Utah Habitats and
Utah Valley Trails The 2008 Utah County Birders bi-annual birding contest
(here) contains a set
of agressive challenges, to locate 8 species in 8 Utah Counties, and in 8 general habitats, and along 8
different county trails or paths. These are interesting challenges, but could be a problem if
you don't know anything about Utah Habitats or Utah County Trails. Click
here for Habitat information or
here for Trail information.
While this information does not fit the contest exactly, it can make finding where to go and what to expect
there much easier. A alternate method for examining Utah habitats can be found
here.
UtahBirds Photos
UtahBirds.org, our local nationally recognized birding web site has a large number
of wonderful bird pictures taken by local Utah birders. Problem is, these pictures are invisible unless you
take the time and effort to go look at them.
There is an easy solution to this if you happen to use a Google personalized home page. I have crafted
a Google Gadget that displays the bird pictures for you right on the personalized page, as shown.
When initially displayed, the Gadget displays the most recent UtahBirds Recently Submitted Bird Picture. To see the
UtahBirds Photo of the Month or the UtahBirds Hot Line Bird, click the appropriate tab.
If you click on one of the pictures, it will take you to the list of photos at UtahBirds.org.
If you already use a Google Homepage, adding the Gadget is easy, simply click ‘Add stuff' on the right
side of the page, then click ‘Add by URL', then enter the Gadget URL, which is
‘http://www.utahnature.com/UtahBirdPhoto.xml".
If you do not already have a Google Homepage and want to try one out, go to www.google.com
and click the "Personalized Home" link at the top of the page.
The UtahBirdPhoto Gadget is experimental and may fail. It works by scrapeing the picture links from the
UtahBirds web pages, which can fail should Milt change how he has the web pages set up. When we are sure
this works correctly, we will transfer the official Gadget code to the UtahBirds.org web site.
I have started a new Utah County Trails project, walking as many urban trails I can recording a time lapse
video of the walk. This is my first try at this, so I am still learning about framerates and frame grab intervals.
This video was taken in February before the trees leaf out, so it is fairly drab. I expect to take several more
videos of this trail as I refine my procedures and settle on a mix of settings that yields the best timelapse videos.
I built a mobile platform to capture the videos from which I will document shortly.
I made a version of the Habitat map program that displays 5 topographic maps across and 3 maps down, just to see more
of the country at once. Find it here.
