Birding targets for 2010

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For 2009 my target was to increase my life list to 200+. It is currently sitting on 202 and will remain there unless something unusual appears locally…

For 2010 I am aiming to pass 250 – this should prove quite a challenge! A few of the target species are below:
  • Common Pheasant and Indian Peafowl – going to have to take a day trip to Rottnest Island for these. Should also be able to pick up Rock Parrot and a wader or two hopefully as well.
  • Noisy Scrub-bird/Western Bristlebird/Western Whipbird (a.k.a. the Big Three) – we are planning two trips to Cheynes Beach in 2010 so hopefully I can see these birds.
  • White-browed Babbler (the first of many “inland from the metropolitan area” birds I want to see.
  • Stubble Quail/Little Button-quail/Painted Button-quail – so far all quail apart from the Brown variety have eluded me.
  • Cuckoos (generally). I have seen a few but should be seeing a lot more…
  • Miscellaneous honeyeaters.
Please note that by targets I mean that I want to see and photograph these birds, not shoot them…

Grey-crowned Babbler

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Bird number 202 on my life list is the Grey-crowned Babbler. I found a group of about 4 of them creating a ruckus amongst the trees on the edge of the Maitland River at Miaree Pool (near Karratha, WA, Australia). The name is descriptive on all counts.

It is worth noting that I have taken a bird off my list. The more I talk to other birders the more I realise that the Mute Swans at Northam aren’t really a free, breeding population anymore. Perhaps at some stage in the future they may be (again) but given that they are introduced I’m not too fussed.

BAWA Twitchathon 2009

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The BirdsWA Twitchathon was held over the 12-13 December 2009.

I was a member of The Big Twits – other members were Martin Cake, John Graff and Alan Collins (all seriously good birders). I have learned a lot from these guys.
The event was a great experience – I added 12 species to my life list including (but not limited to):
  • Little Penguin (swimming in the ocean, not at Penguin Island);
  • Jacky Winter (Dryandra Forrest);
  • Nankeen Night Heron (at Herdsman Lake).
We finished 3rd with 139 species in the 24 hour race. First place had 149 species, second place had 143 species.

New gadget/early Christmas present

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I recently picked up my own Christmas present – a 3rd Generation 8GB iPod Touch. So far I have been very impressed. Current apps that I like are:

  • BirdSight AU (pretty good, could do with some extra features like lumping/splitting);
  • Convert Units (does the job well);
  • Holy Bible;
  • Mactracker (very good for a computer collector);
  • TouchCalc;
  • Sudoku (great apart from the fact that it tells you when you have placed a number incorrectly, which makes the game much easier than a paper version);
  • To Do (basic To Do list manager);
  • File lite (superb application that allows files to be stored on the iPod Touch and viewed).

All of the above are free (apart from BirdSight AU).

I also purchased a Belkin leather case and screen protector for it.

Bird #187

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Bird number 187 on my life list is the Black-tailed Native-hen.

I saw a single bird at the Peninsula Ornamental Gardens in Maylands after a tipoff from the Birds WA sightings page. On two consecutive days I located the bird within 5 metres of the same spot. It seems to prefer foraging along the scrub/lawn edge where it can quickly duck for cover if disturbed.

Thanks to Peter Clifton for finding it!

Mac mini Server

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I think this is a really cool idea – a Mac mini with dual HDDs (no optical drive) and a copy of Snow Leopard Server. If only they had 2.5″ HDDs bigger than 500GB.

I also think Apple should have dropped a few of the USB2.0 ports and added a second gigabit ethernet port (although that would have required a motherboard change, the second HDD just requires the internal adapter and case to be modified).

Still – very cool. If I only had the spare cash…

Formatting drives in 2.5 inch external enclosures

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I have a somewhat generic BlueEye O2 USB2.0/FW400 2.5″ external drive enclosure. I was recently trying to format some older laptop drives (2.5″ PATA) and discovered that the “erase” and “partition” options in Disk Utility (Mac OS X 10.5.5 version) always fail when I was connecting using USB but work fine when connecting using FireWire. The error message is along the lines of I/O error or something. I’m sure glad my MacBook has FireWire…

I wonder whether this is a limitation of the BlueEye chipset or the Disk Utility software. I really should upgrade 10.5.5 to 10.5.8 too…