ABACO BIRDS YOU CAN SEE IN THE BIG APPLE…

January 6, 2016 by Rolling Harbour

ABACO BIRDS YOU CAN SEE IN THE BIG APPLE…

Big Apple, here we come! Mrs RH has business there next week. Sometimes, if I have behaved particularly well for an extended period – 2 years on average – I am invited to go along on her US trips. Providing I can grab a cheap fare as well. Well, sorted! NYC is my absolutely favourite capital city. Along with Marsh Harbour, obvs. And maybe Paris. Not London, we live there. Too close to home.

Northern Mockingbird, High Line, NYC Northern Mockingbird NYC High Line

I never go shopping, but I have specific must-dos. Route 66 on 9th for the best breakfast ever. Walking the wonderful new High Line park, extended since we were last there. The Staten Island Ferry out and straight back for the best free ‘Manhattan view plus water ride’ experience. The Tramway cable car to Roosevelt Island to visit the beautifully restored Blackwell Farmhouse which dates from 1796 and is arguably NYC’s oldest surviving residential building (not many people know this). Then a brisk walk to Lighthouse Point for a winter picnic. This is where, one day, I plan to catch a fish – any fish – on the fly in the East River. I’ve debated packing a small travel rod & reel this time but it is not an ideal time of year, frankly, and I don’t want to set myself up for failure in what will anyway be a hard task…

A Herring Gull provides irrefutable proof that there is piscine life in the East River even in winter
Life in the East River NY

Mallards in Central park: a male and a LEUCISTIC female Mallard (m) NYC Central Park Mallard (f) - leucistic NYC Central Park

And to people’s complete bemusement (sample comment: “Are you quite mad?”) I go birding. NYC is a great place for it, being on a major migration flyway. Central Park is fantastic, especially the Ramble, the Reservoir, and the lesser known wild areas at the top end – the Loch, the Ravine, Harlem Meer. Prospect Park Brooklyn is another great place, with wild woodland and lakes for many water bird species. There’s a wildlife refuge at Jamaica Bay which looks worth exploring too, though it’s a bit of a trek. Anyway, here are a few Big Apple birds that are found on – or at least recorded for – Abaco (some very rarely, it has to be said).

Ring-billed and Herring Gulls on the Staten Island Ferry Ring-billed Gull NYC Staten Island Ferry Ring-billed Gull NYC 2 Staten Island Ferry Herring Gull NYC 2 Staten Island Ferry Herring Gull NYC Staten Island Ferry

Male & female Hooded Mergansers on the JKO Reservoir, Central Park Hooded Merganser (m) NYC JKO Reservoir Hooded Merganser (f) 2 NYC JKO Reservoir

Male House Sparrow (Central Park) & female (Prospect Park, Brooklyn) House Sparrow NYC Central Park House Sparrow (f) NYC Prospect Park

Rock Pigeon, Central Park Rock Pigeon NYC

Eurasian Starling (High Line Park) Starling NYC High Line Park

Canada Goose on ice (Prospect Park, Brooklyn) Canada Goose NYC Prospect Park

American Robin (Prospect Park, Brooklyn) American Robin NYC Prospect Park

Poor photo of a Coot (Harlem Meer, Central park) Coot NYC Central Park Harlem Meer

Ultra-shy Red-winged Blackbird (Prospect Park, Brooklyn) Red-winged Blackbird NYC Prospect Park I can only get away with crap photos like this because it’s my blog & your decision to put up with it

Bufflehead, JKO Reservoir Central Park Bufflehead NYC JKO Reservoir Central Park A bird recorded once or perhaps twice for Abaco in the last 60 years. I have better photos than this, but this one best illustrates your chance of seeing one on Abaco – vanishing…

~~Hairy~~** Red-bellied Woodpecker (The Ramble, Central Park)

Red-tailed Hawk NYC (Prospect Park Brooklyn) Red-tailed Hawk NYC Prospect Park Brooklyn The RTH header image was taken in the Ramble, Central Park

** As Woody Bracey has been quick to point out, this is in fact a Red-bellied Woodpecker, not a Hairy Woodpecker. Unlike the HWP, the RBW is not recorded for Abaco. HOWEVER I do have a HWP photo from Central Park somewhere, and if I can find it I’ll substitute it and make it right!

All photos, good, bad and indifferent: The Author

HOW TO RECORD BIRDS EASILY ON ABACO (OR ANYWHERE ELSE…)

May 23, 2013 by Rolling Harbour

RECORDING BIRDS: A LAYMAN’S GUIDE

YOU WILL NEED: an iPh@ne or similar smartphone with a voice memo facility; patience; minimal non-natural background noises (traffic, yelling people, barking dogs, heavy machinery); a steady-ish hand; one or more birds nearby

RECORDING

Use the Voice Memo app on an iPh@ne (I presume most other smart phones have a similar app).
Once you have it onscreen, turn the phone round 180 deg and the image will swivel round too. Now you can point the microphone at the sound and have the controls the right way up facing you.
Turn the volume up to max before you record.
Handle the phone carefully so it doesn’t record you touching it as well. It probably won’t pick up pressing ‘record’, but it may when you press ‘stop’. But you can trim the end of the saved file on the file very simply.
The recording saves in m4p format, and you can email it to your computer direct from the app (or to anywhere or anyone else).
Drag / save the file onto your desktop from the email. When you open it, it will (a) play and (b) appear in your iTunes library (or whatever music storage system you use).

CONVERTING RECORDINGS TO MP3

Having opened the recording, to convert the file to an mp3 (generally the preferred version for uploading elsewhere) in iTunes, go to Songs in your iTunes library and search for Memo. There it is!
You can rename it at this stage if you wish.
Then go to File on the top bar, and in the drop-down menu, near the bottom, go to Create new version. It will offer you mp3.
Click mp3 and a second recording file will appear in your library. That’s your mp3.
Drag it onto your desktop and do what you want with it.

Apologies if this is all blindingly obvious and written in the elementary computer language ‘eggy-peggy’. It took me a while to get it sorted out, and I hope the details above will help the lo-tek computer user to record birds and use the results painlessly.

FIELD NOTES

I recommend recording for about 20 – 30 seconds max. The iPh@ne allows easy trimming at the start and end of the saved file, but there’s no easy way to edit the middle to take out the barking dog.
Several short recordings of each bird will give a better choice of results than one or 2 long recordings.
The iPh@ne mic is surprisingly sensitive. It will pick up all nearby sounds – someone whispering at you “is it recording yet?”, for example. So ideally this is best done in the pine forest or coppice, away from the Highway. And maybe the loud whisperer.
Wind can be a problem. Not just for humans. The mic will pick up gusts of wind, or wind blowing across it if you change the direction you are pointing the phone as you record. So this is best done on a calm day.

Here are two practice recordings I made in March. The first is the female red-winged blackbird above (and header) at Casuarina beach. The distinctive call is rather like a rusty hinge on a swinging gate, often heard far out in the mangrove swamps of the Marls. You’ll hear background noises from collared doves and also the sea lapping on the shore.

The second is thick-billed vireo in the coppice at Delphi. You’ll hear an answering vireo – and also some wind noise. I find these little birds frustratingly hard to see – they always seem to be lurking further back in the bushes than I think. I’ve never managed to take a good photo of one, so I’ll upload an illustrative poor one to be going on with. I am back on Abaco in a week, and a better TBV photo is on my avian hit list.

Finally, you’ll find a longer recording I made of Abaco parrots squabbling noisily at Bahama Palm Shores near the end of a recent post HERE. I made an mp3 using the method described above, and uploaded it to the excellent Xeno-Canto bird sounds website, which is well worth exploring. You can find my recordings of the parrots and the birds in this post, plus sonograms, on my XC page, such as it is, HERE

But if you just want to hear the parrots, here they are. Like schoolkids, only louder.

Why do I do that annoying ‘iPh@ne’ thing? It’s a statistical fact that I have just made up that 373,597 people a minute world-wide g@@gle the correct word. Imagine the meta-crawlers and spam-splurgers that lock onto that word. I don’t want to cyber-meet them. I also use the form Am@z@n but for different reasons relating to their ingenious tax arrangements (alleged, obviously). Thus with G@@gle as well (again, merely alleged – as Dusty Springfield memorable sang, “Nothing is proved…)

BIRDS OF ABACO: WILDLIFE ART FROM ARTMAGENTA (1) – THE REAL DEAL

February 18, 2013 by Rolling Harbour

Jack-Snipe

BIRDS OF ABACO: WILDLIFE ART FROM ARTMAGENTA (1)

Sound of jet engines. “Back in the UK…” (as Macca so nearly sang), and I have the chance to amend the epic fail – or comic fail, anyway, that was the original of this post. And the truth is, Dear , that apart from simple captioned photos, an iPhone does not cut it for more complex posts involving formatting and so on. Or maybe I can’t use it properly (far more likely). Whichever, here is what should have appeared in the first place as a prepared, ‘press-the-go-button’ post for while we were away…

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At Rolling Harbour, we are occasionally bold enough to investigate the interstices between wildlife and art. If that’s what one does to an interstice. ArtMagenta is the cyber-name (“ethernym”? Yes, I like it…) of Ulf, a prolific artist whose website ART MAGENTA provides an enjoyably eclectic selection of pictures. Birds from around the world. Caricatures. Sketches. ‘Gesture Drawings’. And more. From time to time I will post a small gallery of Ulf’s enjoyable depictions of the birds that may be found on Abaco.

BLACK SKIMMER

MOURNING DOVE

Mourning-Dove NORTHERN MOCKINGBIRD

PIPING PLOVER

RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD

RED-TAILED HAWK

LEAST TERN

AMERICAN OYSTERCATCHER

BONEFISH! POLING THROUGH THE MANGROVES ON THE ABACO MARLS

July 10, 2012 by Rolling Harbour

BONEFISH! POLING THROUGH THE MANGROVES ON THE ABACO MARLS

I recently posted a short video giving an idea what it is like on a skiff as it skims fast over the water to the bonefish feeding grounds of the Abaco Marls SKIFF VIDEO Having arrived among the mangroves where the bonefish are lurking, the game changes. Instead of the roar of the engine and bump of the waves, the engine is cut and in near-silence the guide poles the skiff very slowly through the low water…

There’s a regular gentle scrape of the long pole on the sea-bed, as all eyes – guide, the fisher ‘up front’, and fishing partner – scan the water and the margins of the mangroves for bonefish or signs of their feeding. There might be tell-tale grey holes in the sandy bottom – or, as below, a ‘push’ wave as one or more bonefish move on to another area

There are bird calls such as the strangely melancholic metallic double-note of the RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD sounding like a rusty door-hinge.

Otherwise, very little noise until… the urgently whispered “Hey! Bonefish 9 o’clock, 30 feet, moving right, 3 of them…” and the hunt is on

This short video shows the skiff’s slow progress across low clear water close to the edge of the mangroves, while we search for the dark shadows cast on the sand by the bonefish as they work their way through the flats hunting shrimps and small crabs… and in due course, with luck a well-placed “Delphi Daddy”

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/45498544]

Credits: Red-winged Blackbird call – Xeno-Canto; Video Music – Albert Ross (formerly of Fleetwood Mac); R-WB below – Cornell Lab of Ornithology