Mokka mit Schlag » 2010 » April

I had a serious and scary flareup of RSI this weekend, so I decided to give Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows one more chance. If Dragon craps out on me again, I’ve discovered that I may actually be able to get in touch with Nuance technical support by posting nasty comments about them on their Amazon product pages. You’d think it would be more efficient to just answer customer e-mails in the first place, but apparently Nuance doesn’t agree.

One other thing I’m trying, is to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking in Parallels 5 on my Mac. Parallels 5 is a little faster than VMWare Fusion was, and is actually usable on my MacBook for basic web surfing and other simple operations. However, I’m skeptical of its ability to run CPU intensive applications like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and FPS games. I am considering upgrading my Mac to either one of the new MacBook Pros or perhaps a Mac Pro if Apple ever gets around to releasing new models.
(more…)

Only one life bird today, the endemic Puerto Rican Bullfinch. I saw it only very briefly; but it’s very distinctive and easily identified: a jet black bird with big orange on its head and throat. I saw this on the Ballenas Trail in the Bosque del Seco. Unfortunately, I did not get a photo of this one, so how about a much better photo of a Puerto Rican Tody instead?

(more…)

Today we spent most of the day at the hotel (plus one abortive, rained out trip to the allegedly dry forest). Early in the morning (6:30-8:30) I spent some time in an undeveloped area just east of the hotel with a lot of mud flats and it was jumping. In fact, I’d say it was the best birding of the trip so far. Across the road from the hotel I finally located a small flock of buzzy little brown jobs I’d been hearing for a couple of days. They weren’t anything I recognized, but after consulting the field guide I decided they were grassquits, but which ones? The female and immature Yellow-faced Grassquits look almost exactly like the immature Black-faced Grassquits. Fortunately I eventually spotted one male Yellow-faced Grassquit (though no photo) which resolved that. Or at least it did until I found two adult male Black-faced Grassquits:

Apparently it was a mixed flock so that’s #498 and #499. At least one of the grassquits was banded, though I couldn’t read the band. I later learned there’s been an active bird banding project in Bosque del Seco for a couple of decades now.
(more…)

After we got back from Bosque del Seco I took another spin around the hotel grounds. Toward the eastern end, I heard some unfamiliar buzzing noises, and eventually tracked it down to a Bananaquit:

(more…)

I was doing a sea watch from the beach around sunset when I happened to notice something funny in the mangroves along the shore. I put the scope on them and there they were, two White-cheeked Pintails!

(more…)

I thought I had one of these at the hotel earlier, but it was just a Northern Mockingbird, not even a Bahamas Mockingbird. However they are quite common, and I found my first one at the Guanica Burger King where we’d stopped for a shake: