), and generally was very nice.

Most importantly, Craig mentioned in his email that Ken is actually on his way over to Craig’s as we speak, to replace the tall cylindrical feeder (they were out of sunflower seeds). Hopefully while he’s there he’ll also be able to replace the purloined suet and fill up the birdbath (which I noticed just now had a bunch of gray hairs in it. hmm…) Ah, the glamorous life of a professor.

Update: Yes! Fresh bath (lovingly washed out with a paper towel, to remove all those unsightly gray hairs):

A refilled suet feeder:

And best of all, joining the restocked cylinder o’ sunflower seeds, a sock feeder. Yeah! Bring on those goldfinches.

There was even a brief, embarrassed wave at the camera from Professor Ken, though I wasn’t fast enough on the “Take Snapshot” button to catch it.

Anyway you slice it, that’s some excellent full-service birdcam work. Let’s see the Santa Cruz Island eaglecam muster a full professor with a roll of paper towels to tidy up after the birds. I don’t think so.

CONE Sutro Forest rules!

I didn’t get to spend much time looking at Sutro Forest pictures today (oops, yesterday), but I did notice the following.

7:19 a.m.:

7:20 a.m.:

7:34 a.m.:

8:16 a.m.:

Those last two are the two suet-feeder photos bracketing the time of the crime. Now, I realize the case against the suspect is circumstantial, but I’d really like to know what his alibi is for the 42 minutes in question. If you ask me, he had a sneaky look on his face at 7:34, like he was planning something.

Thanks to crack CSI Sutro Forest investigators noho_bird_club, asdourian, nosteps, and rnand001 for the images.

Check out the right end of the T-bar (what is it about the right end of that T-bar?) in #7709, taken a few minutes ago by kryptonkay:

Woohoo!

Update: He hung around for a while, but he was awfully flitty, and hard to get a shot of. These are my favorites of the ones we got. This is #7745 (by kryptonkay), #7749 (by robin54), and #7762 (by me).

Late today I was picking up some cheap points, entering IDs in a hurry. I whipped past image #7594, taken by Harpsichordgal, saw the female Black-headed Grosbeak in the bottom of the ball feeder, entered my ID, and was about to move on, when I did a double-take.

Whoa. What’s that on the right end of the T-bar?

I’ve seen that bird a bunch around our house lately. I realize it’s not a great shot, but what you can see sure fits the bill. And I keep trying to make other things fit (a male House Sparrow with an inexplicable yellow wash on his chest? a scrawny male Black-headed Grosbeak with his head turned all the way around, preening?) and I just can’t.

I’m seriously bumming now, more than any time previously in my playing the game, that I don’t have the ability to delete and re-enter a previous ID. Because I think there’s a good chance that we’re looking at a new species for the game. He’s perched there cool as a cucumber, his beak pointing straight at the camera, just begging someone to zoom in for what would have been a spectacular shot.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Hooded Oriole.

Maybe? Anyone?

I noticed a few changes that had been made to the system yesterday, and wanted to pass them on if you weren’t aware of them.

1. Photos in “Disputed” status no longer appear in the Public Gallery’s “Not Yet Classified” view. I think that’s probably a good change; it means that most of the time, us yahoos constantly reloading the “Not Yet Classifed” view will get a quick page load that doesn’t use much of the server’s resources. It also means, though, that a new shot that quickly gets ID’d incorrectly, or that falls quickly into “Disputed” status, can slip in there without your noticing. So it’s probably a good idea to check the “Show All” view, or at least the “Disputed” view, from time to time.

2. There seems to be some kind of throttling going on, where certain kinds of actions (like submitting a new ID) take much longer than they used to. Again, I assume that’s a response to the usage patterns of us competitive types who are (in my case) opening up a dozen tabs in my browser with all the newly available images, and then banging through them entering identifications as fast as I can in a (mostly vain) effort to beat wyoming to the punch.

3. Finally, I don’t know if this is actually new, or if I just overlooked it before, but there is some extensive information about the CONE SF system’s development in the pages linked to from the big black “Jump To” box on the “About” page. I especially liked the Credits page, where I was able to learn trivia like the last names and project roles of my heroes bryce and patti. There also are some cool photos with shots of the whiteboard design sessions as the system was being planned. As someone who works in web software development, I really got a kick out of that.

In all the excitement of the grosbeak invasion yesterday, this shot by bluebean sort of slipped in under the radar:

I was at work yesterday, where the firewall prevents me from seeing the streaming video (which is probably a good thing, given my obsession with the game), so I didn’t see the image get taken. But when I got back from lunch and saw it in the Public Gallery it had already picked up two votes for Bullock’s Oriole (along with one for Lesser Goldfinch), and hence had been classified by the system as a Bullock’s Oriole. And my first reaction was, “yeah! a new species!” I wanted to enter my own ID so I could see who’d voted on it already, but then I paused, and said, wait. Is that really a Bullock’s Oriole?

So I got out my Sibley guide and started doing some comparisons. And I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that if that was a female Bullock’s Oriole, it was just as likely to be a female Hooded Oriole. And after thinking about that for a minute, it occurred to me that really, if I saw that bird myself, I wouldn’t be thinking oriole at all. I’d be thinking tanager.

So I checked the female Western Tanager, and yeah, the more I looked at it the more I liked it. Consider the following:

• The bird is too large for a goldfinch.
• The silhouette (relatively large head, relatively short tail, and relatively thick beak) all say “tanager”, rather than “oriole”.
• The tail itself is pretty hard to see in the image. But we have a beautiful view of the tail’s shadow, which is deeply notched. To me, that’s the ballgame right there. I’ve never seen an oriole with a deeply notched tail. I’m convinced: It’s a tanager.

We’ll see what the experts think. So far I seem to be the only person crazy enough to see this as a Western Tanager, and judging by my going down in flames in my effort to get #6320 classified as a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, my ability to influence the direction of difficult IDs is questionable at best.

Oh well. You win some and you lose some. Or you just lose some. But that’s the nature of the game. It’s still really fun to think about it, and the learning that goes along with the thinking is one of the things I love most about birdwatching.