Chat

On Monday, Cali and I took the Goldfinch-Pliskin route on our morning walk.

As we entered the McDonald Forest path at the west end of Goldfinch, I heard a series of calls, whistles and other noises that I hadn't heard before. For some reason, I thought of the description I'd heard of a Yellow-Breasted Chat. To be sure, I listened to the Chat vocal on my iPhone Peterson app. I was right! As a bonus, the Chat popped out of the bushes and talked to us for a minute or so before going into hiding again.

I first identified a Yellow-Breasted Chat at Finley in 1977, but I really don't remember seeing or hearing it since then. Now I have a new sound to be listening for.

June Walks

In the first half of 2012, Cali and I went on 174 walks for a total of 225.27 miles in 80:47:23.

Now that I'll be leaving HP in two months, my travel will be rare. We'll get in more walks and miles. Being a professor at OSU has more than one big plus.

May Numbers

May was another really good month for birding. Overall, I saw 117 species (27 FOY). I added three lifers: Aplomado Falcon in Campinas, Brasil, Glittering-throated Emerald in Porto Alegre, Brasil, and Eastern Phoebe in Polk County, OR. I saw 105 species in Oregon (25 FOY), 46 with Cali (18 FOY), 27 at home (9 FOY) and 74 at Finley WLR (15 FOY).

May was also a good month for walking. It's fairly common now to get in three walks a day with Cali. Even though I was in Brasil for a week, we managed to walk 33 times for 48.45 miles in 17:05:45. The mean walk was 1.47 miles in 31:05 at a 21:10/mile pace.

Interesting Day

Today I accepted HP's early retirement offer. My last day at HP will be August 31. My 20th anniversary at HP was April 20. I never expected to be there so long. I'm looking forward to the chance to do some teaching at OSU and maybe some consulting.

While at HP, I will have reported to 10 different people. For what will be almost 13 years, I've reported to the Imaging and Printing Group CTO. This spans the entire history of that office from Lee Caldwell to Frank Cloutier to Patrick Scaglia to Mike Salfity. With all of the changes at HP, the CTO is effectively gone now.

During my 20 years at HP, I took 437 trips and 1535 flights for HP, flew about 1,929,103 miles, and spent about 178.6 days in the air. That's 1.3% of my adult life in the air for HP and 2.5% of my lifetime while working at HP. The good side of all this travel is that I was able to visit all of these countries: USA, Canada, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Hungary, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Portugal, Finland, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, and Brasil. I will miss the international travel.

Let's Misbehave

Our "faculty recital" was a big hit at OSU this month. People loved it!

It was a lot of fun to prepare and to perform. Here's the program headline.




The plan is to repeat some of the songs and add more.

A Year of Birding

It has been one year since I started birding again and posted observations online. During that year, I identified 219 different species while birding in Oregon, California, New York, Maryland, France, Germany, and Brasil. I saw 49 different species while walking with Cali, 49 species at home, and 125 species at Finley Wildlife Refuge. In Oregon, I identified 150 species in the past year.

Sora

Yesterday I went to Finley WLR to find the Whimbrels that had been spotted at the conservation wetland just east of the Refuge. I found six of them.

Then, as I was driving on Bruce Road at McFadden Marsh, a bird stopped to look at me while crossing the road. At first I thought it was a quail. But it didn't have the quail's "top knot." As it quickly darted into the marsh grass, I saw enough of it to think it was either a Virginia Rail or a Sora. It flashed white under it's tail, so I was thinking Sora. Then I played the Sora call from my iPhone. Sure enough, the Sora called right back.

This is the first Sora I've seen since 1978 at Malheur WLR.