Sunday, January 07, 2018

CBC, King and Queen Co. 2017

Because it was 20 degrees on our assigned day (12/31/17), Dad and I shamelessly birded from the car only. Because K&Q is rural, it's not hard to do so safely and without annoying others. Mom reports that ebird rejected the large number of palm warblers we ID'd sharing a field with meadowlarks. The list we submitted for the territory we were assigned includes Mom's yard list plus our roaming:

8 northern bobwhite
1 great blue heron
4 black vulture
17 turkey vulture
3 bald eagle
3 red-tailed hawk
21 mourning dove
1 red-bellied woodpecker
4 yellow-bellied sapsucker
1 downy woodpecker
2 northern flicker
2 pileated woodpecker
21 eastern phoebe
2 blue jay
84 american crow
2 carolina chickadee
4 tufted titmouse
2 white-breasted nuthatch
1 carolina wren
1 golden-crowned kinglet
15 eastern bluebird
3 hermit thrush
21 american robin
4 northern mockingbird
78 european starling
8 palm warbler
5 pine warbler
7 yellow-rumped warbler
6 chipping sparrow
6 field sparrow
86 dark-eyed junco
40 white-throated sparrow
6 song sparrow
17 northern cardinal
12 eastern meadowlark
2 red-winged blackbird
1 brown-headed cowbird
3 house finch
9 american goldfinch


Monday, January 01, 2018

Cleaning

You know what I use even less often than Blogger? Browser bookmarks. Only I today I do want to set some to easily rediscover two birdwatching things that I couldn't remember by source. Who runs the bird count project I've been doing: Audubon? Cornell? Somewhere else? (Project Feederwatch is sponsored in part by Cornell, but that's not in the url.) And then there's the online class that did NOT help me ID sparrows in the field when we did the Christmas Bird Count in King and Queen Co. yesterday....

I added those two to my active bookmarks, then investigated my old bookmarks, a personal archive of projects, interests, and goals. There's much I no longer need - some of which Chrome may be foisting on me? I can't imagine I set up a News subfolder with a Tidewater paper as well as USA Today, the RTD and NYT. Even if Chrome pulled them out of Firefox for me, most weren't things I'd choose. As a loyal Chrome user these days, I start to type "ric" and richmond.com autocompletes > hit enter >  read RTD. There were copious folders and subfolders for my job search. Nearly 13 years and 2 promotions in, I believe I'm where I'm staying!  Some bookmarks -- metadata, national archives -- seem to be left from grad school. Some are from work and likely from Firefox. Now I just search anew for IRS forms or Morningstar; I wouldn't skim bookmarks. Other bookmarks were blogs I enjoyed, almost all dead now. 

And a few are mysteries: what is Instapaper and did I really set up an account? Exporting bookmarks TO IE? Seriously, self? 75 Ways to Draw More??