From a window

A post on PetaPixel talks about a South Korean photographer named Ahae who has taken a million pictures from his studio's window in the past two years. The results are actually pretty cool, check out his site. The "Birds" section alone is worth your time.

NEVER MIND THE FLYING CHUNKS OF CONCRETE, JUST GET THE DAMN PICTURE

So the Second Avenue Subway contruction had a minor mishap today:

This photo was taken by

...John Wilson, 69, of Wilmington, N.C., who was out exercising a new hip implant when the explosion happened.

Wilson, who underwent hip-replacement last week at the nearby Hospital for Special Surgery, was with his wife, Roberta, when they arrived at the scene just moments before the earth moved.

"We were right in the middle of it," Wilson told the Daily News. "We were crossing Second Ave. and a worker says, 'Would you like to see something really cool happen.' Then boom!

"I started feeling the dust and the debris hitting me," Wilson said. "The rocks were right in my face."

Wilson said he immediately started snapping away with his camera, taking dramatic photos of the sky-high blast.

(That's all from the Daily News story linked above.)

John Wilson is my new hero. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Blackburnian etc.

I see one of my favorite bird bloggers posted another of my sightings:
http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/2012/08/blackburnian.html - "Ed Gaillard is very cool about his Blackburnian. If I had been reporting one I probably would have let myself go with CAPS and exclamation points!"

I guess I just like to make my reports concise and matter-of-fact.  But also, I didn't find the bird, a couple of other birders pointed her (pretty sure it was a female) out to me.

And I have a skewed perspective on account of not having birded very long.  I had a bunch of good Blackburnian sightings this Spring:



so maybe I don't fully appreciate what a good sighting this was.

I also had a Northern Parula, Redstart, Baltimore Oriole, and Northern Waterthrush today. The migrants are returning in force already, and it's not even the middle of August.

Bears Discover Beer

http://www.thelocal.no/page/view/bears-break-in-to-norway-cabin-drink-beer

Warblers returning south already

What do you know, somebody blogged a bird sighting I sent to NYSBirds-L:

http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/2012/08/warblers-heading-south.html

At first I thought I had seen Yellow-Rumped Warblers, not Redstarts.  They were moving pretty fast and I got neither a photo nor a good look through binoculars, just a flash of yellow on the side. (I did get a good look at the Black-and_White Warblers).  But when I looked at the failed photos, I saw the tail of a Redstart moving out of the frame.

I saw a Black and White a week ago, Louisiana Waterthrush on July 21 and Northern Waterthrush on July 25.  These are all pretty early.

The Decisive Moment

Curiousity spotted while landing by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia15978b.html

A poem by Eric Van

I lost track of this excellent poem by Eric Van once before, so I'm sticking a link to it here:  http://ericmvan.livejournal.com/2407.html.

On Conferences

Excellent post about conferences on Mark Bernstein's site:  http://www.markbernstein.org/Aug12/OnConferences.html.  His site in general looks interesting.

Reduce, re-use, recycle

I wanted a place to put random links to stuff, and I noticed that I'd never got around to deleting this blog.  OK, then.