Tools of the trade

I carry around a lot of gear when I hike or watch birds. For watching birds, I carry binoculars, a field guide, and sometimes a spotting scope attached to a tripod. For photography, I carry my digital camera and one, two or three lenses. I use a Camelbak backpack to carry some of the gear (like lenses and field guides), plus food, water, sunscreen and bug repellent. And finally, I often will carry a GPS with me.

Since I am usually not bushwhacking, the reasons for why I carry a GPS may be a tad vague. Here are my reasons for carrying a GPS, in order of importance to me:

1. I am a geek. A GPS falls cleanly under the category of "gadget", and geeks like gadgets. The word "need" does not typically factor into this discussion, however the word "want" is prevalent.
   
2. During the 2007 ABA Conference I attended a lecture that convinced me to start using eBird to track my bird sightings, instead of keeping that data isolated on my PC. Having a GPS makes part of the eBird data entry process much easier.
3. I am a geek. Having a GPS lets me do cool things like depicting my hikes on a Google map. Geeks like building web pages, especially if the pages contain cool things like Google maps and GPS tracks.
   

I just recently figured out how to accomplish #3. I had several GPS track logs saved, so I published those tracks here. I will continue to add to that list as I visit more places. And yes, I do know about EveryTrail.com (where they will do all the mapping and page building for you...just create a free account and start uploading your GPS track logs). But I really wanted to build my own page just to see if I could do it.

ABA Lectures

As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended two lectures instead of going out to bird. There were no field trips scheduled in the conference, and the weather was iffy enough to keep me from going out on my own (they are calling for severe, potentially tornadic, thunderstorms in Louisiana today and tonight).

The two lectures were quite interesting. The first was about the use of weather radar to detect migratory birds. The second was about the psychology of identifying birds.

The weather radar lecture provided me a nice "duh!" moment. Weather radar is designed to bounce microwaves of of material that is in the atmosphere. Rain, snow, sleet, hail and other forms of precipitation are examples of material that will reflect the waves broadcast by radar, but so are insects, bats and birds. When you get enough insects, bats and birds, then the image produced by a weather radar will indicate their presence. The number of birds involved in spring or fall migration are easily enough to show up on a weather radar. Since birds migrate at night, you have to look at certain times of day to see it. And you have to know which radar imagery to use: many local television station's filter their radar images to only show reflectivity caused by precipitation. I will definitely be looking into this some more.

The second lecture, on the psychology of bird identification, was given by David Sibley. In his opening remarks, he said he was always interested in the topic, but the recent debate over the rediscovery (or not) of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and its associated evidence, really has intrigued him. He provided lots of interesting observations on phenomenon and human behaviors that prevent us from being entirely objective. In general, as our experience in bird watching grows, we evolve from a step-wise form of identification to a holistic one. This evolution allows us to make very educated shortcut guesses as identification, that tend to be correct (out of experience) but can also be risky (because the process skips the stepwise approach). There are other factors as well that I will not delve into. All in all it was a very interesting lecture that hit home with me several times. In many ways, the process of identifying a bird with limited information is very similar to the process of figuring out a software problem with limited information. In both cases it is not uncommon for what I would call "conspiracy theories" to form and grow. Human tendency is to note evidence that supports the theory instead of evidence that contradicts the theory. It requires a purposely objective approach to consider the alternatives and reach root cause (or identity).

Tomorrow is another field trip day. Because of the weather tonight (the storms are here, but no tornadoes near Lafayette), it is possible that all of the migrating birds that were going to leave tonight will be combined with all of the birds arriving tonight. If that happens, there might be a lot of birds flitting about tomorrow. We shall see.

Sigh

Okay. I was so excited earlier today when I used my fancy super-special technical genius to watch the weather radar to avoid getting soaked and electrocuted. All without any wires, inside my rental car, in the parking lot of the Orlando Wetlands Park.

I waited the rain out and then spent about three hours in the park. My arms are sunburned. I saw lots of interesting birds and took lots of pictures.

So tonight I planned on getting those pictures onto the computer so that I could take a closer look at them. Maybe even upload them to Phanfare and put a few in a blog post.

One problem. This damn work PC has no way of reading the memory card that my camera uses. No pictures to look at until I get home.

Sigh.

Wireless in Christmas

I am in Orlando for a work related conference. I have arrived, however, early enough to get a little birdwatching done. I flew into Orlando this morning and first thing headed in the direction of Orlando Wetlands Park. This park is actually located to the east of Orlando in a little town called Christmas.

Today is not a wonderfully sunny day. The wind is blowing and storm clouds are rolling by above me. There is a reasonable chance of rain, and the last thing I want to do is get caught out in this park when the rain starts, or worse, during a thunderstorm.

Since I am here in Orlando for work, I have my work laptop and an "aircard" that let's me access the Internet via Verizon's cellular network. So, at the moment, I am writing this blog post from the air conditioned comfort of my rental car, while I sit in the parking lot of the park. In another browser window I have the new interactive weather map from weather.com open and repeatedly animating the radar image across the Orlando area. I probably have an hour to wait before the rain comes and goes. Then I think I will be in the clear. Later tonight, if all goes well, I will post some pictures. At a minimum I will edit this post to include some links for the places & names I referenced above.

My Kung Fu is better than yours!

Another from today's picnic. Go ahead....take one of the drinks from me! You should note that my girlfriend is laughing quite a bit at this picture. Should give you a hint at how hard it would actually be to get one (or both) of the drinks.