Leucistic White-throated Sparrow

White-throated Sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) are anything but exotic in New York City, with large numbers overwintering in a typical year and still quite a few in the exceptionally mild winter of 2011/2012. This individual, however manages to be quite a striking example of leucism with most of the feathers on the head turned white. The yellow lores are made even more striking, and the residual crown stripes are especially dark, suggesting that these things are partially masked by the brown and gray coloration that usually manifests on the head.

This bird was seen on the morning of April 15th in Central Park, spotted by Morgan Tingley, but undoubtedly the same individual that I saw briefly the previous morning in the same general area. Hard to miss, this bird, with such a white head.

Razorbill

My usual view of a Razorbill is moving in a small flock at high speed about a mile out in the Atlantic. Even on a Pelagic (e.g. a March 2011 pelagic off NJ) I saw lots of Razorbills, all of which were flying away from the boat from some distance out. So this particular bird was quite literally amazing. It was feeding parallel to the rocks on the south side of Manasquan Inlet (Point Pleasant), sometimes surfacing right below me. I was on the rock wall along the south side, and I just basically watched it work its way back and forth along the inlet. It could not care less about me. Which, despite some pretty poor lighting, is how I came up with basically full-frame Razorbill shots. While on dry land.

Judging from head and bill coloration this appears to be a first year bird, which may or may not be correlated with tameness.

Dickcissel

Common in the south, Dickcissel is very much a rarity in the north east and can usually be found hanging out with House Sparrows, with whom they are superficially related. This individual was hanging out with a large flock of House Sparrows - 30 or so, at the edge of ball fields at Inwood Hill Park. It was a very skittish flock - perhaps the fence line they were at is a favorite hunting spot for Accipiters, because they rarely spent more than 30 seconds on the ground feeding at any one time.

This bird is a first winter male, aged by the narrow dark streaking on the breast (immature), tapered primaries that don't show in this photo (immature) and the quite extensive yellow on the breast (male). Immatures tend to be the ones to wander - adults much less frequently.

Rufous Hummingbird in NYC

Every few years a Rufous Hummingbird turns up in/around NYC, and this year is one of them. There have been a lot of Rufous in the general region this late fall, and this is certainly an unusually late one.


It was feeding on a remaining patch of flowers outside the American Museum of Natural History Planetarium entrance on the north side of the building with no direct sun. There's no flash used in this image - this is actually from sunlight reflected off a nearby building on the north side of W81st Street. It's an immature female - various tail-spread shots (see the one I added below) are pretty definitive for both age and species and allow separation from the very similar Allen's Hummingbird (yet to be placed on the NY State bird list despite a Central Park example of Allen's in 2002).


Sadly the prospects for this bird are not good - it's lacking in energy and often clings to plants while feeding. It's doubtful it has the ability to migrate south far enough to find more flowering plants, so this will likely be its final stop. Proving me at least partially wrong, it's a tough bird in a mild winter, and it's still there as of Feb 7th 2012, apparently currently in retrix molt.

Unusual Ruddy Turnstone

In the lower image the typical appearance of winter-plumaged Ruddy Turnstone is in the lower left-hand corner. A Purple Sandpiper is in the middle, and this rather atypical Ruddy is at the top right. The top image shows what it looks when it's walking around feeding - demonstrably a Ruddy Turnstone but with no paler rufous fringing and a very extensive breast mark. Although Ruddy Turnstone and Black Turnstone overlap in breeding range in Alaska there's actually nothing in this bird to indicate a Black Turnstone hybrid - it's just a very dark Ruddy and one that really stuck out from all the other 40+ Ruddies that were roosting on the side of Barnegat Inlet jetty. I've considered melanism (or some other color defect) as a possible explanation - it's interesting that at least in the "group" photo the legs are noticeably a darker shade than the other Turnstone.

EOS-1D X - notsomuch

I'm underwhelmed by the announced 1D X that Canon says will be available as of March 2012. (Nice summary by Rob Galbraith's site). Basically it's an 18 mpix full frame fast-firing pro camera with lots of video extras and rather substantial redesign (again!) of the AF system amongst other things. Given my experience of the 1D III and 1D IV AF performance is less than totally stellar, I reserve judgement and enthusiasm on that part.

Most significant for me is the pixels. There are more pixels than the 1D IV, but it's 18 vs 16 and the move to full frame means that the pixels are larger on the chip. This is great for noise - it should certainly decrease, but pixel density decreases over both the 1Ds III (21 mpix, full frame) and the 1D IV (equivalent density to 27 mpix full frame). Since my wildlife photography is almost always pixel-density limited I'm not going to drop $6K to have the number of pixels on my subject drop by 1/3. That's a very large number and enough to offset any improvements that may be under the hood.

This is probably a recognition that Canon have reached the upper limits of signal/noise for their current chip technology so the only way to lower noise is to drop pixel density. It's going to be very interesting to see where they go with the 5D Mark II and 7D successors - in the latter case the 7D noise level is too high for my taste, but since it has a pixel density equivalent to 46 mpix full frame it can afford to lose 1/4 of them and still be a very interesting upgrade over what I'm getting on the 1D IV.

Upside: this leaves extra cash to consider the new 600/4L II (which is about the same size/weight as my 500/4L).

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

All my digital photography processing has been done on a Mac - a succession of G4, G5 Power Macs and iBooks, and intel MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac. I do research in structural biology using Apple's underlying Unix operating system (open Terminal.app and see what I mean). I have the inevitable iPod (music and image backup while traveling) and iPhones. I'm writing this on my Mac Pro octacore at work. I also owned a NeXT, once upon a time.

So it was appropriate that last night I found out about the very sad news of Steve Jobs death from a NYTimes alert read on my iMac. While not the only visionary in technology he was the most iconic, and it is so sad to lose him this soon. For those of us that remember Apple's darkest days when it was perilously close to bankrupcy (e.g. Wired's "Pray" cover - shown here), Apple's ascendency in the second Steve Jobs era was nothing short of breathtaking. Pray that it continues.

Addendum: Jobs has, in ways small and large, altered the ways I have done things and reacted to technology. The iPhone is iconic and much impersonated because it is both functional and beautiful in ways that enhance using it. However his vision, will and force of personality is also conveyed in the ideas and products he created. That why I had an emotional response to his death, like many other people. However I'm not sure he is someone I would have liked to work closely with - the other aspect to his character, which also made him effective, is nicely illustrated by this piece on him at the PDN site. If you read that, and also his 2005 Stanford commencement address, you get a sense of just how singular a person he was.