Wednesday, January 11
5:30 am
It is -17 °C, with a high forecast of -4 °C
From the Environment Canada website:
Today Sunny. Wind southwest 20 km/h. High minus 4. Wind chill minus 25 this morning.
Tonight Partly cloudy. Clearing before morning. Wind west 30 km/h. Low minus 9.
Normals: Max. -2 °C Min. -14 °C
We are back to to Normal. Brisk!
6:00 am Technology
I have just installed an update for Sandvox (this is the software I am using to create this website.
6:30 am Birding
Now to produce a few quick reports using Bento with my birding database.
The first step is to carry out a search for all records meeting a particular criteria. Normally this would be Country, but if I want to focus on just Alberta then I can search "Alberta Unique Number" for all records that "are not empty". In the case of Alberta this returns 424 records.
Then I sort the records, first on the field Time and then on the field Date. This will order all the records in the order that they were observed.
If I scroll down to the last record I see that the last entry for Alberta was on August 17, 2011 when we saw an American Dipper at Waterton.
If I sort on the field "Alberta Unique Number" and then scroll down to the last entry I see that it is number 164. That is, we have seen 164 different species in Alberta. The last unique Alberta value was on May 31, 2011 when we identified a Cliff Swallow for the first time.
I can change the search by looking for Cliff Swallow in the field "Species English". The program looks for all occurrences of this name in the data base and returns 2 records. One is the Alberta record, the other is a Canadian record (in this case Ontario) indicating that we first identified a Cliff Swallow on May 20, 2011 while birding at Prince Edward Point with the Larry & Mary Ann.
If I remove the search criteria so I can access all 1381 records, and then sort on "Unique Number" and scroll to the bottom I see that we have identified 604 different species of bird since we began keeping records.
When we begin birding in 2012 (i.e. later today) we will keep a record of each bird we identify for the first time this year. After I enter the basic data (species name, date, time, comments, location, habitat, country), I then will do a search on the species name to see all of the records for that bird. I can then see if it is a new "lifer" (i.e. first time ever for that bird) or, as is more likely - the values for unique number and unique number for each country that we have birded in (Canada, USA, Australia, Mexico, Panama). I can then fill in the values for the new record.
For example, suppose we see a Black-billed Magpie today (which is very likely). Then when I do a search for Black-billed Magpie" of the entire data base I see the following display:
This tells me that this species of magpie has been seen (and Recorded in this database!) on 5 previous occasions. It was the 23rd different bird that we had identified, the first time being in 2003.
I have just added my first record for 2012 to the database. It was for a Canada Goose. I saw about a hundred of them on Henderson Lake while I was geocaching. The database worked perfectly and the new format was even an improvement over the one I had been using with Filemaker Pro. I am delighted.
I also submitted a report to eBird for this sighting. ( http://ebird.org/content/canada ) Not too exciting, but I am trying to get into the habit.
I just checked that although it is a Canada-based website, one can submit reports for any sightings world-wide.
2:30 PM Life
It is never too late to add another category. I had this one in last year's web site, but this is the first time that I felt the need for this category. The idea is to have a place where I can add a few sentences about something interesting or noteworthy that happened during the day. I took the idea from a student planner that acknowledged that in addition to studying, one should have a life.
The temperature rose to about -4 C near noon, and the wind has finally let up, so I decided to walk to the grocery store to buy an acorn squash, which will be part of this evening's meal. It takes about 40 minutes to walk one-way, thus making for a decent workout.
2:40 PM Birding
While on the walk to the store I saw a Blue Jay fly in front of me and on the return walk I saw 9 Black-billed Magpies in a birch tree. A good opportunity to add a couple of common birds to my 2012 list. I have updated my Bento data base, and submitted a report to eBird.
6:40 PM Cooking
I was browsing through "The Best of Clean Eating 2" this afternoon and noticed a recipe for pork cutlets. We were already planning to have pork for dinner so it was an easy matter to change the recipe.
This was called "Dusted Pork Cutlets" [p. 126]
The basic idea is very straight forward. Dip the cutlet in a bowl with a whisked egg and then in some cornmeal.
Finally fry the crumbed cutlets . Meanwhile bake an acorn squash that has a tablespoon of maple syrup in each half.
There was a very nice red from South Africa accompanying this meal.
It was a good meal, but the cornmeal made the pork cutlet seem a little dry, even though it was quite moist. The maple syrup was a very nice touch to the squash. There were also some raisins that had been cooked in balsamic vinegar for ten minutes that added to the flavors.