The Black Bird Of December - Asian Koel

While growing up at the place where I now live, the only black bird that I know of are Crows. I get to see these Crows almost everyday when they fly, as they still do now, from South to North in the mornings and in the reverse direction come evenings, squawking as they fly slowly up high overhead.

These days, there is another rather big black bird, a migrant bird in fact, that comes visiting only in the month of December - 10th December to be exact for this year. They are the Asian Koel. I think they are quite common in the coastal areas. But up to about 30 or even 20 years ago, I don't think I have ever heard or even seen one before. I wonder why and when did they decided to move inland?

Map Of Old Greentown, Ipoh

I have searched and I could not find a map of OLD Greentown (Ipoh, Perak) online. I do have 2 partial maps of Greentown from Shell and Mobileoil (circa 1960) but they were no good simply because they were incomplete. Someone did give me a 1959 contour map of the Ipoh district earlier this year but I could not reconcile this map with what I know. There were no road names (which make things harder) and for about half of Greentown the roads were not properly drawn. Just some blocks on the map to denote 'houses' and I have to resort to guessing where the roads/lanes are - and I got myself confused.

Old Greentown

My only resort then is to draw the map myself. And with a little help from here and there, this is the result of my attempt: a map of OLD Greentown that I knew and grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s. Do click on the map below to view in full size.

The Returning Bee-Eaters

The Bee-Eater birds, they are back in Ipoh, Perak. Like the Brown Shrikes, they are migratory birds too. Out of the 4 species that have been known to exist in Malaysia, I have only spotted 3 so far. It seems that the high-wires in front of my house is their favourite roosting place, probably because of the many flowers that everyone has in their front-yard. More flowers mean more insects and that is the best place to look for food. They can usually be seen in the afternoons between 2 pm to 4 pm.

Chestnut-Headed Bee-Eaters

The first to return was the Chestnut-Headed Bee-Eater. They were first spotted on 17th October 2014. Prior to this, they were last seen on 20th May 2014, based on the time-stamp on my photographs of them. I wonder if they have migrated elsewhere as I have not seen them in recent weeks. Maybe back North as it has been reported that they do not go further South than Ipoh in the Malaysian Peninsular.

RavenPlus: Spell-checking And The "Save" Button

Here is another quirky behaviour in the editor window in Raven/RavenPlus. Similar to my previous post on "drag-and-drop", this problem will also only be apparent if the first thing that is done after opening an existing blog post for editing is a spell-check, or when we do a spell-check right after saving our blog post while editing. If one or more words were "replaced" via the "Spell Check" dialog box (by clicking on the "Replace" or "Replace All" button and thus modifying the blog post), the "Save" button on the toolbar remains disabled. To enable the "Save" button, what I used to do was to insert and then delete a blank space. But that can't be right, and it should not be happening in the first place.

RavenPlus: Drag-And-Drop And The "Save" Button

It is almost a year since I started using Zoundry Raven/RavenPlus and I have noticed that there are a handful of quirky behaviours within the editor window. These are not showstoppers. I can still compose and post my blogs successfully, but I find them annoying - a thorn in my side.

Below is just one of these peculiarities in Raven/RavenPlus, and how I fixed it. This problem will only be apparent if the first thing that is done after opening an existing blog post for editing is a drag-and-drop, or when we do a drag-and-drop right after we saved our blog post - the "Save" button on the toolbar remains disabled despite the modification.

First Month Of Freedom

Some time during the month of March 2014, only a single egg hatched out of a total of 3. Since that time, it had been a routine for me every morning for the last 6 months as I had kept the Serama hen and its chick in captivity. At around 8 AM everyday, I will, without much hassle luckily, move the single chick and the hen into a different cage which has ample space for them to roam, scratch and sand-bathe in my backyard. It had been so routine that the chick and hen seemed to know what to expect when they see me coming every morning. That is until one fine sunny morning about a month ago when I finally set them free; a taste of freedom for the 'chick' for the first time.

RavenPlus: Where Did My Just Added "Category" Go?

It has been approximately a year since I started using Zoundry Raven. In my opinion, it is definitely the best offline blog editor that I have ever used. More recently, I have been customising Raven (which I now call RavenPlus) and tailoring it to meet my own needs. Hurray for making Raven open-source.

Something Peculiar

I still remember the quirkiness the first time I added a new "Category/Tag" (also called "Labels" on Google's Blogger) in Raven. Adding the "Category" is quite straight forward in the Raven editor - no problems there. After successfully publishing my post with the newly added "Category", everything looked to be in order when I viewed the blog post via a web browser.

I did not suspect anything amiss until a few days later when I tried to reuse the "Category" that I have added in Raven in another blog post. To my surprise, I could not find it in the list of "Categories" in the "Categories" tab, under the "Configure..." pull-down menu in the Raven's editor. But curiously, when I clicked on the "Tags" node on the "Account Navigator" sidebar, all "Categories" are listed, including the missing one.

Poking around, I later realised that for any "Category" that I have added via Raven, they are only available for use in the original blog post in which it was created. I was dumbfounded. Not surprisingly, this happens in RavenPlus too, since it shares almost 99.8% of the code with Raven.

An Undocumented Step?

But luckily I found something within Raven that can overcome the above mentioned shortcomings. I stumbled upon this discovery quite by accident actually, while going through Raven's log ("Tools -> Background Tasks" in the main window).

Brown Shrikes - They Are Back

Without giving any sign, they, the Brown Shrikes, left sometime around the month of March. None was seen during my count for the MY Garden Birdwatch that I did in the month of June for both years, 2013 and 2014. But now, with winter approaching in North Asia, this migratory bird is back in the Malay peninsular.

One Of My Hen Turning Rooster-Like

As far as I could tell, it was a normal Bantam hen when it was hatched. When it reached maturity it laid eggs and even went broody at times, just like the other hens. There was nothing out of the ordinary. That was until the beginning of this year when I noticed a change in this particular hen - the pattern and colour of its feathers began to transform. I did not give it much thought at that time as it was not sick, nor was it acting in any bizarre way, but at the back of my mind, I did find it odd. None of my other chickens had ever changed their plumage before.

Disabling Google+ Comments On Blogger

I should have given it more thought before enabling Google+ comments on my blog. The problem with this feature is that once enabled, a Google+ profile or page is required before any comments can be made on my blog. Anonymous and non-Google+ user comments are disallowed. With Google+ Comments enabled, I would expect some future comments to be loss as I actually have a few Anonymous user comments on my blog itself. This is definitely something that I do not want.

I spent something like 2 hours looking for a way to disable Google+ Comments on my blog. The answer is actually there at Google+ Comments FAQs but unfortunately it is not that obvious to me. A separate heading on "How to remove Google+ Comments on Blogger" in the FAQs would have been a much better idea.